We were standing around not quite eating yet, I was listening to other family members and I didn’t even see him take one. I had quartered a heaping large serving bowl’s worth of Baby Crawford peaches right before time to leave so they would be as perfect as possible.

It was the motion that caught my eye: his face did this sudden downward-nod of someone caught by surprise as a soft “Oh wowwww!” came out of his mouth. He had not been expecting that.

I had also brought a smaller bowl of green gauge plums and none of them knew what they were. The guy’s daughter biting into one of those had the same reaction as her dad had had.

Are these from your trees? –Where was this place??

I think we have some new Andy’s Orchard enthusiasts.

When it was time to go, between the eleven adults and the baby everybody wanted to see and the three year old being adorable, we found ourselves lingering alongside the staircase without quite reaching the door. The toddler was in her daddy’s arms at that point, and I softly sang to her, So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen good night!

She stared at me in delight and an expression her daddy explained for me: astonishment.

Because every single night at home at their own house across the country, they sing that song to her. While going up their staircase one step at a time. ‘The sun has gone to bed and so must I.’ And with that they put her to bed.

And here was her great aunt whom she has no previous memory of meeting before tonight having no idea of any of this singing it to her in front of her grandparents’ staircase at bedtime.

The phone rang.

Our nephew is in town visiting his in-laws, letting them play with the baby we haven’t met yet, and his parents flew in, too; would we like to join them all for dinner tomorrow?

(Is this a trick question. Some of my favorite people.)

What should we bring? I asked Richard to ask him.

Uh, uh, (I pictured him calling over to his mother-in-law and then wondering why he chose the words that popped out of his mouth next.) “Fine fruit.”

I guffawed when Richard conveyed that to me.

Andy Mariani considers his Baby Crawford his best peach and this year the crop was good. Two days after picking them up Friday will mean peak ripeness. Trying to remember, was it The French Laundry or Alice Water’s Chez Panisse that after a prix fixe dinner that would be for most of us a once-in-a-lifetime experience (I’ve never been to either so this is strictly hearsay) they’ve been known to serve, for the exclamation point of a dessert, a perfect August Andy Mariani peach.

Fine fruit? I think we can make that happen.

A comic strip, of all things, helped me learn something new about my late father-in-law.

I mentioned today’s The Buckets to Richard and the fact that the author chimed in that this is pretty much what had happened to his family member.

Richard remembered the days: Oh yeah, my dad used to grab his badge when scammers came to the door. They couldn’t get away fast enough.

Starting at the Eisenhower Administration, his dad was a lawyer in the Justice Department.

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?

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.

I goofed: last night I reminded Richard of my appointment today.

He reminded me that I had okayed his having been asked to meet up with someone today.

We only have the one car. He couldn’t miss his. I couldn’t miss mine, I mean, I could reschedule, but…!

And so it was that the woman who knew all of my cousins back in Boston, being a peach, drove me to the clinic. She offered to come again to take me home afterwards and I assured her I was fine with my knitting till he could come across town when he was done.

Which meant we had a little more time to get to know each other one on one on the way there and I had a rah rah go team go! cheering me on at the moment I most needed it. I felt much readier for this. She’s the best.

I told the doctor about my grandmother having had–they said it was ovarian cysts–and being treated with what was then the very latest thing: massive doses of x-rays.

Her jaw was hanging and her eyes went huge.

Which turned into a laugh when I added, And then she lived to be 96.

Well all right then but we don’t do radiation like that anymore!

Well no!

I didn’t realize till after I came out just how much I had talked myself into believing we would just continue doing what we’d been doing, ultrasounds, attempts at biopsies, keeping tabs on it.

Not so much.

Not that having a period every day till I’m the one who passes at 96 was so much the problem, it’s that it had been slowly steadily increasing. That’s not sustainable.

(I told Richard afterwards, I didn’t want our two granddaughters to think I was willing to risk major pain and surgery and possibly losing my hearing just to not have to bleed anymore when they’re going to start on all of that soon. I didn’t want them to think that that itself was the bad thing I wanted to get away from. He said, I would never have thought of that! and I said, Because you’re not a woman. I wouldn’t expect you to.)

So. The only way to get a firm diagnosis and to rule out cancer once and for all is a hysterectomy, and there was no point in leaving in the possibility of ovarian cancer–out they go, too.

She gave me two surgeons’ names, assured me they were both top-notch, and said the Da Vinci robot would do the actual surgery. It would be laparoscopic and minimally invasive and given the age and stage of those parts, it would be a lot less of a recovery than if I were younger.

Oh, said I brightly, so they can do it without needing painkillers?

She said decisively, Oh. you. will. need. painkillers.

With Tylenol being the only one that doesn’t deafen me?

And that is why “But I don’t want to!” kept ear worming in on my thoughts for the rest of the day. We have to do it. I don’t want to do it. She’s right. We have to do it.

—

Edited to add, I suddenly just remembered our friend Lance’s story long ago of being in the middle of doing surgery when the 7.1 Loma Prieta quake struck, with his unconscious patient suddenly projectile-missiling as he and the nurses grabbed him and held him and themselves to the table for dear life.

Tell you what. Let’s skip that part.

A potluck picnic in the park.

A family that had recently moved here from Boston.

I asked the wife if by chance she knew Grant…?

YES she knew Grant!!

He’s my cousin.

Then she asked me if I knew Tina?

Yes, she’s my cousin!

We bought her house!

And then, having moved here, they’d sold that house, with the closing being today in fact. I told her that Tina and her husband had moved to take care of her dad. He quietly passed away at home at 101 last year with family by his side.

Then she asked me if I knew Julie? She adored Julie, too, and Julie’s husband had gotten his PhD at Stanford, so maybe we’d met them?

Yes, she’s my *oldest cousin’s daughter!

No way!

(*My sister corrects me: Julie’s dad is the second oldest cousin, his big sister beat him to it.)

Richard’s Uncle Bill was laid to rest today at a good old age.

Many decades ago, he really wanted to be a pilot in the Navy but was told he was too tall.

Where there’s a will…

So he had a buddy sit on his shoulders all night long to compress his spine, went in in the morning, got measured at exactly the upper limit, and he was in.

There was a Carolyn Hax chat at the Post today, and I always know I can widen my perspective and come away a little better person for reading her peacemaking.

Or she’ll tell it to you straight when you need to hear it.

A woman wrote in, an avid gardener with pollenizers here, veggies there, an herb garden on the side. They’d bought the house three years ago. Her mother had found out she was terminally ill and so dug up her own sage and thyme bushes and gifted them to her daughter for her new house before she passed.

The writer’s father-in-law hated her yard and was not shy about saying so.

And so while the couple was away on vacation, he paid someone to come over to their house, rip out the front and side yards and replace them with what he thought it ought to look like. Why plant flowers when you can have neatly edged mulch?

She was furious and he was furious at her for not being grateful, after all, he’d spent a lot of money on this.

Carolyn was furious, too. She said taking the woman’s husband up on the offer to replant her things together as much as possible would be putting her marriage first and she said if she were going to offer any advice on this that’s what it would be, but no, she most certainly did not have to apologize to her FIL!

At the end of the chat she said her responses were being slow because she had never had so many people write in in response to a question before–all in defense of that poor gardener grieving her mother and those lost plants and connections.

Former copyeditor that I am, I noticed that pollenizer and pollinator were both used in their conversation.

I had to go check that out.

Pollinator is something that conveys pollen from flower to flower. Pollenizer is a plant that offers pollen, that feeds the bees and the hummingbirds. My Stella cherry is a pollenizer for itself but not for my tart English Morello. Got it.

I mentioned the letter to my husband. My easygoing, always-look-at-both-sides husband.

MOVE, he said with emotion, surprising me. There can be no communication with someone who willfully will not hear you like that.

Move to where he cannot easily reach you to trespass like that ever again?

YES.

That had been my first thought, too.

But then (in our case it was a bad boss, not a relative) 38 years ago, we did exactly that.

He didn’t recognize the song last night, but then, I’m not the voice on the radio singing it from way back when to give him context and I had no idea of the words beyond the chorus. It’s just one of those catchy little tunes that pops up in the brain every decade or two and wants to get you to dance.

So I went and looked it up.

The No No Song, by Ringo Starr. (Me: It IS? Ringo?!)

Pulling out the second stained glass puzzle tonight, I found myself softly singing today’s silly little ear worm.

He didn’t recognize that one, either. So, repeat pattern from *.

Back Off, Boogaloo. By–you guessed it. Ringo Starr.

Which one of his will my brain come up with tomorrow.

He wondered why Ringo was using that word and what it meant.

Okay, Merriam Webster says this, that it’s Latin-inspired 60’s music, Collins says it’s a fast dance of Afro-American origin, of couples not touching while they dance in quick jerky moves (that is definitely our generation!)  and neither one of them says a thing about the group banned by Facebook that Ringo had no way to know would steal and twist that word.

I bet they had no idea who it celebrated. The self-mockery!

But then bullies were meant to be laughed at.

The news from Texas has been heartrending. Historian Heather Cox Richardson says the National Weather Service did publish flash flood warnings, but the head of Kerr County said the warning systems that would have conveyed that locally were not in place because they had decided that cost too much.

Man.

My husband got his ham radio license after 24 hours of not being able to reach his aunt’s family very close to the epicenter of the big 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (they were okay but their house had stories to tell) and from there he did emergency communications volunteering with the city, the county, and the Red Cross.

I said in agony over the lost campers in Texas, Don’t they have reverse-911 there!

And then went, Wait. Do they?

Which got him reminiscing. He knew all the people who started that. It began with an idea: the city had topography maps and it had 24 fax machines. What if… So they kluged up a system where if there was a risk of flooding, the homes in the lowest elevations could get a warning phone call by having a switch that disconnected all incoming faxes, because that’s not the priority in an emergency, and took over the faxes’ phone lines to call out to those homes with a pre-recorded message.

Twenty-four numbers at a time. That’s all.

But then you have the computer call 24 more, and 24 more…

That concept got tested pretty quickly thereafter: we had our 100 year flood in 1998. There were kids boogie-boarding down our street. There was the friend who saw his koi from his back yard swim past his feet in the front yard to go live happily ever after in the Bay (good luck). The elementary school principal hauled a canoe out and got himself in the paper paddling across the playground just for fun but there really wasn’t much water there. Might have drowned a few gophers, though.

There was one notable fire department rescue operation where someone thought his big pickup could easily do that puddle and tried to drive through the steep railroad underpass. Oops.

So anyway. Instantly it became: how do we make it so we can reach everybody? In time? Can we do it all at once?

Well let’s see: the Feds had passed a law requiring the phone companies to provide the phone number to every address for 911 calls so that the first responders could know where to go no matter how much information the caller was able to give them. Early cell phones weren’t covered. The Feds made them cover them, too.

That database existed. How about if you invert it?

You could draw a circle on the map and say, everything in this boundary, or you could say everybody in the city.

And thus they created the reverse-911 system that lets you know there’s an emergency.

The surrounding cities thought this was great and copied us.

The county thought this was great and copied us.

And it took off from there.

I thought by now everybody had it. I cannot for the life of me imagine why on earth any municipality wouldn’t.

Everything about making your own chocolate is messy. Towards the end there he looked at the front of my shirt in some amazement.

That’s why I put on an old one, hon!

And it is so worth it.

It’s a good thing it makes so much: once you’ve stirred that thick liquid nonstop while holding the bowl for 15-30 minutes in cool water and then again in warm to lower and re-raise the temp to get the right crystalline structure to try to get that perfect shiny tempered snap while not letting any water touch the inside whatsoeverdon’tyoudare, then an hour-plus of cleaning up the equipment including spraying a connected pair of granite rollers with hot water while holding them above the sink for way too long… (But you only do that after you’ve paper toweled all the chocolate off that you possibly can for the sake of the plumbing.)

You love that you got it done. But you really don’t feel like starting the next batch that very day, even if the machine claims you can get right to making your husband’s preference of 80% dark to mine of ~76%.

She who does the math rules the superfine sugar box. More or less.

(Parchment paper under the molds. Always. To create samples not spills.)

Last year a drop of water got into the melanger while it was just getting going: I had done the usual step of first running the cacao nibs through the Cuisinart, not realizing that its lid wasn’t entirely dry from the dishwasher. It was the second batch of pure cacao crumbs that touched it.

The chocolate in the machine instantly seized into a hard rock and jammed the motor. I leaped to turn it off fast.

I gouged and scraped the stuff out of there and set it aside. I didn’t know if the machine was toast. I didn’t want to know. It’s an entry level machine for hobbyists that was actually originally for dry lentils, upgraded a bit when the manufacturer found out what it was being used for and trying to match that market–not a more seriously-priced and -engineered one. But at the time we found it, it was all there was out there that we knew of. Plus we could buy it on Amazon points.

After what Congress did to the American people and the rule of law yesterday, after Monday’s little surgery that was so much fun, on the Fourth of July with no fireworks because lives were lost when the vendor’s warehouse blew up this week… I needed to do something, anything, to give myself a break from moping.

I thought I would start in the morning. It was 2:00 when I finally turned on the oven. (No professional cacao bean roaster nor winnower here.) But I got it turned on.

Half a 5 lb bag of cacao nibs got baked and Cuisinarted. (A side note: raw cacao that some swear is a health food? It’s a source of salmonella poisoning. It is typically fermented on trays in the sun, wildlife can walk on it and poop on it, just don’t. Plus the heat greatly brings out the flavor anyway.)

Superfine sugar got calculated.

The melanger turned on. It turned on. It worked.

We added the crumbled nibs slowly, slowly, slowly, taking turns, making sure not to overtax the thing with too many big particles at once. Let it work its way up.

It worked.

It’s working. It’s working! And noisy and there’s a fine spray of crumbs across the counter that no water is going near till this batch is done and poured and safe and man, it smells so good.

Tomorrow we pour it into the molds. The tempering will likely be half- (insert pejorative of your choice here.)

I had been waiting so long to find out that we could still do this, knowing how good all this could be again. And we can.

Congratulations, one person told us back then, You picked the hottest day on record in Washington, DC.

Which was topped thirty years later at 99 to our 98. It took that long. But at the time, we were like, Oh. It’s hot? I mean, yeah, I guess it is but, um, we kind of hadn’t really noticed.

Jokes about how maybe I should stand on the low stone wall along the garden pathway near the temple’s doors so that I could get up into the same picture as him and his family.

The skunk raiding the marshmallow off his campfire stick right over the fire on our honeymoon in the Shenandoahs with its tail brushing his arm as it sat back and savored the thing–with his face pleading, Just don’t laugh. PLEASE don’t laugh.

His consolation prize being that the skunk sided with him over me: a long slow roast over my burn it fast and crunchy and blackened and then reach for more while he’s still working on three marshmallows ago.

The hair stylist in Indiana who couldn’t cut my hair because she was husking.

What the heck is husking?

How do you not know what husking is?! She’s helping bring the corn harvest in.

Oh.

George Winston’s December album playing softly while we turned off the lights and with our babies in our laps, watched the snow fall (and fall and fall) in New Hampshire to the music as each perfect silvery flake danced and sparkled in the moonlight.

Our oldest remembered, and took that album off to college.

The monochromatic boredom of white snow, grayed parking lot snow, more snow. And how pretty and quiet and peaceful it was. Along with the how do you shovel snow so you can pick up your husband from work and leave your kids alone inside but how do you shovel snow with them outside in weather that cold? You can’t take a baby out in zeroF for an hour+ while trying to watch the toddler while trying to get this done.

Somehow I got it done, or enough, anyway. I don’t remember how. Naptime? I just remember I had to, so I did.

The househunting trip in Spring in California, going straight from 72″ in 17 days to green, glorious green and flowers everywhere.

The kid who left me speechless by saying, Mom, I don’t think I could ever call anything on the East Coast a forest.

Say what now?? Why??

Because no redwoods.

We have got to get these kids an education… We flew us all home and played tourist in DC.

Taking my sister’s boys to where the sun sets as the ocean waves goodbye, laughing that yes that feels like you put your dawn on backwards in the morning.

The day we drove past the high school, knowing there would never be another Back To School night for us.

The knit night at Purlescence where I took my cell phone out of the shop for a minute, needing it to be on speaker and wanting to hear my son and where he could have a little more privacy. Then walking back in the shop, holding my phone out to my friends, and saying, This is my son. He’s calling to say he’s engaged!

The whole shop burst into applause and cheers. As well they should. Such a profound gift to our family Kim has been.

The arrival of grandkids.

The feeling, within five minutes of meeting my daughter’s boyfriend, of, I don’t know who you are. But I HOPE you marry my daughter.

He did.

The arrival of their two.

The missing them. The treasuring every moment with them when we are there with them. So much love.

Our younger two, hoping for those blessings too but entirely blessings themselves as they are. So proud of them. All of them.

The gratitude beyond words at this dear, dear man in my life who made all of this come to be with me and that he gets to still be with me and I still get to be with him, well beyond the time we once thought I might have left.

I got up this morning, picked English Morello sour cherries from the tree that he’d driven me over the mountains to Santa Cruz for and had helped me pick out in happy anticipation of moments to come just like these, let them soak in their sugary filling mixture for awhile and then put the pie in the oven to bake while I headed to Andy’s Orchard. Richard got off work, checked the pie, and had it cooling and waiting when I got home with the first peaches of the season and the newest Candycot apricot developed by the guy who gave the world the Anya: the Yelena.

Just an ordinary day. But one that gives a meaning I love to the new-to-us number of 45.

We’ve been doing a random assortment of wooden puzzles of fewer than 100 pieces after dinner of late (with thanks to Holly for introducing us to Nautilus.)

Somehow after a lifetime of not doing puzzles he’s got me hooked on those little ones with him. If he weren’t there I would never bother but 75 pieces away from a picture of a coral reef together? When it’s so gratifying to see him having such a good time? Sure.

We’ve done those five or six little ones enough times now that we did three tonight zip zip zip. He admitted to boredom.

I called his bluff and pulled out a 500 piecer of shore and ocean. That one last edge piece is still defying us somewhere but the center has a bit of progress showing. My resistance to the idea of having to wait for the entire finished edge before filling in the center might actually be rubbing off on him.

I just finally got up and looked and exclaimed, 10:32?!

Maybe I’ll order a new little one after all.