Didn’t go Monday. Didn’t end up going Tuesday, but c’mon, when you’ve got your daughter in town, in August no less, ya gotta have some of Andy’s divine peaches for her and we’d finished off the last previous one together, so off I finally went.

Maybe going on a long drive would get me out of my head a little better.

Some acquaintance-friends who are grieving and under pressure were not thinking straight and did something stupid because they did not think it mattered, did not think we would find out, and did not realize just how many problems they were causing. It was likely physically beyond either of us to fix it if it turned out it went as far as I was afraid it might (later: turns out it didn’t.)

Grief is not a get-out-of-rude-free card.

Forgive as you would want to be forgiven, I told myself again and again. Make it better the best you can, not worse. A year from now, this will be nothing.

Miles and miles and at last suburbia gave way to golden hills and quiet.

Andy’s Orchard. There was the woman I’d given the hat to last month. It was so good to see her.

And then–I think it’s been two years since I’ve seen him, and probably only once since the whole Covid thing–Andy himself stepped in from the back room to talk to her.

He saw me and his whole face lit up in the warmest smile, and I tell you, he had no way to know how much I needed that. Such a lovely man. The two of them turned my day around completely just by being there and by who they are.

I brought home some perfect Kit Donnells and a variety of deeply golden nectarine that Andy himself had brought home two seeds of from the then-Soviet Union. Silk Roads.

And thought wistfully of these friends who, having no idea what they were missing, were last week the only ones who have ever turned down my offer of an Andy peach.