Seven-month-old Maddy giggling again and again as her brothers jumped on bubble wrap off camera in yesterday’s video. Can’t get it here yet, but then FB was freezing part of my keyboard, with a particular dislike for a, s, g, and h–the thing worked everywhere else. Go figure.

Today we got to see her giggling for ourselves via Skype while Parker told us all about his legos and Hudson described his favorite book and showed us pictures: tractors. Trucks. These are the important things and we needed to know about them.

(How long has he been talking like that? we asked.

Just in the last two weeks or so.)

He was speaking in long sentences while searching for just the right words with all kinds of big facial contortions for emphasis. Twenty-eight months is a fun age.

So is the scooting backwards when you’re trying to crawl forward stage, giggling and grabbing your daddy’s nose. So is four and a half.

Life is good.

If only I had thought of it a day or two earlier I could have shared some of this with Ellen–and likely there would have been more. She, though, gave me a nectarine from her travels in the Central Valley and pointed out the tiny dimples: the farmer had told her the unusual rain striking the skin had done that.

So the story: I exchanged emails last winter with Andy Mariani, the owner of a well-loved orchard a ways south of here, and he was delighted to find someone who knew of and liked Loring peaches like he did.

I didn’t think we got enough chill hours for them to grow here. (But he’s in a slightly different subclimate.)

Yes he did have a few trees. Get back in touch with him come summer and he’d be glad to put some aside for me.

A tad late, I remembered all that and shot him off another note.

The market stand was sold out, he answered Thursday, but if I could come Friday they would be picking the very last few that morning. Maybe three pounds’ worth.

I don’t care if it’s just one single peach, I said, for my first Loring in thirty-eight years it’s worth the trip!

And so they managed to find ten peaches for me tucked among the leaves and set them aside. Michelle and I got there, and the woman at the counter asked, You’re Alison?

She offered samples of a Silk Road nectarine, too. I prefer peaches–but that was like no nectarine I’d ever tasted and would have been worth the trip down all on its own. I’d never had one run juice to my elbows before and I did not know they could have such an intense, interesting flavor–so some of those came home, too.

I did not get the name of the dappled, pretty, ripe, green–cherries? So they were. In almost-August. I’d never heard of such a thing.

We came home with our treasures and cut up our first Loring. That first picture is not a trick of the camera angle–that thing was 508 grams.

Michelle closed her eyes a moment and pronounced, Now that is a peach!

Relief! After all that buildup, it just couldn’t be a letdown, it couldn’t…and it wasn’t.

We took one to Timothy at the chocolate shop. “You didn’t go to Andy Mariani’s, did you? You did? Yes!” He shared it with his employees. Our favorite hot chocolates showed up at our elbows.

The one I later shared with Richard needed one more day to ripen perfectly but it had bruised slightly from all the juice and a little jostling and needed not to be wasted. He too pronounced it good, though I told him Michelle’s was even better.

At least I got to send Ellen off with homegrown Meyer lemons. She’ll just have to come back next July.

She sent me a picture and Richard sent me some from his phone and they’re too big to go here and I’ll try to shrink them tomorrow for you.

But let me just say that Ellen is absolutely as wonderful in person as I always knew she would be.

She’d had a huge drive from her trip to Fresno to make it here. The funny part is that at three and a half hours into it my doorbell rang and I opened it with You’re here!

And it was my next-door neighbor. And so Richard and I got to talk to her a little while and I was halfway walking her back over to her house when Ellen pulled up in front of it. And Ellen? That’s the neighbor who just missed being in the big tsunami in Phuket and who then spent a month driving a relief truck to stricken areas long after her vacation was supposed to be over. Because she could.

We had such a good time! She and Richard and I went out for chocolates and sandwiches at Timothy Adams, then dropped him off at home and headed for Purlescence.

I had no idea one of the regulars listens to Ellen and her twin sister Jan’s podcasts–she did quite a doubletake and went, Are you–are you–!

It was a treat to watch Ellen belong on the spot among my friends just like I’d felt with her as she’d stepped out of her car the first time. Heather got to tell her she’d knit a hat for the Warm Hats Not Hot Heads campaign. Everybody introduced themselves.

It was late by Ellen’s time but she let me bring her back inside after the shop to dip some of the strawberries she’d bought us driving across the Central Valley into some sour cream and sugar as we three chatted some more. It was a struggle not to be selfish with her time. I am so glad she came.

And she brought nectarines and a melon and plums and tomatoes and good news about a good farmer who’s making a difference re water usage there.

Richard took pictures of the two of us….

Nope, no sign of basal-cell recurrence here, and the dermatologist liked how the scar on my scalp was healing at my yearly checkup today.

Mentioning again in case someone out there needs to read it: my oldest had a highly aggressive melanoma diagnosed at 27 years old. They apparently caught it in the first two weeks and were able to operate it out of there without her having to go through chemo or radiation–speed and a doctor’s intuition about that mole six years ago saved her.

Get checked.

And then I went home and made an appointment for the next mammogram, as long as I was being all grownup about it.

Michelle had us over for homemade lemon meringue pie and sent us home with the rest and it was very, very good.

Looking at the overly full fridge, I put it at the back of the top above the fruit juice and milk that I knew wouldn’t be moved or touched for several days till the stuff in front would be used up. Knowingly, not a bright move, but I had cleared out the lower shelves a few days before and still there just wasn’t room for the height of that pouffy meringue.

This would do. Be careful, is all.

Tick…tick…tick….

Before I even had that fridge door open again all the way the entire right side of the top shelf dominoed over and threw itself down towards my feet. Lemon makes a great cleaner, so, hey, it was just being helpful, right? The sides, the drawers, the door shelves, the floor, my feet, my clothes, even somehow underneath the fridge. If it was possible within the realm of physics for pie to land or bounce there it did.

The most points of impact! Olympic gold! And the crowd goes wild. The Blobsledding champion!

I almost sewed today. It was going to have two layers.

I had ordered two identical silk dresses for a grand total of $22 with the idea of cutting the one up to use for parts for the other: the style was eh but the colors were pretty and it had a lot of possibilities.

I knew going in that dye lot could be an issue, but when I held fistfuls of each together against incandescent, fluorescent, and sunlight they always looked good to go. I know, that’s like winning the lottery but it seemed I had.

I could also do this, and this… I cut the one across at the armholes so I could actually see the possibilities in action before ironing and pinning.

And all those times I had checked couldn’t show me what wearing both together did: the dye lots didn’t match after all. So very close, but. Not it.

And that started off a whole new set of tangents: okay, so, the cut one can now become a skirt that will be longer than what it had been because the armholes are now down at the waist. This is good. The other can be shortened to be a tunic over a navy skirt.

And it wasn’t till I typed all this and was about to hit post that it finally hit me just why I’d bought those dresses. Flower prints are generally not the first thing I reach for, but it hadn’t been just the colors and the price after all.

When I was eighteen my paternal grandmother had cancer. Cross-country traveling costs for a large family being what they were then, I had been lucky to see her two years before, not knowing it would be the last. She had always been an avid needleworker, even after rheumatoid arthritis hit, and with my babysitting money I had bought a little kit. I embroidered wool flowers above a little basket motif, set it in the prefab wood frame it came with, and my dad sent it off to his mother with a get-well (I wished!) card from me.

It was pansies. I had always loved purple pansies, and so I was sending her some from my heart the best I could.

Purple. Pansies.

Suddenly I see.

81F (for a few minutes) and .23″ near San Diego today.

I remember trying to convince my then-school-age children that to me, there should be rain in summer, and that it should be a warm, heavy rain that makes you want to run in it and laugh for joy and splash in all the puddles with your bare feet and listen to the crickets after it’s over.

Warm? Rain? Summer? These were three words that did not go together at all as far as they were concerned. Rain equals cold straight off the ocean and it only happens in winter. You bundle up against it. You do not want to get your feet wet. Warm does not rightfully co-exist with rain. They refused.

Except it almost did exactly that today–we got the heat and the muggy air and the clouds threatening darkly but we just missed any actual water to go with. San Jose got some, though. San Diego got it. The I-10 bridge that collapsed into the flash flood hitting its supports definitely got it. In July! Never since records began in 1877 has LA gotten so much at such a date.

Hudson and Parker had to experiment with this idea of drinking summer skywater straight from the tap. Note that Hudson is all ready to splash in the puddles and Parker for the warmth.

And now it’s the Gold Nugget mandarin that’s got one little flower blooming all over again to go with its dozen or so fruit that set some time ago.

And there is a beautiful little boy with thick blond hair who turned two today (correction: yesterday. I’m late here.) Hayes’s daddy shared a picture of him with a big mischievous grin on his face.

And of another back when, remembering…

Took some friends some homegrown yellow cherry tomatoes after dinner, a pretty perfect little snack, and we all chatted for three hours.

Speaking of which.

The squirrels occasionally get past my attempts at barriers and raid those, sucking the juices and spitting out the rest because they don’t actually like tomatoes. There’s not been much loss because they don’t seem to go for seconds and the things were pretty small to begin with.

And plentiful. The Sungold is super-productive, so losing one or two of them a day isn’t a big deal. I also planted a big red type but as the Sungold branches spread out all around the other much slower plant, the one in the center grew a grand total of three fruits. Almost no blossoming.

But so I really want those three tomatoes once they’re ripe: all that water and anticipation for such a small payoff. They’d gone from green to greenish-white and clearly the red was coming soon and I was keeping a wary eye on the critters when I happened to mention this to my friend Robin at the beginning of the week. She told me to do something I’d never heard of before: take some white paper towels, soak them, and wrap one around each tomato. They will dry as white husks encasing and hiding them.

And they did! So far so good! (Do NOT peek during the daylight. They do watch and learn fast. But I’ve learned too.)

Paper towels. Wet white (no dyes seems a good idea) paper towels. I don’t know who thought of this, but clearly they were a (desperate) gardener. And a genius!

Batteries, sun-dried tomato sauce, shrimp, blueberries and raspberries. (Phew!)

Oh wait no that was mine.

He always did have a sense of humor.

And so. I was heading down the milk aisle when I did a double take and stopped to say hi. Totally out of context (and did he even know I was about as tall as him when we’re both standing?) he was lost for a split second (it’s been a year, but it’s been 25 years) and then he stopped, too. Richard was coming right up behind me just then after looking for something else, his wife was right behind him, and so we got to introduce each other all around.

But the funny part was right off the bat when he put on this fake-panic voice and exclaimed, “Don’t look in my cart!”

Laughing, I assured him I hadn’t, and actually the only thing I did see over his shoulder was baby spinach which reminded me we needed baby spinach so I sent Richard to get some after that little meet-up.

But as we got to the far end of the aisle with them out of sight going the opposite direction, Richard turned to me, not quite remembering, wondering, it having been twenty years since he’d seen the guy, “C’est qui?” (Who was that?)

“My cardiologist.”

Do they measure this stuff like fabric? Always a little extra in case the previous cut was done at a bad angle? Or is it prefab? Never bought it myself so I don’t know.

A cousin’s story.

Bob’s mom wanted to redo the wallpaper in this one room. She picked out a pattern, ordered, and when it came it was in two rolls.

Which, it turned out, didn’t actually match: one was printed larger than the other–somebody’d really goofed.

Well, huh. Well let’s see: you could use one as a border to the other here here and here like this and that would like nice but would there be enough for that?

(Oh, the roses one? I asked. No, that was in the kitchen, he answered. I don’t think I’ve been in that house in forty years but I remembered the roses–wallpaper was a novelty to me as a kid.)

My uncle, an engineer and a gifted mathematician, measured everything meticulously and went off in the other room to work out the dimensions of each space vs the wallpaper to find out, if you cut it with this part this way you could fit that that way but if you do that then this or maybe you could try this like this other. Etc.

Meantime, my aunt and Bob, her oldest son, decided between themselves, Oh what the heck, we were all ready anyway, let’s just do it.

They were just triumphantly applying the very last piece when his dad came back around the corner saying apologetically, I’m sorry, it just can’t be…(suddenly looking up in slow motion at the walls and their hands)… Done?

Every reunion needs a moment to tuck away for laughing over together at the next one.

We were not far from a ski resort. The cabin had a small square patio overlooking a noisy rocky creek below (I heard it. I heard it! It was loud, too!) and in our childhoods that patio was hemmed in by iron railings whose top rail bowed halfway down at the center as if it had been designed to scallop like that. Gram explained to us back in the day that that was from the weight of the snow.

Those railings are gone now and instead there was modular outdoor seating along the three outer sides. We filled it up. Another square of it was put at the fourth side closer to the cabin with a small round table top placed on top; throw in some folding chairs next to it and we were able to squeeze everybody who was there that night into the space for a barbecue. (More cousins arrived the next morning while some had to leave. Me, I went down the mountain for the night and back up the next day, that altitude was pretty high.)

Two of the men were sitting on that table top and then one got up to refill his dinner plate.

Which is how they found out it wasn’t nailed down: the instant see-saw flipped Grant and sent him flying across me, food airborne and fruit juice down my side. I, at the same time, for once in my life managed to gracefully move my own cup of juice out of his way in time so as not to nail him in kind. He is so not a klutz and I so much am and the role reversal was quite the show. He picked himself quickly off my lap while making sure I was okay.

We all guffawed (since it was clear nobody was hurt). Grant, between laughs, apologized for soaking me and I told him, In this air? I’ll be dry in five minutes.

I knew I should be taking pictures of the aspen and spruce towering around us, the majestic trees of the rocky mountains, so gorgeous, but I just couldn’t pull myself out of the moment to focus on a camera lens. I just wanted to breathe it into my bones, the love, the place, the memories, the new ones we were making, to bring it all home and always have it.

Saturday night there was another barbecue, this time at my niece’s with all her cousins’ generation invited who could come as well as her mom and me. Where I saw for the first time in my life monster Campfire marshmallows, big enough to make any kid happy for a long time. I told my skunk story. Eric asked me how I wanted mine cooked–and then went, Oh, of course: burnt!

Yes! I laughed.

And then dinner with my son, my sisters, and more of our kids at our parents’ for one last meal together Sunday night, celebrating a niece’s birthday before my flight.

Richard always gets to the airport a bit early to wait at park-and-call but this time he wasn’t there yet. I didn’t wait too long but I was a little surprised. One person who’d been on the plane walked past me, still dressed for a hundred plus degrees as she walked into the chilly Oakland breeze and I caught her eye and nodded, Back to the cold.

She laughed–and then stopped and asked if I needed a ride home. I thanked her but I was fine. She totally blew me away with her kindness–I was a long way out, not that she knew that. But she had decided on the spot that it wouldn’t matter if I were, she would do it. Wow.

Richard pulled up a few minutes later asking if I were up to driving. Sure!

Turns out he’d had to pull off the road to barf. RICHARD! Oh I’m SO sorry! I could have called Phyllis or someone and gotten a ride, you didn’t have to…!

It actually hadn’t occurred to him. He’d been so focused on doing right by me that he hadn’t been paying any attention to himself.

He’s a sweetheart and I got him home and put to bed quickly while I typed out that brief post to say I was back.

And that will be a story to tell the next time, too. He missed me. I missed him. And we took good care of each other.

A story told by my cousin Russ, one of the youngest grandchildren. It made me realize that I never, no matter the weather, saw our grandmother looking disheveled: she was always properly dressed and coiffed just so. Always ready to look the role of the Senator’s wife.

Russ was coming into town on business and had a reservation to rent a car, the cheapest economy size, of course, no need for more.

Only when he got there they were fresh out; would he mind being upgraded?

Gram was 95 or 96, and it was during her two years of widowhood after seventy-two of marriage.

Her usual routine had long been to be taken to have her hair done on Wednesdays and then to her favorite restaurant for lunch. I don’t know how many years she and Grampa had kept that routine, but my family and I once got to join them for lunch there ourselves. (Grampa, who wasn’t always entirely with it by then, ordered something unexpected and the waitress smiled behind his 95-year-old back: “I know what he really wants” and brought him his usual.)

The people hired to take care of Gram were happy to help her go off with Russ this week–assuming he was legit.

So here’s this handsome young man in a hot Mustang muscle car (I pictured it in red but I’m not sure he actually mentioned it) pulling up to the curb. The nurses asked her, making sure, Do you know who this man is?

“I don’t know,” said our formerly tall, now stooped and tiny Gram with a laugh, “but if he’s taking me to get my hair done he’s fine with me!”

The next-door neighbors had a good-sized garden for years and who knows who all else is planting what.

And not just the humans.

It’s become a game: once a week, when I water the plants, I look closely around the mango tree in particular to see what the squirrels have growing next to it this week and every Tuesday I find something new. I think it’s the proximity to the compost pile that I know is somewhere on the other side of the fence and am guessing that that’s where by the occasional–

–side conversation: What do you call those pictures of an atom where the electron goes zipping around the center (motioning like a toddler trying to wind a niddy noddy). I mean the path it takes.

You mean the orbit?

THAT’s the word!

And then he goes into a detailed description of what electrons really do, not what their mug shot looks like. Okay, thanks, got my word there.

So, anyway, that kind of motion of bugs as seen from my side of the fence orbiting around that one area. The squirrels take it from there and then dig over here.

First it was strawberries, or at least, those couldn’t be any plant but strawberries that I know of but I’ll know for sure when they flower. (Hoping.)

Then it was a fig tree.

Then a week later another fig tree, with neither of those existing the week before. Not even a day’s overlap. The first I dug out oh so carefully and potted and it has thrived; the second I just yanked out, stuck it in a pot and told it sink or swim. It sank down into the dirt, then just at the moment I thought it beyond hope it rallied and now the darn thing is coming along fine. Which means I have to water it because I can’t kill it after rescuing it. Anyone local want a random-seedling fig tree?

Today, a little farther from the mango than those two were and far enough that I don’t have to pot it up this time to keep the roots far enough away, the volunteer of the week was a tomato plant. It wasn’t one of my tomato plants and it was not there last Tuesday at all (I’ve gotten to where I really look now), but it’s grown fast despite not having been watered for a week. The fact that it’s at the end of where I mulched and in the direction the water flowed to surely helped.

There was also what appears to be a new lettuce plant over by the cherry tree. Not that I’d eat it to see.

Nature seems clearly determined to make a real gardener out of me whether I want to or not.

So I checked the weather there to see what to pack: summery, yes, but the cousins reunion is going to be way up in the mountains and it’s always cool up there. The cabin that our grandparents owned forever was to be sold when they passed away–and one of the grandkids bought it and kept it in the family and there you go.

A hundred and nineteen today?! That’s thirty-six hotter than here. Yow. Okay, so the rest of the week is only going to be 100. Yay for SPF 100, because that sun jacket layer just got a whole lot less appealing.

Airfare for a holiday week was as soaring as the temps so it’ll be just me going. It’ll be in the low 80s here, meantime, with AC should anyone faint in the sultry heat–I told my sweetie he would be the one in the resort vacation place. (And that I was very glad that this didn’t get scheduled on our anniversary, and thank you everybody for the kind words both on and off the blog re that milestone.)

Seventeen years ago all but one of the cousins made it to the last big reunion on what would have been our grandfather’s 100th birthday. So much has happened in that time. I can’t wait to start catching up.