Richard’s reaction to the New York Times article about Andy’s farm turning into housing was the same as my initial one: Go. Go now. Everybody will want to.

I said, But I’m going tomorrow with Holly, but he and I both still felt it–Go! The place will be cleaned out.

I hopped right in the car and went.

She loves figs like I love peaches and the figs were on, along with the last of the nectarines and plums; from her house we are more than halfway to Andy’s and she wanted to see the place while it was still there. Her husband had a meeting in our town today. What’s an extra ninety minutes on the road at that point?

Cool, we’ll have a great time!

You never know though how plans will actually work out and they had a long drive ahead of them. I was standing in Andy’s farm store thinking about roasting figs and saving them in the freezer as an ingredient in winter, ready to go, and how good those have been to have. You never know. The figs will still be on next week, I’ll still be making my weekly trek. I don’t need a lot of them right now, I started to brush it away. One should be plenty for now. I’ll be right back tomorrow.

The thought persisted, hard, you never know.

So I brought home not one box for us but three: Exel, Tiger aka Panachee aka Panache depending on who’s doing the spelling, and Black Madeira. The descriptions of Black Madeira on the Fig Forum were so good that I actually bought a scion once but did not succeed at rooting it. I got a bit of leaf out of it before it died.

It was ten bucks. If I’d been serious about it I’d have bought a started tree but I knew I had no room for that.

So what actually happened: traffic was horrible and they were stuck in it for an extra hour and by the time she’d dropped him off across town, the idea of getting back in the car for another ninety, when we could just sit and talk and for me to be able to hear with no traffic noise…

And there were her figs all ready and waiting. Or mostly. One each of the Black Madeira and the Tiger had been sampled by then, because hey, we were going to go to Andy’s together the next afternoon. The one Delicioso plum she let me add to them hoped to make up for it.