Being way behind on my inner deadline, I started the day with this picture and the determination to finish that first tree.

I finished it.

Oh wait–no, I think I’ll add one more row and then a half row on that side.

…Okay, *now* it’s done. I was right. I like that better.

The New York Times did a piece on a home, if that’s the word, in New York. The dentist who left Ukraine during a prior administration wanted a piece of, say, St. Peter’s Basilica, he said, y’know, that kind of presentation.

How much had he spent building on the lot of the razed Victorian, they wanted to know.

Oh, I gave up counting after $10M, he waved that away.

So. For $25,000,000 you too can rival Felon47’s gold-leafed-everything. Although I do have to say I like that stained-glass star up there, forgive me, I do.

And! A bucket shower! (Somehow the Times did not include a photo. I mean, like, everybody know what they meant, right?)

What. Is a bucket shower.

I got suckered in. I googled. I found photo #17. I…I…

Do you have to donate to the ALS Foundation every time you use it? That’s all I can figure out.

Oh thank you Etsy. It’s artisan-made, it’s not mass-produced, just like you used to be all about. And you totally guessed what I wanted to see.

Or how about this one, with the cobra climbing the stick? (Look at the smirk on that thing.)

Or maybe not so much.

Actually, I laughed–and then went, wait.

What if some idiot tried to shoot it out of my hand to save me?

Just raising a little cane here.

(Fusses with photos, wonders why they’re not posting.) You’re just going to have to take my word for it that those two cherry tomato plants are going all out and it’s a good thing that one of my friends is looking forward to being shared with because even the zucchini plants can’t keep up with their output. (Edited in the morning: Okay, there it is!)

Giving or receiving warm ripe homegrown tomatoes–that is one of the best parts of summer.

The person at the pulpit was talking about Jesus at the Mount of Olives. No loaves and fishes, no mention of any other miracles but the one of His ability–and willingness–to feel all our pain of every kind in order that we might always have a friend to turn to who knows exactly what it feels like, because He was willing to go through it with us at a time when He was entirely alone.

I was reading the Zoom captions on my phone.

My eyes did a silent Ohmygosh!

No. No he did NOT say the Salmon on the Mount. Wrong part of the story anyway. NO.

Clearly, that AI has been to church before and it thinks it knows everything it’s supposed to learn there.

Well, teaching us in parables always was His style…

But also, it brings back to me the time my mom told young-kid me that clearly, G_d has a sense of humor. Which intrigued me and puzzled me no end and made me pay attention to that possibility all of my life.

Clearly, He does, because a shared good laugh can bring out the best in us.

Salmon. On the Mount. I’d tell him a good joke but He told it to me first.

My hands were a little cold after reaching into the freezer. Just enough to…

I saw it fly off my left hand and shoot under the trash compactor.

Never, ever get a trash compactor. The tray-shaped part that pushes down only pushes down, for obvious safety’s sake, when the door is closed and the machine is off–but ours collects any stray bits that spill over the top of that tray and then the sides that are supposed to thwart trash from getting on top of the pusher now make it so you can’t get them out of there: the space is too narrow and enclosed for a hand to get into or an eye to see well in there.

Imagine a trash can you cannot ever completely clean.

The problem is a blank space in the cabinetry with no way to match the oak.

I wanted my ring back.

No sign of it whatsoever.

After several minutes of trying, he came over and pulled the thing off its runners and into the center of the kitchen. I looked, I scrubbed. No ring.

I took the bag off the compactor, sat on the floor, and went through every single bit in there. No ring.

I looked all around–but I’d seen that thing shoot straight across, where on earth could it be? I pulled out the long thin lines of styrofoam that the compactor had been running back and forth on for 31 years. And they looked like it. I scrubbed them off (I don’t think they were supposed to come out but they were now, whatever was supposed to cover them was long gone), looked under where they’d been, then put them back nice and flat in there. No ring.

Never has a cherry pit nor used sauce packet been so thoroughly inspected.

Finally, I got the trash back in the bag, he got the compactor back on its track, and we tried to get it back in its place.

Past the halfway mark it won’t anymore. So far at least. We both tried. So now it juts halfway into the space where you’re coming into the kitchen and you’d better be paying attention or you’re going to walk right into it. Charming. We have not won that one yet.

I scrubbed my hands a good one again, turned to move around the compactor–

–and stepped on my ring.

Apparently he’d knocked it forward when he’d pulled that thing out and then I’d put the bag on top of it. I got my ring back. I got my ring back. I got my ring back. I considered where it had been and washed my hands again.

While the trash compactor declares that we’ve wanted it gone for so long and now it’s just trying to help us get there. Isn’t that nice of it?

Sometimes you just need to change the focus, so I drove to Andy’s today, bought two big lugs of peaches, got home, and texted a friend with whom I had a multi-year agreement but hadn’t done anything this summer because the peach supply per customer had been limited. Till this week.

Did she want a half lug of each of the two types I’d bought or should I freeze half my haul? The great Loring of my youth and Silver Logan. I was fine either way.

YES she wanted peaches from Andy’s!

(I threw in some of his early-variety Gage plums just because I could.)

Her husband is a beekeeper, and she sent me home with not one not two but three jars of his honey from different hives. Some friends you can never get ahead of, you know?

And then I had put it off long enough. I tried to look up how to contact the new surgeon online, but you can’t–you have to call (just like I’d been warned by the other surgeon.)

They had been expecting me.

Summer vacation time means it’ll be three weeks. About four miles away. There was one earlier slot: first thing in the morning four cities away where rush hour traffic would add a minimum extra 90 minutes, two hours to be sure. Honey, I don’t even get up for cheap flights that early.

So. Let’s see how much knitting I can get done before I get sliced and diced.

The book club with the author Zooming in! Wow, what an experience! And for her to get to see that the people she met in Ukraine and wrote about who meant so much to her meant so much to us, too. She wove historical background in with their stories and I highly, highly recommend “By the Second Spring.”

The other thing is I saw the surgeon today. Got a nope! out of her: too many surgeries and complications, laparoscopic is not the safe way to go here, go see the oncological surgeon and expect the hospital to keep you till you feel up to walking again.

Oh that sounds like so much fun. (Been there done that, told the nurses who were trying to get me on my feet to take my blood pressure. Something over 40, okay, let’s get that number up first.)

So we’re back to waiting to find out when I can get a pre-op appointment to find out when everything will be.

But she had good answers for the painkiller question and that is the thing I most needed to know.

Back to the afghan, made good progress yesterday. Ran out of that ball of blue and went to start the next.

Crum.

It’s a thin weight and I’ve been knitting it doubled but there was only a single ball ready, wound up who knows when. This is the problem with working from cones: you have to hank, scour the mill oils out, hang, dry, and then wind every single one. Quality+mill outlet price+cashmere=work+time.

I went looking, found the rest of the cones and there was one cone’s worth that I’d already washed and hanked. Yay. I wound it up, and then wound it again along with that first ball because, two strands, intarsia, I’ve learned not to have two separate ones rolling around tangling when you only have to have one per color or section.

Knitted a good bit of the day.

Got up this morning and this time I finally saw what had been nagging away at my subconscious that whole time: I now had three strands of that blue on that new ball. It had already been double-wound when I did all that work yesterday. That’s what I get for letting it sit there waiting for two months.

I should maybe frog yesterday’s rows. But the beaver dam is finished now, the second tree is started now, that rock in the water is started now, that foreground tree is at its uppermost branches.

I had plenty of time to think about it while I slowly, carefully, unwound that tripled ball back into single and doubled ones. With resting my shoulders and hands time, those *558 yards took me most of the day. How, when you pull two strands straight up from the floor to wind them together, do they end up needing to be constantly untwisted as you take them the other direction? It was very obvious which two had been together a long time and which had not, and yet…

I picked up the afghan and carefully examined it in sunlight, room light, and thought, nah, it’s good. Nobody could tell that part was slightly different but me.

But you know?

I think I’ll let it sit in my brain and see how I see it in the morning. Sleeping on it, it turns out, is a good thing.

—

*Half price at the time.

Amazing how restorative a chance conversation with a neighbor can feel on a day when you need it. With a cute puppy thrown in! We are so lucky to have such good ones.

And then the mail came, and a farther-away friend had chosen to be the best neighbor ever, too, and I tell you. I want to live up to all this. Thank you. To life!

And it isn’t even the first of April.

A special effects artist got an Etsy order.

A police department got a phone call .

A cop got a story to tell for life.

No that wasn’t “human remains” discovered in the a.m.p.m. convenience store–it was a teddy bear (if you can call it that) from an artist across the country who does the haunted house gig.

It was intended to be ugly, but sheesh, not call-the-cops ugly. (SJ Mercury link. Here’s the FB link, which seems to work fine if you just X where it says to sign in rather than signing in. Also, it says bus station rather than the a.m.p.m.)

“The coroner’s office gathered the evidence, and the investigation is ongoing, Rodriguez said.”

It’s. A. Doll. Put it in an oak and you can call it an eye, doll, a tree.

When you weave, the weft thread finds its pattern between the raised and lowered warp threads and then half-circles back for its next row, adding continuity and the strength and smoothness of a selvedge at the sides of the piece being created.

I signed into the big blue website to read Sean of the South’s essay of the day and to wish anybody a happy birthday that might need it before trying to escape the clutches of its algorithms…

And saw the friend suggestion with mutual friends listed.

I stared at the screen, speechless. How. On. Earth.

So I went up to this good woman today who’d moved in about a year and a half ago and asked, How do you know Jordan and Jennifer in Texas?

Stopped her right there mid-motion. Her jaw. Dropped.

JEF?! How do *you* know Jef?!

(Okay, now I really knew she knew her!)

Said in the most faux-nonchalant trying-not-to-laugh tone, I answered, I’ve been married to her brother for 45 years.

It was fun to watch her being as staggered as I’d been last night.

And then I realized I’d seen her on one of our visits to the in-laws.

Turns out my brother-in-law had helped her husband land his first post-medical-training job. She was the one who, after my father-in-law was widowed, gave my sister-in-law a break by visiting him every week with her little boy, bringing a loaf of homemade bread and getting to know this character of an old guy who loved to make you laugh.

They’d moved since then, and then again to here.

All these months we had all had not a single clue.

She asked after DadH and I said, Six years I think? Richard called him to wish him a Merry Christmas and all the sudden mid-conversation was exclaiming, Dad?? …DAD!?!!!! He called his brother, who was there and rushed him to the hospital, and then he was quietly gone.

I forgot to mention DadH’s then-98-year-old friend in their ward who’d played in a band with some of his buddies at assisted living places to help keep the old folks company. I know she knew him. How could you miss him. Next week.

It’s summer, the finches and doves are foraging for weed seeds where once there was pre-drought lawn and I’m cheering them on because those non-natives are stabby.

And then I stumble across a discussion about how a rare and huge squash is the best of all the squash, that it makes a pumpkin pie that almost doesn’t need any sugar, that it easily keeps for six months, that more gardeners should grow it to keep it from going extinct because it has the best taste and texture.

So I go from the gardening forum to the seed company and check through the comments.

There are pictures of the North Georgia Candy Roaster hanging from trees it was not planted near. One guy said it looks like kudzu, another that theirs vined twenty feet to either direction, and many many saying, you need space for this one!

And I’m looking out the window and thinking, y’know…those big leaves could shade the noxious weeds right out of existence. Sounds like it wouldn’t take very many of them. How many plants did that guy say he had for his 200 pounds of squash in his yard? Hello Second Harvest food bank?

One said his grew so fast that he was afraid to walk out there and stand still too long.

Four bucks and free shipping. Yeah, I did it. Might even plant a seed for this year to see if I can still get anything.

Now I’ll just need a machete to go with it to protect my fruit trees.

I finally finished the 90-stitch hat that has been demanding to stop being possibilities hidden within a ball of yarn this past month.

I watered all the fruit trees–a day early, but so I don’t have to worry about whether I’ll have time to get to it.

I made almond muffins with a spoonful of Nutella in each and really made my sweetie happy.

I took a pound of apricots, split them, melted some butter in a stoneware pan, swirled it around to coat it, poured the rest of the two tablespoons’ worth out into some brown sugar, and then put the apricot halves in the stoneware and a dot of the mixture in the center of each. Forgot the cinnamon. Forgot the bit of almond extract that really adds to that. Because I was running in and out between that and setting the timer for three minutes to move the hose 18 times. Oh well. 350F for 40 minutes to make one of my favorite comfort foods and they are definitely good enough.

They originally told me the surgeon was booked up FAR out, so sorry. Then they called back saying they’d had a cancellation and would next Thursday be alright.

(Did I ask for a cancellation. No, no I did not.)

Thursday it is.

Today was coping mechanisms day.

Scene: CVS. I could tell you any number of ways I would have preferred to spend my morning but there it was and there I was.

There was a mom picking up her prescription. Her son, about 13 and trying not to be bored waiting for her, picked up a pair from the spinning display of sunglasses at the end of the nearby aisle and tried them on for the mirror that was probably lower to his view than it would have been just a few months ago. You know that awkward stage where the feet grow first and then the rest starts to catch up?

I was done just then so as I walked past him I told him appreciatively, Cool shades.

His face absolutely lit up. And so so did mine as I continued on towards the door.

Kids need their villages so much.

Actually, come to think of it, we still all do, every day.