They are ubiquitous where I grew up, but here, you have to be willing to buy new bulbs every fall or dig the old ones up and store them in your fridge all winter and not mistakenly use them for dinner. They’re poisonous, so you really don’t want to make that mistake.

But not to the local squirrels, who go straight for them as soon as they’re in the ground. I tried to plant some years ago and found it a lost cause.

But today brought a surprise.

One of my kids sent me a picture of two beautiful flowers in loud, random-brushstroke stripes, a petal on each curling and twisting while the others grew straighter, with the question, did I know what these were?

Tulips!

I said that historically, tulipmania in Holland four hundred years ago was set off by the search for specimens like these. They were gorgeous.

I went back to my afghan–I finished a fish, yay! I just need to tighten up the strands running behind so they don’t show–and thought about all the new random variants in a short time that made ordinary flowers into something never seen before, more beautiful, each as individual as the next, costly and highly sought after.

Caused by a virus.

Glancing next door from my kitchen this afternoon, there was a fire extinguisher.

On the roof next door. Just sitting there, nobody in sight.

Okay.

A little while later I went to get the mail and heard a man arguing loudly but saw no one. Came back inside and looked out the window again.

The extinguisher was gone. His back was to me, his phone tight to his ear. I decided that given that he was not having a good day it might be best *not* to stand on a chair nor to open the door in order to get a better photo as the heated conversation clearly continued on, I mean, c’mon, leave the poor guy alone.

He was sitting on a very large canister.

Of gas.

On the roof.

To his left, that mostly-dead very tall tree.

These things do not play well together.

But it has a very large nest in it so you can’t cut it down right now.

Maybe.

Anne couldn’t find my address so she had to rat herself out and ask. I’d ordered some Holz and Stein needles and a Mel and Kris deep-dish pie plate for picking up at Stitches back in February, which I missed due to a if not the virus.

So Anne had picked them up for me and waited for me to get better. But before we could plan it–we do not live close and the whole thing was heroic on her part as far as I’m concerned–the early lockdown was announced.

Today we became officially slightly less locked down.

The doorbell rang.

She had on a mask, I put on a mask, but these past few months have taught me that I lipread more than I think I do. So Anne stepped even further back and hung hers askew so I could see and we chatted a few minutes, which felt like heaven.

She brought me my needles, she brought me my pie plate…and she brought me a Mel and Kris yarn bowl as a surprise!

She had no way of knowing how much I’d wished for weeks that I had one while working on the ocean afghan–well, and forever before that, too. I finally gave up a few days ago and started doing the intarsia Kaffe Fassett style, where instead of trying to untangle whole balls of yarn as you switch sides at the ends of the rows you simply break off as long a length as you think you can manage and pull it and the next through again and again and again and just deal with weaving in all the extra ends. It’s faster and so much easier.

This is the yarn bowl I would have picked out if I’d been the one picking it out. It’s gorgeous. (So is the pie plate.)

Anne also brought the news that since so many of the festivals and art fairs they make a living at have been canceled this year, Mel and Kris are now selling online. Shipping is what it is because pottery is heavy.

Those pictures of the 8″ pan I make my fruit cobblers in? It’s labeled as their mini pasta.

The roasted radishes were definitely the way to go. Sweet, soft, no heat–and pretty.

This peach tree nearly died of leaf curl disease last year, but look at it now.

Milk Pail is back! Sort of.

Their old store is being bulldozed by the developer but it turns out they had a warehouse that they’d held onto, and they still had 45 years’ worth of connections to all kinds of suppliers.

In this ongoing shutdown, a lot of farmers are hurting badly and a lot of grocers are having a hard time stocking their shelves.

The newly retired Steve missed his customers. His daughter, back in college with the burden of stocking the shelves gone, was up for part-timing it now.

You could create a lot of market for individual small farmers if you were packing take-what-you-get bags of produce and olive oil, etc etc for several thousand customers via a drive-through.

And so, in a riff on the Community Supported Agriculture movement, they have started Brigadooning it on weekends. Order on Tuesday, pick up during your chosen hour on Saturday or Sunday, put your name and order number in Sharpie on a piece of paper and hold it up to the window with the back window rolled down or the trunk popped and they’ll just swing your order right in there with a smile, a no-touch contact but definitely a human one.

Last week for their first run it was mostly an assortment of marvelous cheeses with a few accompaniments.

Some of it went in the freezer, because there are only the two of us.

But the response was so enthusiastic that it was definite proof of concept, so now you can order bags of produce, too.

Man, it felt strange to get behind the wheel of the car, and did you ever notice how intense the leaves of all those trees that aren’t in my yard are? And almost no traffic.

Up one side of the parking lot, stop, roll the window and share a moment of oh it is SO good to see you all that went both ways, and back around the divider to the other side of the lot and away.

My first take on the radishes was, what on earth could an ileostomy patient possibly do with those?

There had to be something. Which is how I found this page. Roast them like potatoes and it comes out like that? Now I can’t wait to try.

Keenly aware that every vegetable in my fridge is one someone else didn’t get to find on the shelves, I made a big pot of soup and cleared out what was left of the older as I fit in the new, and it came out really good. Vegetables are food and flavor, not aspirations and intentions. We are definitely eating better.

Has anybody else been cooking a lot more since this shutdown started?

My elderly next door neighbor went from being rescued by the paramedics after days on the floor to the hospital to a recovery center–to being picked up by her son and taken home with him to an assisted living place close to his house a thousand miles from here. She absolutely could not risk living alone anymore.

And then the facility went into lockdown due to the pandemic. It’s got to be rough. I miss her.

Plumbing, mold, landscaping–her house needed a ton of work, and assisted living is expensive.

Houses a good bit below market are unicorns here–it probably sold the first day and it surely made at least that part of her life easier.

I took a few pictures this past week as the entire front yard was stripped bare and then planted anew and sent them to her children, with the question, Should I share these with your mom, too?

It would probably be better if, for now, I did not, was the response–but please, send more, they’d love to see.

New driveway. New walkway. And oh thank you, they didn’t put in the pestilent non-native monkey grass that was a fad against the drought for awhile there.

Today, a truck backed up onto the sidewalk, given that the new driveway was still taped off.

And what did they bring down the gangplank of that truck in front of that 1950s modernist-style Eichler house?

Two perfect Eames rocking chairs, in style if not in actual fact.

I grew up in an Eichler style house and my parents had an actual Eames rocker. I saw one years ago at the Modern Art Museum in San Francisco and kind of laughed that something that had been so utterly ordinary to me was considered art–and yet of course it is. My mom rocked her spitting-up babies in theirs, but then, plastic is easy to clean up.

I feel a connection with the new neighbors already and I haven’t even laid eyes on them yet.

 They were in this area, but this is not how they were. He must have quietly dug them up and replanted them. I thought he’d just cleared off the dead cover plants.

They were here when we bought the house, and over time they crowded themselves badly and then did a mass die-off in the drought–and have been steadily, slowly working their way back ever since.  They ended up kind of split down the middle into two bunches of randomness.

I thought it was so weird when we moved to California that everybody had a hired gardener. Doesn’t anybody work in their own yard around here?

Then I got lupus with extreme sun sensitivity, my husband threw his back out, and we ended up asking the neighbor’s how much he charged. (Fred’s cardiologist had made him retire.) It’s been good to have the help, and Elio’s a great guy.

I paid him extra last winter for something I didn’t feel was in his usual job description. He disagreed and tried to stop me. Dude: Take. The. Money. You spent the time, you did the work, you earned it.

Which is probably why the purple irises are now arranged in a perfect circle of green leaves and purple blossoms, with enough distancing to be social and healthy for a goodly while to come, placed just so between the apples and the fig tree. They are in their fullest glory and they have never looked better than they do right now.

Elio quietly offered up a gift in the barren winter dirt and waited for the day when I’d get to notice.

Blame it on the mailman.

He left the next-door neighbors’ magazine in our mailbox. Well, that wouldn’t do.

And so I put on a face mask, washed my hands, cut an amaryllis that was opening up today, plunked it in a vase, and walked it and the magazine over next door.

After stopping in my driveway so the woman pushing her stroller could continue on past, but she saw me, chuckled, nodded, and rolled those wheels over into the car-less street.

The little dances we do.

What would you call claymation when the medium used is felted wool? We need a word for how this animated history of handspinning was created, because it definitely deserves one.

The amaryllis bulbs that my dad gave me for his last Christmas have begun to come into bloom again, bringing cheer to our lockdown.

And it is not possible–I thought–but that last apricot seed in that last paper cup, the one that wasn’t doing anything but I couldn’t bear to toss because it hadn’t decayed away like seven of them had those times when watering them had left them exposed enough to see…had a tiny root showing today. After trying for what, two months? I thought I was just putting off the certainty of disappointment by not letting the cup dry out, but there it is. It lives.

I covered its brief uncoveredness quickly with just a bit of chicken-manure-enhanced soil and hoped. It would be so cool.

My dad adored Andy’s apricots.

Today is Mathias’s third birthday and we were supposed to be there to help celebrate. I admit it took me a couple of weeks to concede to reality and cancel the plane tickets.

His mom knew there wasn’t going to be a birthday party, not this year–but she had an idea while in an Indian grocer during Holi, the Festival of Colors.

The dog got rainbowed, too.

Bubblewrap. Crinkly, poppable, interesting, new, light-reflecting bubblewrap, and (briefly) on the floor, too.

And so one very determined little Lillian mastered crawling today.

Two days into this, and after the one guy working that part of the yard made it quietly clear that there would be no conversations (French is not the most useful language for California), I made a point of watering my still-tiny columnar apple tree at the corner so they would know for sure that it was mine. That ivy creeping towards it amongst the weeds? It’s all gone now. Nothing but dirt.

They cut my Chinese elm tree that the squirrels like to dangle upside down from in season.

Well, not all the way, but a lot, because a lot of it was growing on the other side of the fence and that house is being readied for market just as fast as the masked, spaced-apart workers can do it. Construction is (or was?) on hold but apparently getting a house ready for market is not.

The three men are careful at keeping the requisite 6′ distance.

They were measuring new flooring in the street before cutting it to match room dimensions. They did measure twice. (The mailman either drove over it or the sidewalk.) They cut down every weed and bush in the front yard and the now-denuded pine tree stump by the door will surely be next. Everything. Gone. They cut, they raked, they flattened. The weeds are gone, the ground is even now, and I expect rolls of grass will be unfurled shortly.

Just as we’re heading into another drought year, it looks like, but sellers gotta sell. But I’ll find out for sure in a few.

They did not cut down the oaks the squirrels planted badly that I had to pay to cut back from my side under threat of losing my homeowners for the fire risk. It’s nesting season; they probably can’t. But those are going to take out the fence in a few years, the roots are going to damage my foundation (same story, different trees) and someone’s going to have to deal with them. Trees are wonderful, but raining copious amounts of acorns on my roof all day long definitely gets old–got to admit, the insurer had a point.

We had a dense, forest-y view of graceful Chinese elm leaves outside the breakfast nook, with a keen appreciation for how few people ever get to even seen an elm. And now, well, they’re pretty sparse.

She had the biggest toyon tree I know of off her back patio, the berries celebrated by many a robin and cedar waxwing.

It’s gone.

There are two very tall trees that are half dead because she never watered anything; one already dropped a major limb that punctured our roof some years ago. I don’t know how you could take those out safely for the workers while keeping to the coronavirus distancing guidelines, and so far they’ve stayed.

It is amazing how, at a time when we’re staying home day after day after day with everything the same, the world immediately outside our windows is dramatically different after their three days of hard, hard work.

So, it was like that yesterday, and I sat down and got four rows into the next fish before it was time to rest my hands and call it a night.

It was only after that that I went, wait a minute….

Ohmygoodness. It was true.

I had ordered the Ankara Green to mix with the blues at the top of the future waves. I hadn’t even glanced at the Water Green because it looked lighter than anything I wanted to deal with.

But that’s what it was and after opening that bag yesterday I’d immediately paired it with what had been an orphan skein: if one critter was going to be multicolor to the point of overdoing it, well, as Eleanor Roosevelt says, repeat your mistake and make it a pattern.

And then it’s not a mistake anymore.

This sure wasn’t.

I emailed Uncommon Threads, thanking them profusely and enthusiastically–it meant I hadn’t had to wait a week for the mail from someone else for me to be able to start in on the next fish in colors Uncommon didn’t have–but letting them know in case it messes up their inventory.

I won’t need that Ankara for awhile anyway.

But I put in a second order of it now because I wanted to say thank you. They’d totally rescued me.

You guys!!

I spent more time working out the design, even made paper cut-outs of fish with circles of tape on the back to be able to move them around my drawing while keeping them to scale.

And I went through all my Rios, ie all my soft superwash worsted-weight merino in the house.

Amazing how much that stuff gets used up.

Being with other colors changes how you perceive them: context matters, and there were a fair number of perfectly nice skeins that just weren’t going to work out with what I’d done so far. That not-bright with that bright but not that one with it.

Which of course means that some of what I’d originally planned on using next, but that I’d kept mentally dragging my feet over the more and more I got into what I was doing so far… But I’d been reluctant to order more sight unseen and right now that’s the only option–it’s not like anybody can go browse anywhere. I’d been avoiding the issue until finally I had no choice.

Rios, it turns out, is a popular yarn to order online when you’re stuck at home. For good reason. It took some searching.

I did, though, I found what I wanted–and inwardly lamented that I was going to have to wait till it came from the east coast. Plus Illinois. I did not want to lose my momentum, but the very next row was where I was going to need to start the next fish in some new color and that yarn just wasn’t here. What I wouldn’t have given to have been able to dash out to Cottage Yarns–you couldn’t ask for a better Malabrigo inventory than Katherine’s.

I did spot some light seafoam green at Uncommon Threads a few miles up the road, though, and thought that would be good for the mixing of blues and light at the tops of the waves to come. Their Living Coral was redder than my Glazed Carrot, cool, some of that, too, for the clownfish that I’ll be doing after the ones coming up. If I’m going to be a perfectionist I might as well be a perfectionist.

They didn’t even charge me for shipping.

All. Day. Long. I wanted to knit on that afghan but not if I couldn’t do it right. Color (quoting my friend Constance) is everything.

I was out back watering the mango after dinner and when I came back inside, Richard was wandering down the hall calling my name, holding a pretty little paper bag by its handles. “Where did you go?” He’d seen someone running away from the door and clearly, this was meant for me.

They did?! Seriously?!

It was from Uncommon Threads. Niiiice.

I pulled out the seafoam green and compared it to what I had and suddenly one ball at the bottom of the bag whose tag and colorway name are lost to me leaped out at its new best friend. “That’s IT!” I exclaimed in delight. I could do it! I can do it now! I started doing it now! It’s perfect, both with what has been and with what will be.

Man, that felt good. One fish two fish red fish not-blue fish. Thank you, Uncommon Threads!