Last one to fledge is a raw egg! Neener neener!

For the first time there was a third scrub jay begging at momma today. The other two tried to get in on it but were ignored and yet they all stayed close together, a family of four flitting around my small yard keeping all others at bay–and between them those jays have learned, for the first time since I planted this tree, that mandarins are edible. They even peeled it out by sections.

I stuck a small bird netting cage on kind of sideways over some of the untouched ones as best I could to at least make it hard to perch there. The ones that look like this, well hey, they’re welcome to come back for seconds.

The baby falcons in San Jose, meantime, with nature pressuring them to try out this flying thing they didn’t feel ready to spend the energy and risk on in the 95+ heat were not so cheerful.  That was quite the tantrum! Wow!

Finally finished the requested black cap and found a UFO that just needed the ends run in. That one’s Mecha, not Rios, so it’ll be nice and thick for June. Umm. It does get cool in the mountains there at night. And it was a fun hat. She told me yesterday that the only chemo caps she owns are the three she’s gotten from me. So off it goes.

I looked for a small box, struck out, went to the post office and decided to use one of their all-you-can-squish-in ones. It was definitely tight but it would do.

Maybe.

Trying to figure out their origami packaging, I was distracted by a short older guy I hadn’t even seen coming throwing a wad of trash hard at the other end of the table from me, and I thought, well that’s charming; making some employee have to clean up after you? The trash can is right there, dude. But I kept my mouth shut.

His face looked like, Do NOT mess with me. I have had it.

There were three clerks and a long line that did not move, and then #3 went on break. #2 went looking for someone’s stray package in the back. Clerk #1’s customer had a problem that took awhile. None of us were going anywhere anytime soon and #1 had from the time I walked in looked as angry as that guy.

Some minutes later, he suddenly appeared from the back (I’m thinking: he works here?!) and grabbed a package from next to her and threw it through the plastic-strips screen to the bin hidden behind. Hope there was nothing fragile in that.

Breathe. The only person whose behavior in this scene I could change was mine.

So I turned to the guy in a working man’s uniform behind me and asked, Are you in a hurry? You’re welcome to go ahead of me.

He was, actually, and quite grateful at the offer, even if it didn’t seem just then like it would really change a thing. We switched places.

There was one more person behind me: an older dad with a kid of about four with nothing to do. I repeated my offer. He turned me down. I offered him a finger puppet to keep his little guy amused, and it took him a moment but when I said Happy Birthday to make it clear I did not expect it back he decided why not.

Crocodile? He asked me, stating the obvious, I mean, we could quibble alligators vs caimans here but sometimes a finger puppet is just a finger puppet. ( –Oh wait, don’t let the staffs’ bad moods get to me.)

Yes.

The kid soon did what bored kids in strange places whose dads are staring at their phones do, which was to run his new pet up his dad’s leg and try to get his attention.

Clerk #2 returned. The line moved.

Finally I got called over to the one who’d looked so angry earlier. She wasn’t now. I asked for help figuring out that box, pleading bad eyesight re the tiny instructions, but she had a better idea and asked if she could put them in this padded envelope for me?

She didn’t hear me say Sure! so she repeated the question and I was amused at not being the deaf one for a moment there, but she just really thought this was a better idea so we went with it. (Maybe because it wouldn’t pop open if thrown hard, come to think of it.)

You make? She asked brightly, admiring the hats quickly and then looking up into my eyes.

Yes!

Cute! She exclaimed, looking at the address and clearly being glad for the person who was going to get to have not one but two hand knit hats! Made just for her!

She did the usual circling the tracking number on the receipt before handing it to me.

And then she waved me goodbye and wished me a nice day with the biggest, warmest, very real smile on her face, ready for the next person and utterly transformed, and I wasn’t expecting that at all, either.

One of the females jumped to the upper ledge, Chico, our little guy, did too for his first time, the mom decided to feed them there and when the food risked being gone the other two jumped up.

The eyases are at the stage where they grab the prey and try to run with it to feed themselves while playing keepaway from the others, but in that tight and new space they were a lot more meek about it. They let Hartley play the mom. Feed me!

Fledge watch officially starts tomorrow.

Chico ended his day by dropping down the back side of the nestbox onto a ledge where there is nowhere to go unless he flies at least a little bit. Coasting downwards is easy; gaining height (oops) almost never happens their first day of flight. Maybe he can flutter/jump straight up to get back into the runway area, maybe not. So we’ll see.

Meantime, in case you missed it (multiple people made sure I did not, which I very much appreciate–thank you!), there’s a young Cooper’s hawk in New Jersey that has learned to use a pedestrian crossing button for his breakfast take-out.

When it sees a pedestrian approaching a particular intersection and then pushing the button, starting sounds for the blind to know how long they’ve got, the hawk is in a tree at the far end of the block, ready for it.

It is rush hour. It only waits at rush hour and only on weekdays.

Once the cars line up along the entire block–it takes ten–the hawk comes zooming fast and low using them as a cover. When he gets to where there’s a flock across the street in someone’s front yard every morning, he turns 90 degrees at the exact right spot from where he can’t see them yet and they can’t see him and bam! He gets his meal.

His staking out got staked out by a biologist.

He doesn’t bother on weekends because there won’t be enough cars.

Here’s a picture of the scene.

(Edit: Wait. There was when I googled to find it again but the photos aren’t showing via my linking to it, at least on my computer. But there’s the rest of the info and you ought to be able to bring it up.)

A scrub jay. Its favorite spot seems to be in front of my recently-planted apricot: it offers a little clearing where it can see under the bushes to the sides and anything coming from above with the young tree protecting its back from attack.

Where did it get that orange thing… What is that? Curiosity got the better of me and I went outside to see. The jay dropped it and scrammed.

In my astonishment I said quietly but quite out loud, Where did you get that?!

It looked like a tiny, ripe mango exactly like one off my tree, miniaturized. Maybe an inch and a half long. A slight wrinkle that said it was ripe, and it smelled faintly like a mango, to0, but not with those round black seeds. I tossed it back where it had been, went inside to wash my hands and before the door was even shut the mama bird had snatched it back up.

Instantly two more were right there, just as big as she was (as fledglings are), acting like babies as they begged for food: fluttering their wings with bodies lowered and heads stretching upwards, beaks gaping wide. Like teenage boys towering over me in the kitchen back in the day. (One was 128 pounds and 6’2″ at 12 when he had seven more inches to go. I am 5.5″. I totally related to that jay.)

She pecked at the loquat like a raptor going after a carcass, ripping into it with that long sharp beak, feeding them bits. Such a small amount of food to me but everything in that moment to the three of them. I knew that was a sight you wouldn’t see a day or two from now: she was already starting to fly away when they begged, but for a loquat? This was to be shared and Momma was going to make them.

I have no idea where it had come from.

I did notice that the young ones acted afterward like they owned my little yard specifically, and I checked the mango flowers they’d gone after previously to make sure it was still covered.

And then I looked up loquats.

I had tried buying them once, been unimpressed, and that was that.

There are kumquats, which are in the citrus family, but loquats are in the–rose and apple family? Huh.

And there is one particular variety, well spoken of, that looks like and tastes rather like a champagne type mango. So now I know one of my neighbors is apparently growing a Yehuda loquat. They’re so soft and fragile when ripe that you can almost never find them in grocery stores, you almost have to know someone with a tree or grow your own.

Nope, nope, nope. I am not planting one. At least not before I’ve tasted what they’re really supposed to be like. I’m not taking it on word of beak.

The mango tree April 12 after the top half of it had frozen over the winter: this was after my first attempt to cut off anything obviously dead while leaving a chance for any wood that was still alive to make a comeback. The normally dark green leaves it still had were so pale.

I took a few pictures tonight, looked at them…what was going to grow was growing. What wasn’t never would. Out with the pruning shears.

It was too dark by the time I finished to take After photos, but I just kept marveling at what an incredible flush of growth it’s doing now and how healthy it looks. No sign in the new leaves of last year’s fungal disease that had put it in survival mode with no blooming even before that frost. It had been holding its breath for so long and so had I. Look at it now!

For probably five years I haven’t been able to see nor reach through the dense growth to replace the string of incandescent Christmas lights that helped keep it warm in the winter nor to check more than a few of its sockets, and by the end of this past season it was down to a single working bulb. We were having such a mild winter that it didn’t seem to matter.

Till those two nights when it did.

But by that density, the upper half protected the lower half when I missed getting the frost covers in place.

And down here where that last little light bulb was: look at it now.

And over on the other side, too, in the new growth, and hey! A third set! And they’re actually starting to set fruit!

We don’t do business anything on our Sabbath if we can at all avoid it, so talking about buying stuff feels a bit hypocritical.

Ain’t it great to be human. So here goes:

I posted to my knitting group recently about finding someone selling old-stock Holz and Stein needles and how good those are.

Tonight at our Zoom, one friend said she’d thought, sure, I can try a pair.

She was telling us, marveling, that these were the best needles she’d probably ever had!

She was asked what made them so, and she talked about the finish, the smoothness.

I thought, and the perfect join between the needle and cable, the perfect tip for all kinds of yarns, not too sharp, not too blunt. The sturdiness from the wood having been treated to withstand the stresses of being a musical instrument, and how cool that the leftovers got put to such a good use. You’re just beginning to find out. Have fun!

It just totally made my day that she hadn’t simply blown money on a rather expensive pair on a retiree’s budget but that she had actually fallen in love with them the way I had mine, and I pictured the many many hours to come of her enjoying them because she knits even more than I do.

And she gives away more of her time and love that way than probably anyone I know.

She’s the perfect person for the perfect needles to have found their way to.

With my train-wreck immune system, I slept twelve hours, got up for awhile, slept some more. That vaccination always does me in for the one day afterwards, but it’s worth it. I won’t get Covid again–and better yet, I won’t pass it on to anybody else. I don’t know if the current version circulating damages hearts like the original one did mine but now that we don’t have to go through that, I am so grateful to every person whose life’s work went into offering this gift to their fellow man.

I can give up a day for that.

He said see if you can find any appointments or does it have to be walk-in.

Appointments. On a holiday weekend. Five o’clock today was the only time available to do two people. I clicked yes.

Only then did I look at the clock and realize it was 4:48–forget dinner, we had to dash out the door now! and hope we hit every traffic light green. Which never happens.

But it did.  We are officially covid-proofed for now. It was also an excuse for ice cream because dessert is the most important thing you can eat after a vaccination: they do their medicine, we do ours.

A fried light switch out of a set of three outside the kitchen. A package delivery. Time to play electrician. He had as a teen done the wiring for the addition on his parents’ house, the work duly signed off on by the inspectors, so a simple light switch shouldn’t take very long.

Mutterings commenced.

That plate had a really terrible edge on the inside where nobody was supposed to ever see it: sharp and wavy. The wrong lights flashed on and off when he was sure he hadn’t even touched that wire. The insulated screwdriver hit the floor.

He looked at me and in a self-mocking tone pronounced, Tarnation.

Now there’s a Southern cuss word for you, I told him. Thinking further, I wondered if I’d ever heard a northerner Yankee type say such a thing (we lived in New Hampshire for four years.) I was pretty sure I had not.

He thought maybe yes they had.

The short, great linguistics debate of the evening (feel free to chime in–that way one of us will find out we were right.)

And now I have my kitchen lights back and everything works the way it’s supposed to and nobody can see the inside of that plate.

Meantime, my new zucchini stem had twins this morning. I have never heard of such a thing before.

At that picnic on Monday, a friend who’s an oncologist asked me point blank out of the blue, How’s your health?

I admitted I had an ultrasound coming up on Wednesday, but they’d done one previously and found nothing so the doctor didn’t think it was cancer but wanted to keep tabs on it.

He said something about his patients hating ultrasounds and I kinda shrugged it off. But not out of ignorance–rather, eh, I know what I’m in for.

Turns out it actually was easier than last year’s testing. Yay. And for getting one step closer to ending this two-year period. The hard part is the waiting to hear. I have plans for this next month of my life that I am going to do (Hi, Mom!) because I said so.

I mean, that always works, right?

(Update: I just signed in and there was the radiologist’s report. No mass seen, no abnormal thickening. Yay.)

About 15″ so far. Side edges to be added at the end. I am still at times talking myself into that white–knowing that if it bugs me I can always cut it off at the row below the one I went to take off so that I have that last one holding stitches in place to tink backwards from. Knitting downwards from there, everything would be off by a half a stitch’s width, but since it would be ribbing anyway that shouldn’t matter.

I ripped out the original attempt at roots and over-compensated for those mistakes on the do-over, trying to make the lines of roots reaching over the Cabin John trail like I remember them, so I’ve started embroidering a few extra stitches here and there to make them match the heft of the tree. There will be more of that.

I need give that box turtle an eye.

I did four rows and then switched to starting a chemo cap for my cousin. It’ll be my carry-around project tomorrow.

Having your parents divorce while you’re starting to hit puberty can’t be easy. The kid’s had a rough time of it, the parents don’t have each other there for emotional backup as their oldest starts his teens, and I’ve been trying to figure out if there was anything I could possibly do but have come up empty for months now.

Because every thirteen year old boy wants to be best friends with a sixty-six-year old woman, right? Uhhhhh…

There was a potluck picnic in the park this evening. He and his little brother were heading to where the food was being set up when suddenly, to show off, he leaped up to the picnic table and danced across it, down to the bench, and back to the ground heading past me.

I caught his eye just long enough: “I was just thinking, another week or so and you’ll be taller than me. And then you did!”

That’s the first time I’ve seen him laugh in a good long time.

My friend Anne told me her story this evening and I asked if I could share it.

She and her husband had gone out for ice cream.

In her words, after asking me to pray for the elderly gentleman:

“We were waiting for someone to take our orders, and he gave up and walked out just as someone showed up. I went and got him, and paid for his milkshake. As we were leaving, and he was heading to his car, I told him to have a nice day.

That’s when he said his wife died yesterday. To say I was gutted is an understatement. I parked, got out of the car, gave him a hug and prayed for comfort and that good memories would counteract the grief he feels.”

To which I expressed that the fact that the employee had been out of sight to the point that he had given up while they happened to be right there feels to me like the choreography of G_d: had he been immediately taken care of, there would have been no conversation, no meeting of hearts, no sharing of pain nor offering of compassion nor even the simple gift of a milkshake on a day when he so needed to feel human connection. Enough to get him out the door to go buy, what? Ice cream? I can imagine him thinking, Why? What does that matter now?

But there was. It happened. There was.

She and her husband were part of the answer to the very prayer she’d sent up on the man’s behalf.

Or just below it, actually.

This little guy got caught trying to escape upwards into the awning for awhile. I had no way to guide its way out without risking squishing it and eventually it managed to escape on its own.

My first take was a monarch–but that big white area on the downbeat suggested a different tune.

You don’t need to get an ID app, your phone has one, he said. Push the Lens button below the photo and let go.

Regal Fritillary, was the suggestion that popped up.

It was fanning its wings a lot and they glistened slightly in the noon sun as if it had just come out of its chrysalis.

It probably had.

It was gorgeous.

I’m so glad it shared its new day with me.

(Coming back to add, So that’s why I spelled it wrong the first time: Fritillaria. That’s a flower.)

Some years ago I mentioned a woman in my lupus support group whose health and mental health were spiraling downward together. She was an immigrant and at that point had no support system here other than us. We all did our best to reach out to her but it was hard to feel successful.

One month, an unusual thing happened at the meeting: only three people showed up. Her, the group leader who is a nurse as well as a patient and a very gentle, quiet soul, and me.

Listening to S, it was a wonder that she had even made it there but that seemed a sign that some part of her still wanted to live.

In the quiet of the room she opened up just enough for us to see what she had finally decided to do and said I’m sure more than she meant to of how she was going to do it.

Which she could have just gone and done already and none of us would ever have known, but she hadn’t, which said to me that she didn’t really want to, she just saw no other way out but had wanted to see us and say goodbye to us first.

We did our best to just listen, to convey that we cared.

And then I raced home and grabbed the phone I could hear on, because my cellphone in those days was not it.

Riiiing.

I know, HIPPA and all that, but can you tell me if you *don’t* have a patient named–? I explained the situation.

The first doctor’s office staff, after some checking with colleagues for guidance on the situation: We don’t have a patient by that name.

Thank you very much! (Calls second office, repeats the question.)

(Checks with colleagues, too.) We can’t tell you that.

Alright, cool, she’s with your practice, I said, I thought so. So: IF you have a patient by this name, this is who I am and my phone number, this is who the group leader is with her name and phone number and she can verify that this is what this patient told us at our support group meeting a few minutes ago.

They thanked me and got me off the phone fast and were right on it.

Five minutes later the woman herself called me. She was furious.

DID YOU CALL THEM?!

Yes. I did.

WHY DID YOU CALL THEM!

Because: I knew you would be angry with me. You. Are. Worth. That. to me. You. Are. Worth. That.

There was a sound that I could only interpret as wanting to be angry but suddenly turning into what started to be crying but she hung up fast before I could hear more.

And then we didn’t know, and we didn’t know, and we could only pray and wonder, but the two of us never told the rest of the group anything more than that we were worried about her, and that was nothing new to them because they were, too.

Eighteen months later she surprised us by showing back up. She tired easily, but there was a resilience I hadn’t seen before. She didn’t mention the suicide attempt, just that it had been hard–really hard–but that she was doing a little better now. And she had learned that when you have autoimmunity affecting the stomach, your body doesn’t process food well at all and studies have shown that that can impair your mental function and cause depression. So they’d been working on all of that.

At the end of the meeting she walked out with me and once there was no one else around to see it, threw her arms around me and thanked me.

Our group went to Zoom with the pandemic and she was part of it for awhile and then eventually she wasn’t and we’ve all wondered and hoped things had held for her. She had come so far.

Our group leader’s phone rang this week.

Our friend’s family had moved to Canada when she was a child and then she’d come to the US.

I can’t imagine how it must have been under the current regime.

It was her. She wanted to touch base and let us know: she had moved back to Canada and had bought a place with her elderly mom and things were going very well.

Our leader marveled, She sounded so, so happy! I’ve never heard her so happy, it was so wonderful!

She was home. Country, family, everything–at long last she had come home.