Sometimes you just need to change the focus, so I drove to Andy’s today, bought two big lugs of peaches, got home, and texted a friend with whom I had a multi-year agreement but hadn’t done anything this summer because the peach supply per customer had been limited. Till this week.

Did she want a half lug of each of the two types I’d bought or should I freeze half my haul? The great Loring of my youth and Silver Logan. I was fine either way.

YES she wanted peaches from Andy’s!

(I threw in some of his early-variety Gage plums just because I could.)

Her husband is a beekeeper, and she sent me home with not one not two but three jars of his honey from different hives. Some friends you can never get ahead of, you know?

And then I had put it off long enough. I tried to look up how to contact the new surgeon online, but you can’t–you have to call (just like I’d been warned by the other surgeon.)

They had been expecting me.

Summer vacation time means it’ll be three weeks. About four miles away. There was one earlier slot: first thing in the morning four cities away where rush hour traffic would add a minimum extra 90 minutes, two hours to be sure. Honey, I don’t even get up for cheap flights that early.

So. Let’s see how much knitting I can get done before I get sliced and diced.

I got the nicest thank you note yesterday from a waitress.

While we were traveling, we invited some relatives out to dinner, and after asking them where they’d like to go since they knew the area and we didn’t, they said, Well, are we talking Olive Garden or–?

The –? won out. We hadn’t seen his sister in awhile and as my father used to say, How many meals do you eat in your life? Now, how many do you remember?

The meal itself was very good, the waitress, perfect.

It wasn’t till after we flew home and I was working on the bills that something seemed off. Found the receipt.

The math didn’t math at all. The intention had been good but someone had been a little too tired to think straight.

We had to make it right.

At least I had her first name on that receipt, and so I sent a check to, simply, FirstName, c/o that restaurant, asking them to please give her the tip amount she should have gotten and apologizing profusely to her.

A side note here: it helped greatly in those first moments that Richard had entered the restaurant’s name and address into his Waze app to help us find the place after his sister had named it, even though she knew perfectly well how to get there–there it was in his phone’s memory. Oh wait, it was on the bill, too. Of course.

There was a card in the mail from a name I didn’t recognize and as I opened it up and read that sweet note I almost cried. What a lovely, lovely young woman. I wish her all the best in all that life brings her from here on out.

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.

Yesterday I bought some mangoes at an Indian grocer because I knew that even if I didn’t find Alphonsos, that’s a place where they’d be likely to have good ones because they would definitely know what one should be. Which they did, although from Mexico and very fibrous. But the flavor made it worth the trip.

I felt conspicuously white and clueless looking curiously at a few labels of things that I had no idea what they were, but a little exploration is good for everyone. Foreign travel without the airfare, and you can always ask questions. Banana flowers? Think the size of a large butternut squash in the shape of a giant half-opened banana with peel pieces attached, all in a purplish brown. What on earth would you do with it? I only saw the one, so I left it so it could be appreciated by someone who wanted it.

Thinking of the waitress who once quickly slapped a banana leaf-wrapped sandwich-type entree out of my hand, exclaiming, No eat!

Oh. The leaf?

Yes! No eat!

I was glad she let me know!

No nonfat milk there.

So today, a quick trip to Trader Joe’s so we could have our hot cocoa in the morning.

An Asian woman who looked vaguely familiar, and apparently I did to her (quick, which parent from Back to School Nights twenty years ago was she? No idea) decided I was a friendly face and asked me a question.

Between her accent, my deafness, and the complete unexpectedness of it it took her three tries before I got that what she was asking was, “What is a good wine and do they have it here? Where would I find it?”

“I don’t drink,” I half-apologized to her. “I have no idea.”

She laughed (and then I did, too): “I don’t either!”

And with that, whoever she was, we smiled and went our ways, having each found someone a little bit more like ourselves than we knew.

Our friend Dani stopped by two days ago with some Alphonso mangoes–a real sacrifice on his part. One whiff and a long exhale and the thought, Now THAT is what a mango is supposed to be. Thank you, Dani!

Then I took the sad little wannabes from Costco that had been picked too early, chopped them up with a bunch of green onions and threw them in with some peanut satay sauce: playing vegetables was the best they could attain to.

Dani’s were the real thing. Peeled and devoured.

So my thought was I’d sprout the seeds from his. I know he doesn’t have space nor sun but maybe he’d love gifting a baby tree to someone who does. And maybe I just want to see what they do.

Mangoes come mono- or polyembryonic. You want the multiple embryos if you want one just like the parent whose fruit you ate, while monoembryonic is a genetic potluck–so of course the Alphonso is a mono type.

Googling ensued. Videos were watched. One person said let the pit dry for two days and then cut the seed covering here with scissors and pull the seed out.

I tried that. It was every internet hahahaaayouactuallybelievedthat?!! result.

The next video, the guy got a gouge going in that woody thing and then took needlenose pliers to try to slowly, forcefully, hopefully, with great effort, manhandle that thing open and off.

The camera cut away and they did not show you all of what he had to go through, but there it was. Voila. Seed.

My scissors had gone, What are you trying to DO to me! Back into the kitchen gadgets drawer.

My pruning shears went, I’m not going to try it, you try it! Okay, you tried it. I won’t do it. So there.

Huh. Well I do have those long-handle tree pruners where you pull down the string that pulls on the lever that moves the blade that cuts the limb a dozen feet over your head and hope you have a good helmet on; maybe I could manipulate that blade up close while pulling on the string way over thataway out of reach without, y’know, cutting my finger off or my skirt in half in the process. Dunno how well that would work for a precision cut on such a small piece. Where is that thing, anyway?

Remember the old Life cereal commercial, Let’s get Mikey to try it! He hates everything!

Yeah, well. Around here, Mikey seems to have gone into hiding. And that’s probably a good thing.

The New York Times ice cream recipe called for six egg yolks. Thus a pound of strawberries met its fate along with a pint of cream.They call for either a half tsp of lemon juice or a half tsp of balsamic, and who squeezes a whole lemon for a half a teaspoon? I had some Bistro Blend raspberry balsamic from the guy who used to sell that top-notch brand at Stitches West. Unfortunately, the pandemic eventually did the company in–but if you can find anything like it it went really really well in there.

But the leftover egg whites.

I went looking for this almond meringue recipe but then didn’t really want to double it. So before I forget what I did since I was totally winging it:

3 c almond flour

2 3/4 c powdered sugar

1/2 c melted dark chocolate, random bits added till the semi-liquid got up to there

1/2 c melted butter

1/8 tsp salt

I started by whipping those 6 egg whites with a tablespoon of sugar to the hold-a-peak stage. Then I mixed the butter and chocolate into the almond flour/powdered sugar bowl and folded the egg whites in.

I ended up laying it out in a large flat rectangle on top of parchment paper on a cookie sheet. 350F, 25 minutes.

It was very good. It would make great cookies, too. I didn’t realize till afterwards that I was riffing on my chocolate hazelnut torte (and it was a lot simpler to do.)

Then the timer hit 4 hours on the cooling strawberry ice cream mixture and into the machine it went. Because we needed a second big dessert on the same day, right?

Actually, third. The NYT says to strain the cream mixture, and what that left us with was essentially candied scrambled eggs. Which was as weird as it sounds. (Where’s a little kid jumping up and down to take it off your hands when you need one.)

The ice cream? Definitely esteemed-guest-worthy, too.

It’s that time of year again: wake up, pick enough cherries for a pie, pit them, strain the juices back to the fruit, freeze in happy anticipation of good times to come, then go take a shower so you won’t walk around an impromptu redhead. The tart cherries ripen at the rate of about one pie per day.

And on a side note. I am quite sure the photographer did not notice, not when she took the picture and not when she posted the picture on the real estate listing. This is outside that house’s kitchen door.

Picture #30.  Look at how nice and cozy that thing is in its corner, waiting for lunch.

We went to a potluck tonight and time and food with friends was a welcome respite from the worst of the news of the day.

To dear friends of ours in Minnesota: we are so sorry.

I debated to the very end throwing responsible disease management to the wind and joining the local No Kings protest. I badly wanted to be able to tell my grandkids I had, to set an example of standing up for democracy, of the right to peaceably assemble to petition one’s government.

But once again in the end, having done blindness, kidney failure, and cerebral vasculitis in autoimmune reactions to summer suns, I just couldn’t make my husband worry like that. And I wanted to see those grandkids grow up.

But color-wise I was dressed the part because that at least I could do.

Someone else there had on white stripes against red, her pants blue, and I knew without asking. The refugees in that family were only two generations ago.

We caught each other’s eye but didn’t say anything: not in someone else’s home while two older people were there who already know where we stand and who break our hearts.

The kicker being that one of them emigrated here, many years ago, after falling in love with an American.

My friend Anne told me her story this evening and I asked if I could share it.

She and her husband had gone out for ice cream.

In her words, after asking me to pray for the elderly gentleman:

“We were waiting for someone to take our orders, and he gave up and walked out just as someone showed up. I went and got him, and paid for his milkshake. As we were leaving, and he was heading to his car, I told him to have a nice day.

That’s when he said his wife died yesterday. To say I was gutted is an understatement. I parked, got out of the car, gave him a hug and prayed for comfort and that good memories would counteract the grief he feels.”

To which I expressed that the fact that the employee had been out of sight to the point that he had given up while they happened to be right there feels to me like the choreography of G_d: had he been immediately taken care of, there would have been no conversation, no meeting of hearts, no sharing of pain nor offering of compassion nor even the simple gift of a milkshake on a day when he so needed to feel human connection. Enough to get him out the door to go buy, what? Ice cream? I can imagine him thinking, Why? What does that matter now?

But there was. It happened. There was.

She and her husband were part of the answer to the very prayer she’d sent up on the man’s behalf.

We have some Cherry Garcia in the freezer, he said. We need some.

Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s said in protest at a Congressional hearing yesterday, Congress kills poor children in Gaza and pays for the bombs by kicking poor children in America off MedicAid.

This good Jewish man stood up and said Congress needed to let food into Gaza for starving children. The cameras were rolling. He spoke again and again on behalf of the little ones as they zip-tied his arms behind his back, giving voice at long last to his anguish and to that of so many millions of other people, knowing that a famous rich white man and a political donor at that, they might at least pay some attention to.

He was frog marched out of there during his arrest.

Here at home: some for him, some for me. Cherry Garcia was always his favorite and definitely not mine, but in that moment it seemed like the best ice cream there ever was and I knew I wanted to never turn it down again.

“In solidarity,” Richard pronounced, raising his bowl to me and to Ben out there somewhere in thanks.

The green baby alpaca is here! No extra costs that I was told about.

Meantime, I…I… I’m torn somewhere between I have no words and I have lots of words but wow, if you ever wanted to find a fellow knitter in the wild and the KNITTER plates are already taken this is definitely the way to do it: this pattern on Etsy.

I’d just be afraid someone would rear-end me while staring at it. Don’t count the stitches, don’t count the! *Crunch*

Also: I skipped out on the whole Knitted Support Chicken fad but a pelican with fish in its beak? That pattern, I bought. My grandmother at 96 had a large glass candy bowl out next to her for my young kids when we visited; I can just see me in my easy chair at that great old age, pelican by my side offering finger puppets to one and all.

Although one could also put wrapped candies in there for the future great-grands, most definitely.

That’s what Gram did. There were several pounds’ worth in there. While my mom and I were trying to discretely nudge the kids to just take one (they were 5, 7, 9, and 11), Gram got a twinkle in her eye: she ignored us, looked straight at the kids, and said, Have some more!

They each picked and unwrapped and ate a second piece.

Have some more!

(Glances our way from the older two, like, uh, are we allowed?)

Have some more!

There was no hurry, they were being on their best behavior, they took turns.

Have some more!

She got them going to where they ran out of pocket space and were stuffing them, in one case, down his socks, desperately hoping Mom and Grammy (us two generations in between) were somehow, uh, not noticing, while Gram was managing not to laugh. She got all the way to her last, Have some more! when finally there were no more left to have. And she was quite fine with that.

We were walking to the car afterwards when the seven year old burst into tears.

What’s wrong!? Didn’t you have fun?

I DID! But I feel like I’m never going to see her again!

I gave her the biggest hug, suddenly wanting to burst into unexpected tears myself.

It was true. Gram quietly slipped away a few months later, a flight away from us. I figured out that what she had been doing, having lost her own mother as a young child, was making it so that her great grandchildren would remember her and how she had been on their side.

And they do.

Last night:

And so the Grinches puzzled and puzzled till their puzzler grew sore.

Maybe tomorrow, she said, I don’t want to do any more!

So they set it up on the spiral, (it’ll never go viral) with a few pieces missing. With the sections not connected, the thing’s kind of listing. A history of Earth, trilobites to elephant girth, under the same blue sky but what changes by and by!

Today:

Y’know, I told him, every time I walk past that darn thing out of the corner of my eye some part of my brain registers layered chocolate cake.

Him: Me, too! in surprise that he wasn’t the only one.

Looks like there will be a lot of sweet cherries this year. So many flowers!

Last year with all the rain was the first time it produced more than the critters could raid. I had never had any reach overripeness before–it was instructional. Once those Stellas turn deep red it’s time to invite friends to come help pick quick before they get any darker.

I’m sure they won’t mind.