Do you remember how, at the very end of high school, everybody felt so close to each other because we saw now how much even our more casual friendships meant to us and knew that we would never see some of those friends again, maybe even the closer ones, we just couldn’t yet know who those would turn out to be across the future?

Like that.

Post-Christmas gifting I looked at my boxes of apricot slabs, did the math on how fast I go through those, and knew they wouldn’t hold me till Andy’s Orchard opens again in May. And nobody sells apricots like his dried-while-dead-ripe slabs. Plus I wanted to pick up something someone else wanted who was going to have a hard time getting there.

Three years ago there was a cherry orchard next to Andy’s. The new houses are big. They kept the name of that farmer on the development but I don’t think they left a single fruit tree in place.

On the other side of his farm, driving down that newly widened and piped road, the open field to the right was rapidly turning into apartment buildings and closely spaced houses. So much change in a month. I turned the corner to the left around the end of Andy’s towards his store and thought, That cannot be good. That’s too many gone.

Stumps…

As I filled up my basket, the guy on duty laughed when I said, These are for my cousin-in-law’s mother-in-law… I laughed too and said, But she’s a really nice person, I love her! She’s flying today from Germany to her son’s house an hour away and is hoping to be able to get here before you close next week. I’m not sure she’ll make it in time, so I’m making sure she’ll be able to get what she wants.

One of I believe Andy’s crew had come into the little store in the middle of the conversation; the two men clearly meant the world to each other, and in those moments they included me in that palpable love, too.

Together they told me.

The closing isn’t just next week.

Andy will do one more season.

And then that’s it. The land is in the process of being sold. The neighbors who complained about being next to a farm, well…

But they bought houses next to a farm! I exclaimed.

They appreciated that I appreciated the absurdity of that. I mean, fruit trees! How intrusive is that!

I had had a feeling this entire year that this was coming, and soon.

I just didn’t want it to be ‘soon’ as in ‘it’s actually happening now’.

I’m just grateful we get to have one last year.

Celebrating at Dandelion Chocolate this morning.

A day well spent.

Nighttime San Francisco Airport is always gloriously colorful this time of year as you drive in, from the towering trees to the rendition of the Golden Gate Bridge in holiday LEDs.

A quick hug, a rollaboard being pulled towards the brightly lit waiting doors, and we came home under the orange supermoon to a suddenly quiet house with happily planned leftover pastries for the morning to console ourselves by.

She’d made sure her vegan chocolate carrot cake in its pretty little box was at the top of her backpack. Right there under the zipper. With a grin.

I’ve seen a few small feijoa trees growing around here but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the fruit for sale in the chain grocery stores; they have a short shelf life.

Andy Mariani grows them. I don’t go to his farm but once or twice in the late fall to pick up some slab apricots and, during the holidays, stuffed figs, so I guess I’ve always missed the season. But today I did and there they were and I was curious and brought a box home.

I cut one of the green eggs in half. I gave us each a spoon to scoop it out, as one does.

Dang.

Instant memories: the lavender-infused angel food birthday cake at a nice restaurant that smelled wonderful but I’m sorry, it could only taste like the round decorative balls of impossibly slippery soap at my grandmother’s that made it so her nose could tell from a hundred feet if you’d washed your hands for dinner like she’d told you to do. And how the whole dinner tasted like your hands.

My experimenting with a dessert using a new extract and an exceedingly polite friend (hi, Kelly!) telling me apologetically that she and rosewater just had not made friends yet.

Not that I could place which brand in the distant past it was, but this I can tell you: that fragrant, ripe feijoa had a flavor that could go straight to your head.

Now what do I do with the rest of this crunchy shampoo?

A pie potluck, 4-5 pm, dinner was not being served, just pie. Anyone who wanted to could grab the mic and say something they were grateful for.

Which is how one woman who’d invited her friend found out that her friend was my neighbor across the street. We all had a great time catching each other up.

I wonder how many others walked in the door at home afterwards and said, Do you still want dinner?

Not really, I’m good. You?

Nah. It was all I needed.

I knew they wouldn’t be anything near Andy’s but they were pretty and I was missing fresh peaches. What I’d forgotten, though, was the likelihood that Costco late-season US-grown ones would be clingstone. And clingstones that had never been allowed to ripen.

After several days, they were beginning to soften up but the nose knew. Oh well, that had been a given all along.

They held onto those pits like a toddler guards its favorite toy, and when I finally managed to work them loose, my peach halves lost a chunk of their innards.

I scraped the mashed-up bits off as best I could and put them back in the centers.

Hey. I filled the centers with raspberries. Melted a quarter cup butter with maybe a bit more than that of brown sugar and some cinnamon (lemon would have been good, too–next time) and spooned that over the raspberries and took their pretty picture and then baked them for about an hour.

Stuffed peaches, there you go. Is that a thing? It is now.

He needed seconds to use up his ice cream. As one does.

Today was the last test result, the last appointment on the whole endometrial thing.

But first the oncology surgeon had to tell me that he’d taken that Kit Donnell peach home and shared it with his wife: he told me emphatically, That was the best! peach I have eaten. In. My. Life! He wanted to make sure he remembered the name of the variety right. He thanked me several times for telling him about Andy’s Orchard.  I looked it up, he told me: August.

He was clearly very much looking forward to next August’s crop.

The nurse had the biggest smile on her face.

Baby Crawford is the other really good one, I told him.

Oh! He was instantly on it, getting this down. He was not going to miss that either! Baby? Crawford.

I turned to her and apologized that I hadn’t brought two peaches last time, and she laughed hard and I thought, You were thinking the same thing. I should have. But I didn’t know you were going to be there. And I didn’t have enough left to bring a bunch.

So, on to business. No cancer. No virus that might someday cause cancer. No surgery. Fill this prescription to help with the atrophal shedding.

I told him, Plot twist: after two and a half years of bleeding, it is somehow almost almost gone. (How to tell G_d a joke: tell Him, You weren’t going to let up on that symptom till that man and his wife and maybe that nurse discovered that farm and that fruit, were you? Because those peaches are divine.)

At the last he said, with the very warmest of smiles, And then I never want to see you again. For your sake.

A pre-fab Diamond brand vegan pie crust made of ground pecans and oat flour: I was intrigued when she showed it to me. Sure, I’ll try it out.

I’m sorry we did not get to it before John left, but we looked at each other tonight and knew we could not let the last of the Andy’s peaches age out of their supreme goodness, and peaches and pecans, well, the state of Georgia can tell you those two were meant to be together.

Notes to my future self: my 1952 Betty Crocker said to bake an 8″ peach pie with 3 1/3 tbl flour and 2/3 cup sugar. Also a tbl of butter, but not for the allergic and I forgot to add her Miyoko version in. It’s fine. I added a tsp cinnamon and let the peach slices sit soaking in the mixture for a few minutes.

But that 425F for 40 minutes for 8″ (measured across the top of the interior of the pan) was a bit much for it. I would decrease temp or time next time.

But there should most definitely be a next time and it will most definitely do.

Here, taste the tip of a spoon here, see what you think of it so far.

They approved.

Then the kids drove to San Francisco to Dandelion Chocolate for some sibling time and brought home a splurge of bakery goodies and hot chocolate. Not your standard lunch. That orange sanguine entremet–wow!

As my dad loved to say, How many meals do you eat in your life? Now: how many do you remember?

Then John drove me to Kings Mountain Art Fair, with the ocean to one side on that twisty road and Silicon Valley laid out below on the other and the Fair on the spine of the ridge, where we got to see Mel and Kris. Mel knew exactly what I wanted when I broke my favorite tall mug and held the new one up in happy anticipation of my delight. Which he got. I liked it even better than the old one. Kris was there for the first time in several years, her chemo long over and looking great. I picked up one of the smaller mugs–and it had a sheep on it! (With apologies to them that my photo washes the colors out a bit.)

I knew she played with adding hummingbirds and dragonflies and honeybees…

She was delighted that I was the one who bought her first sheep.

Not long after we walked back in the door, Michelle and I ran an errand exploring a store that sold favorite pantry items she hadn’t been able to find in Boston. And because she liked going there; it was part of being home.

John cooked dinner.

We all got to FaceTime with Lillian, who wanted to show her grampa the wart on her foot in solidarity. She wanted to see his foot, too. He gently told her she wouldn’t want to.

And then at long last we turned off that goshawfulloudnoise that had been going in the kitchen for 26 hours at that point (24 is about optimal on the conching) and John and his dad worked for a couple hours more at cooling and re-warming and thus (hopefully) tempering our new batch of homemade chocolate correctly while getting some one-on-one time of their own.

I got to do the honors of pouring it out and did as messy a job as I ever do and we managed not to devour it before it had even set, probably because, really? We had a lot of cleanup to do. And we’d had a lot of chocolate today already.

And all of it was very very good.

I like days like this!

You’re going to like this part.

His kidney stone moved to where it somehow doesn’t hurt, and the clinic’s urologist saw him and is keeping tabs on him. Cardiology set him up on a heart monitor for two weeks to get a more complete diagnosis.

And while that was getting started, I was in the next town over seeing my surgeon #2.

Who told me that surgeon #1 had called him and warned him she was sending a doozy of a case over. I got a bit of, Oh, *you’re* the one!

She had told me of potential nerve damage.

He told me it was way more than that. With no colon nor rectum in there holding things in place, things just slosh around, and–he was pleased that I knew what adhesions were–that ovary they couldn’t find on the ultrasound: it could be fused with my tailbone. Anything could be anywhere.

Finding it all and fishing it out and freeing it amongst all the adhesions risked my small intestine.

I was stunned. I’d had no idea.

I asked him how many hysterectomies he’d done on patients with colorectomies.

It was rare. He’s been practicing a long time. He held up five fingers and said–But they all had cancer. There’s a risk/life balance decision that has to be made. He went through all the testing I’d been through, and he too had tested, giving me a pap smear just to make sure and do due diligence.

And my reaction to that smear was to start bleeding on the spot, and it’s still noticeably going. But that’s not necessarily cancer.

A side note here: his nurse had come in first and while she asked questions, I said that the bleeding had started small and gradually crescendoed over the two years till it was (this much). I wrote about it while waiting for this appointment, I told her, and was quite surprised that the next day it was far less.

And then friends told me they’d put me on their prayer lists. I didn’t know–and it changed, and make of that what you will, I told her. (A thank you to all you who prayed or Thought Good Thoughts my way, which to the loving G_d I believe in fully counts. Love, as they say, is love.)

Come back in three weeks, the surgeon said, and we’ll have the results of that pap smear.

But as he said it, we both were sure we knew what it would say and what we would say and that it would wrap it all up nicely. He didn’t quite say, And tell your friends to pray again, y’know, just to make it a little easier on you.

Having told him about my husband’s hospitalization, I told him of the ones who had asked what they could do to help. And then they’d joyfully made a day trip out of it with their teenagers to make sure I didn’t miss out on my favorite peaches.

And with that I left him with the most perfect single Kit Donnell ever, with the divine scent of tree-ripened perfection. He was blown away by just the smell and sight of it and the kindness of people he didn’t even know and he wanted to know where this had come from so he could find more for his own family.

Such a good man. His patients are lucky to have him. And lucky, in my case, soon not to have to!

Ceramic makes pie crusts crisp in a way no other material does.

A few years back, I asked my friends Mel and Kris if they ever made pie pans. They said no, but then decided to go play with the idea. I happily got two of the results.

They are big, meant for baking for a crowd, not like my store-bought one.

Today Richard came home from his sixth day of treatment and fifth day in the hospital. There was one last slice of grape pie in the smaller pan from last week and, after having saved it for the breakfast he didn’t ever get to have, he finally got to taste it.

He settled into his chair in the kitchen with no desire to spend any more time on any bed during daytime, and I got to work on those peaches. I at last felt like I could. Like I could breathe again.

Boiling water, peaches in the mesh strainer, count to five, out, peel, slice, work a little orange juice through, freeze a pie’s worth. A big pie’s worth!

Four, so far. Tomorrow I’ll tackle the next box. The neighbors to either side got peaches. Proud parents sent us a photo of their toddler’s absolutely gleeful face after biting into one.

I know a family with teenagers who are going to need a surprise pie in the coming darker colder months. A big pie. To let some of their peach gallivanting to rescue a couple in pain come back to them again in thanks.

One friend asked a few days ago what she could do to help and I somehow let myself say out loud in spite of myself that it was the week the Kit Donnell peaches at Andy’s were ripe, that I consider them his best, that I wait all year for them and I was just going to have to miss them this year. Otherwise I’d be buying a bunch and freezing them.

We can do that!

What?! He’s in Morgan Hill, it’s a 45 minute drive each way when the traffic is good, I can’t ask you to do that!

She and her family decided to make a day trip to Santa Cruz, let the kids have fun at the beach before they all finish growing up and going away, stop at Andy’s on the way and get some of those fabulous peaches for themselves, too and learn about what he had to offer. So much of California was still new to them. Exploring is fun!

The whole thing turned into so much joy. They were absolutely jubilant at the day, the trip, the getting to do something that they knew meant so much to me and we had a good hug this morning.

Her daughter helped me load my boxes into my car after the main meeting at church, I got them home and then made a beeline for the hospital.

Where I surprised Richard with a new Nautilus puzzle that I had ordered Tuesday, right before all this hit. A clown fish.

Having no idea that the most pieces in the smallest size would be the best for doing on a bedside hospital tray.

Two of the friends who stopped by to visit him couldn’t help but match up a couple of pieces themselves, to our great delight.

When I was growing up my mom baked a lot of pies, and one of my favorites was one that it surprised me that none of my friends had ever had.

They thought the very idea was weird.

But then, my folks took us to pick-your-own farms and the grapes that went into those pies were not your bland Thompson seedless: they were meant to have flavor.

They were surely geared towards the DIY winemaker types but we were Mormons so we made juice and we got pie.

All of which came back to me when my friend Catherine, delighted at my delivering some peaches, gifted me with some grapes from her garden. Then when she saw my reaction she put more in the bag. Then more. After all, I’d done that drive so she didn’t have to. (We have a standing arrangement that if they’ll let me buy that many, I’ll pick up a lug for her, too.)

Hers were about the size of cranberries. I ran a handful at a time in my palm, searching for stems and hoping I got them all. It reminded me of processing sour cherries–a bit of work but so worth the effort.

The pie is in the oven and I put too many in and the top fell apart because I rolled it too thin and it is overflowing a little and the only recipe I found was for seeded Concord grapes from my 1952 Betty Crocker so it’s all guesswork. But since my mom used that cookbook I figured it was the one to start with. Their 1 1/3 c sugar became 1 1/4 because I know their editors went heavy on the stuff in everything but I didn’t dare mess with it too much on the first try.

It wasn’t done as I was typing this but pulling it out of the oven to see if it was, I dipped a spoon at the edge to see what I was getting.

Wow that was good.

Even better, now that it’s out.

I know who needs to try some of this. Hey Catherine!

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.

I was unloading the car from Andy’s Orchard as the mail truck pulled up nearby.

After weeks in the 70s, 88F was hot, with a slight fire shadow to the air even though we’re hours away from the worst of those.

Going and putting down the heavy lug of peaches and wrestling the top open was not something I could do quickly enough as he was passing by and those could use a day to reach perfection anyway so I offered him a Green Gage. It had rolled out of the bag onto the seat of the car and had gone from there to my pocket. Easy to get to.

He held the little yellow/green two-bite snack in his hands wondering out loud, What is it?

It’s a plum. I just got back from the farmer’s in Morgan Hill.

Did you pick it?

No, I bought it, but it was picked today or yesterday.

Sounded good to him!

Just then my next-door neighbor came running up holding out a bottle of cold water. She had seen him walking past with his shirt unbuttoned in the heat, which I’ve never seen him do in all the years he’s been on this route, and she had to make sure he was okay.

So he got something to wash his miniature plum down with and if he threw the seed in my front yard I say good for him. Maybe it’ll sprout. Green Gage plums are rarely grown on a commercial scale because the trees are difficult and production is iffy–but when they do, they are so good.

But what was really really good was seeing my neighbor seeing that need (I was sorry I had not) and immediately doing something about it. She’s a peach.