There’s a Harvest Festival in San Mateo this weekend and Mel and Kris are there. (See Mel in action here.) It’s indoors? Cool! So I drove up there today to see them.

But before I did, I put the two biggest and best looking persimmons in a small bag to take them–wondering, because you never know, people love’em or they hate’em.

And then I put a third one in.

One of their sons was with them–well, that worked!

I handed the bag to Mel, who handed it to Kris, who looked in and right back up in a surprised, thrilled grin. She said something about how having moved from California to Oregon, persimmons and pomegranates growing were things they never see anymore.

They had the cutest toddler-sized mugs, and oh goodness, a sweet little light lavender baby one, all of them as perfect as I could possibly have hoped for. They’d had the toddler size before but I’d resisted, thinking I didn’t want to worry about the little ones breaking them; then, seeing my grandsons at my table a few months ago I so wished I had something that rose to the moment. Such a rare and fine thing to have our grandchildren here, we should be celebrating with the best, and now we can. (And lavender, and our granddaughter due in six weeks, and then one to match her brothers’ as she gets older…  I’ll get that mugshot when I’m not quite so tired.)

We chatted awhile, and then I got out of the way.

Oh that totally does it: I found myself stumbling into the Skylake Ranch booth (I didn’t know you guys were here too?) and stocked up on some of their syrup and fruit spread and the like.

“It’s a special, three for twenty.”

“I still want four.”

She grinned.

And then I went back to Mel and Kris with that fourth jar of fruit spread made from the pomegranate trees of the woman I’d just been talking to.

And there you go. Take a little bit of California home with you while I feed my family in Mel and Kris style.

So there was a bag, not a big one but it had persimmons of course for offering around at my lupus group today. The number of people who might come is always random so I tried to make sure nobody would be left out. And so there were enough.

It was fun to see every single face light up.

And then everybody was being too polite and the things just sat there.

Our allotted time in the hospital conference room was ending so I declared flat-out, I am not taking these home. Meaning, I know you like them but I will hand them out to random passers-by in the hallways and that is a threat.

And just like that they were all spoken for and everybody who wanted some got some. (One person would have loved but could not eat them.)

A young man whose Mom’s baby shower I got invited to when we first moved here (I knew nobody–it was very kind of her friend at church to welcome me in that way) making it real easy for me to remember how old he is knocked on my door this afternoon, and so we helped the neighbors get rid of some more persimmons. He’ll be sharing too.

But it’s not fair to take all the low-hanging ones, and so this evening Richard and I went off to the hardware store and bought an extending-arm fruit picker, one of those useful things that you only have to buy once, and I sent them off a note offering to use that to pick some for them to give away, too. It’s not fair for me to have all the fun.

As I was typing this the oven timer beeped.

I will glaze the chocolate tortes tomorrow and you know where one of them is going.

First, a side note to Peter and Terry if you should read this: my father would like to offer you written memories of Marcelline, if only he knew where to send them. If you leave a short hey I’m here in the comments section, your email address will come to me and I will pass it along but it will not show on this site. Thank you so much.

Meantime, hawk sightings nearly every day of late and quite the territorial displays. Glorious. The male flew in next to the window this afternoon and–well, he was saying something right at me, but you’d have to ask him. He seemed to wait for an answer but all I could offer was that I loved having him there.

The crows are staying well clear.

Speaking of which. There are neighbors with a tall old persimmon tree that bears heavily this time of year.

The last year or two, whoever had been helping them harvest didn’t and once the fruit was overripe and grossly sweet, every crow and raven in miles was going at it for several weeks, the whole tree one loud heaving mass of flapping black wings, and when that source was spent they went looking for more to claim in the near vicinity–and they drove out my Cooper’s hawks for a goodly while. Hunting doves is enough work without being constantly mobbed and stolen from.

So I confessed to the one neighbor that I’d had an ulterior motive in asking his wife if they needed help with the picking: I love Hachiya persimmons, and I wanted to thwart those corvids.

Boy were they with me on that one.

And so it was that near dusk today, with their strong encouragement (Please! All you want! Take it! Give lots to your friends!) I went in their back yard and picked a big bag’s worth and then walked from house to house, offering it out.

One took the whole bag. Cool, that works.  I started over.

I was amazed at how tiring picking and carrying the stuff around could be.

They will ripen (they’re almost there), I will puree, and I shall have frozen persimmon for whenever I need a fix out of season. As long as I don’t inflict them on my husband, we’re good.

The box was sitting there on a little table outside the women’s meeting room. Enticing–but there was by no means enough for everybody in the congregation and people were being polite and not taking any and the things were just sitting there.

No note on who they were from.

There was a visitor sitting next to me at church and she remarked on how good those pomegranates looked.

Please, go take one! I urged her. That’s what they’re for!

Now, I had never seen pomegranates like this: if you remember the game from when we were kids where you fold a piece of paper just so so that you can put index fingers and thumbs into the four quarters of it and move them up-and-down or across, tightly shut or open, this way, that way, this way, till the big reveal as you open the paper up?

The pomegranates looked like that. Most were split clear open into segments, there were some random quarters, and Jean (it was Jean who’d brought them) had also placed small paper bags at the ready for people to put them into.

All it takes is one person going ahead to offer a sense of permission to others to do likewise–I mean, you just can’t disappoint the giver by making them cart it all sadly home, rejected.

Jean later apologized to me for having waited maybe a week too long, for having let them split like that, but they were her first crop and she’d wanted them good and ripe after her three years’ wait.

And she wanted to share.

I got one that was cracked nearly around its globe but it wasn’t wide open like the others–I figured, with my deep sense of klutz, probably best that I get one that couldn’t spill seeds around should I drop the bag.

When that last meeting was over and it was time to go home, Jean was explaining to someone who hadn’t seen them why she was carrying away this now-empty box.

And I reached into my bag and, knowing my hands couldn’t do this, said to the guy, Here, if you can split this for me?

He did, and Jean got to see her sharing growing into more sharing.

And so Richard and I took home a half of the best pomegranate we have ever tasted.

It was a revelation all around: if all the varieties grow like that one, that would mean you can never buy a truly ripe pomegranate because shipping split ones would be a nightmare.

Because here was the other thing new to us: the seeds just poured out. There was no effort to it. They just came. Wow. Cool!

At church I said something to Jean about growing mangos too and she exclaimed, “I tried three times! My brother sent me a Hayden.” Having grown up in Hawaii, she added wistfully, “I love Haydens.”

Turns out she had never heard of the Christmas lights trick for keeping the trees from freezing. (LEDs need not apply.) She was intrigued. She might need help with the planting but it looked to me like she was ready to go try again.

Jean is a Pearl Harbor survivor, a young adult coming out of church that day in time to look down the hillside to see the bombs falling below.

And she planted that pomegranate tree towards the future three years ago and she got to pick and to share that fruit.

I tell you, order her Hayden and my Alphonso, we will have mango-growing stories to swap, there’s no stopping her now.

An old classmate from long ago now lives near where we used to in New Hampshire. I was reminiscing over a fruit stand on Old Route 3 back in the ’80’s and their Spencer apples–the best apples ever, and a variety I’d never found since we’d moved to California.

A box showed up on our doorstep today. …Betsy! Thank you!

Just look at those fingers barely showing around that Spencer.

There are a couple other types for us to taste test to see if the real thing matched the memories and how they compared to, say, Honeycrisps. Dunno–because I waited till Richard got home so that that first taste would be a shared experience and then we polished off a Spencer each.

Managed to get a little dinner in, too.

There was one summer evening at Purlescence probably two years ago where Sandi and Kaye had a big bowl of huge strawberries set out for the nibbling. They belonged to an organic farmshare and it was the peak of the season.

Those strawberries tasted like the ones my family drove an hour to a pick-your-own place near Camp David to get when I was growing up–and nothing like the grocery store’s. Wow. I went home and looked their supplier up and the demand was greater than the supply; new customers were not being accepted.

Saw something today and finally went looking again.

I’d wanted for a long time to know what a heritage-variety Spitzenberg apple tastes like; I’m not going to plant a tree that’s a question mark.

Our first Full Circle box comes next week. Spitzenbergs will be in it. I can’t wait.

p.s. Hat, finished, scarf, finished, baby dress, finished, baby blanket, finished. Happy Aftober!

As I look through the fall nursery offerings…

A hawk sighting today. A smattering–I like that word, it sounds just like it and it lasted only slightly longer than saying it–of rain.

And a viral video about the way to open a pomegranate.

Actually, we had one waiting to be tackled. Now, I did not know till sampling a grower’s wares at a show last year and looking up the trees later that there are all kinds of pomegranates: there are the sour puckery ones and there’s a variety that is just plain sweet sweet sweet and there’s a range in between. That grower had dark-juiced sweet ones and her products were a revelation. Good stuff.

And the fruit comes in such nice squirrelproof containers! (I may be kidding myself on the sweet ones but the critters do leave whatever my neighbor’s variety is alone.)

So I tried what the video said: you cut off the top jack-o-lantern style and then down the white lines that separate sections of seeds. Pull them down, pluck out the whites, and tadaah!

Lemme tell ya, hon, it ain’t that easy.

But then I wasn’t going to eat mine corn on the cob style anyway. There’s this small issue of my not being able to eat the seeds, just the juice, but I’d read that you just throw them in a blender or cuisinart and then strain away the solids.

Uh…

The timer on the oven was going. The white lines went straight down only halfway and then sideways into randomness. Trying to pry all those little arils out of there, I went past ten minutes with the thing and thwacking the fruit on the counter beforehand hadn’t loosened them away any. I have no way to know how ripe it had been allowed to get or whether that factored in.

Don’t forget the apron I forgot.

Plate, cuisinart, strainer, bowl: half a dishwasher load, while cleaning pomegranate squirts off my sweater and trying to thwack all that grit out of the strainer into the trash.

I got about a third, maybe a half a cup of juice. I said to Richard, (wondering what companion I might plant to go with my Stella) “Pitting cherries is a whole lot less work.”

Dozens of those at a time? A hundred? A tad reluctantly, but, I think we can scratch pomegranate trees off my list. Skylake won’t mind doing the work.

So, today.

My oldest got hit by a taxi. She assures us no serious injuries, but yow. I’m grateful it wasn’t worse–while fighting my mama bear instinct to want to scream at the guy, What did you think you were DOING!!!

Ahem. And. At noon, Michelle showed up bearing hot chocolate from the shop where we’ve been meeting up with her and her cousin many a Saturday morning, wanting to make sure that, flu or no, we didn’t miss out. I couldn’t drink much but what I did was great and the rest is in the fridge in happy anticipation.

And. The doorbell rang, 5ish. A friend from church bearing dinner, and she had absolutely no way to know I’d been craving pasta and cheese and Italian sausage and a good substantial sauce all day. No way. I hadn’t even said it to Richard. And yet–there it was in her hands: a very good ravioli, lots of sauce that appeared to be homemade (I very much want the recipe) and with a lot of Italian sausage in it, and I could not have imagined up better than what we were offered. Susan! We both had seconds, and for me this week that’s really saying something. Happy us, there were leftovers.

Carrot cupcakes, cut-up watermelon, multi-seed-and-grain bread (that last would have to be for Richard.) She took the time to make that and bring that while arranging her 98-year-old mother’s funeral and affairs and I’m just kind of blown away.

And.

I knitted. Not a lot, two 45-minute segments where I was going v e r y slowly but making noticeable progress on the interminable purple cousin scarf. (Yes it’s still going on.)

Because today was the first of two days of the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, two two-hour sessions two hours apart and tomorrow likewise at 9 and 1 our time, and knitting during Conference has always just been a given, and Conference projects always have their own bit of meaning (even if that meaning more than once has been, while I was doing it, finally something that sat me down in my seat long enough to finish this!)

I listen and get my priorities back in gear and feel spiritually charged up while at the same time, and peripherally to it all, create things to make someone out there happy. ‘Oh, I made this one during Conference’ makes it a happy thing indeed.

I think Sunday afternoon we shall have a purple scarf at last and the beginnings of the hat to match. See? That’s the other thing Conference offers: an abiding sense of hope again.

I even started to forgive the taxi driver. I still hope he got caught, if only so he won’t repeat the errors of his ways.

Uh, yeah, so, I’m still working on that one. Good thing there will be more knitting time  spent listening to wise and loving older people telling their stories and of their trusting God’s love come Sunday.

We started off this morning with an excursion to the new venture Timothy Adams Chocolates, meeting up with Michelle there.

As soon as they’d opened she’d gone to see if it would be a place where she could eat anything, and the answer was an emphatic and happy yes.  And so as we walked in, the owner saw her coming and started a batch of dairy-free truffles on the spot.

A good man looking out for and including our daughter just because he could. No wonder she’d gone back.

They were exquisite. It is a rare thing to cater to a milk allergy and have the rest of us not miss the dairy at all. We bought a half dozen of varying types and they were served up with a small knife so we could taste test together. (Or just Richard and me, on a few of them.)

We’re always looking for ingredient substitutes that work. Hazelnut milk? I had never heard of such a thing. You could buy hot chocolate made of hazelnut milk? This could only be good.

Let me tell you, it was, although it was brilliance on the part of the shop to have a gorgeous water dispenser and pretty cups ready as needed to sip between sips–that hot chocolate was a near thing to melted ganache and I found I needed to alternate. It was very rich. And very much worth the trip.

I’m with Michelle: we will be back.

Chomp. “Looks like they got that one.”

Understatement alert, hon, but yeah.

And yet. I haven’t stopped planting more fruit.

When I was a teenager they were building a Mormon chapel closer to home and the locals were asked to pitch in and do fundraisers to help speed things along. (These days, it’s all handled from Salt Lake City to even out the resources between communities.)

Dad had heard of a friend of a friend who really knew his citrus and who was driving truckloads of a type of mandarin none of us had ever heard of from Florida to the DC area for fundraisers for various groups–they get their fundraiser, lots of people discover what was/still is said to be the best-tasting citrus there is, he gets paid for driving his truck, everybody wins. So Dad asked for the guy’s phone number.

And that is how he and Joe Ney became good friends with a shared enthusiasm and purpose. After that building in Potomac, Maryland was finished, Dad continued to commission a truckload every Christmas.

Because everybody who’d bought a case of those juicy Page oranges (technically, tanangelos, a Minneola cross crossed with a mandarin) came back for more whenever they could; there was nothing like them and they were too small to go big commercially and I don’t think they kept particularly well so you couldn’t get them unless you had some kind of a connection to them down South. Dad wasn’t about to let go of enjoying and sharing the best of the best every December, so, if it was a truckload he had to order, a truckload it would be–sign the sheet and state your number and give everyone on your gift list a box and know that they’ll never forget it and they’ll forever be grateful.

Then a major freeze hit Florida. For all the misting and wind-machining and whatever all else they could do, most of the Pages didn’t survive, and since it was such a niche market to begin with and young trees were the most susceptible to the next frost, most growers simply didn’t replant them.

Then Joe Ney dropped dead of a heart attack. (And I hope his family somehow sees this post and knows what a great gift he shared with so very many people and how grateful we all are.)

And I have not had one of these beautiful, deeply colored, juicy, paper-thin, easily peelable almost always seedless little balls of exquisiteness since. The Cuties they sell every Christmas? That’s like an old Hersheys vs. Scharffenberger, or even more now that those two have the same owner, vs. the fantastic upstart Tcho’s.

I wrote here Tuesday about whether anyone had any fruit varieties to recommend for my newly-cleared fenceline. I got a private note asking me if tangerines could grow where I am?

Ding ding ding. That was it!! THAT was what some corner of my brain had been struggling to dredge out of the depths! Richard! We could grow our own PAGES!!!

Oh I cannot tell you how excited I was.

Which quickly got tempered by not being able to find a single source outside of Florida that night, much less one anywhere that would ship to me. There’s a quarantine on citrus trees around southern California, no help there either.

I tried again the next day. Help me out here, Google.

Google came through. Google is my friend.

And so it was that there is a grower in northern California who sells three-year-old Page tanangelo trees for $40 and says that they’re large enough that they should be producing the next year after planting. Wow!

Monday Chris’s stump grinder guy comes to give me a bid on how many stumps I want taken out and where. Monday Four Winds Growers mails out my tree by third-day UPS. Not wasting a moment here, and I had to call my mom, and when Dad wasn’t home I had to call back later to talk to him directly: after all those years after those last boxes, we are going to have Page oranges again!

The one glitch? That no-freezing thing. But if the next-door neighbors can tent their young and vulnerable orange tree with a giant lightbulb inside last January, and they did, and they celebrated their 50th anniversary something like ten years ago, seems to me I should be able to manage doing that just fine myself. Or ourselves. (And let’s see, if I get a Gold Nugget variety too we can have mandarins in winter and spring and early summer…)

Just one tree for now. Pages are also rare in that they’re a citrus that is nearly thornless–and I have grandchildren to keep from getting scratched up. I’ll keep it short enough to stay inside one of my new walk-in-size fruit cages; that should thwart the raccoons at least for a little while. (My brain is suddenly singing Little Boxes.)

Some part of me knew when I wrote that throwaway line ending that blog post that I really really did want…something….

Imagine looking forward to your first bite of chocolate in 37 years. It’s like that.

Going back to last Thursday, our first full day in Georgia: Anne and Ned offered to take us to see the lookout point above Amicalola (not Multnomah, Marian, it’s that funky hearing, sorry) Falls and then a little further down, the entrance to the beginning of the Appalachian Trail.

Where we both said it had been on our life list to hike the entire Trail. Richard had done a goodly distance on it in his younger days but they would have to cure lupus before I could really get to it.

The stone arch marking the spot was behind the ranger station and gift shop. It had rows of benches to the side for people to rest on right after their very long hike, and on those benches was a group of people maybe twenty-five years younger than us. Tattoos, clothes you would definitely wear out in the woods for roughing it, big boned, strong in opinions and body, one would guess.

And here we were, Richard in his oxford shirt (I don’t think the man knows how to wear a plain tee, it’s always an oxford shirt. Preferably blue. Rebel that I am, I occasionally buy him something radical, like a green one) and I in my trademark longish full skirt to keep the sun at bay and so that I don’t hash things too badly when I take one of my frequent tumbles: could we scream city-slicker tourists any louder? Those men guffawed quietly when we walked up to the stone arch, took pictures, talked about the trail wistfully, briefly, and then turned and left without taking a single step past that arch. (I regret that. One step wouldn’t have killed me.)

They couldn’t have known that we were all trying to let us have the experience without my spending one moment longer in the sun than I absolutely had to. But they were right, it was pretty funny.

On the way home, Ned allowed as how we really needed us some lunch, given the three-hour round trip, and he pulled into a barbecue joint to show us a little local flavor here.

I have memories from age sixteen of discovering Brunswick Stew at a little barbecue joint in southern Florida and there it was on the menu. It wasn’t the same thing–everybody has their own recipe–but it definitely made its own memories for the next chef to live up to. The best food comes from the funkiest places.

And yes, this is what they smoked the pulled pork in that Anne ordered. You’ve found it. The smoking gun.

Too tired (almost) to type. Had a great time. Happy Birthday to Phyllis! *confetti* *noisemakers* *candles* *friends* Huzzah!

The other six in our group took a walking San Francisco chocolatiers tour and then the two of us met up with them afterwards at Borobudur, an Indonesian restaurant. Richard and I (who managed to score a parking spot directly across the street in a perfect no-sun-for-you! moment) were the only ones there who hadn’t been to Bali; for the divers in the group the flavors held many memories. For us it was just very good.

We regrouped for key lime pie chez Phyl and Lee and to watch some sea life videos.

A superb day.  (Do I mention here that that double-decker part of the freeway, the one that’s still standing, still creeps me out every time we drive over it twenty-five years and many inspections after the Loma Prieta earthquake and the collapse of the Cypress Structure? No I don’t. Okay then.)

And a good time was had by all.

I know how privileged my part of the world is that this is the kind of problem I have to deal with.  You know how you’re supposed to keep it short and sweet? I didn’t, and maybe that’s why I got the response I did. My note to Costco:

Got the robocall (two, actually, one for each of the past two weeks’ worth of boxes, I assume): Listeria in my peaches. Dangerous for the immunocompromised, which I am; I have both systemic lupus and Crohn’s disease, two major autoimmune diseases.

One box had gone bad quickly and we’d tossed most of those peaches and bought a second box. The recycler took the first one away this morning.

So I took the newest one back to the (I named the specific) store. The fruit wasn’t ripe yet so the box was still full. Did a little bit of shopping first while it sat in my car and asked and was told that I had to have the peaches with me and I had to take them to the membership desk.

Okay, I was prepared for that.

So I put my new groceries in my car, grabbed the peaches and went back in. And that’s where it got interesting.

There were four people at the help desk. One was processing returns and that line went all the way to the front door. There was one customer, and then none, for the other three employees to process.

The employee at the door saw me trying to balance the heavy box in one hand since I have to use a cane for balance in the other hand and told me to go straight to the service side of that desk.

Where I was told I had to go back and wait in that long line.

I wasn’t trying to butt in front of everybody else, but I explained to the young woman (new employee? Didn’t recognize her) that I cannot stand still in one place for a long time: my blood pressure falls. If I’m moving around I’m okay (sitting, I’m fine, too, I’ll add here) but just standing in one place there? For the amount of time that would take? That line was not moving. I physically simply could not do it.

She was maybe too young to be able to figure out any workaround and shrugged and turned away and went back to chatting with her colleague. And that was more productive how? If two of those standing around had taken on doing returns and left the third to handle all others that might theoretically come for other problems it would have worked, both for me and for everybody else.

I stayed there a moment, silently pleading come on, guys, the fatigue in my arm getting to me, at which her colleague glanced my way and half-shrugged apologetically but did not help either.

So lots of people continued to stand in that line while three employees continued not to help them because they weren’t processing returns and the hypothetical Service questions were more important than the actual people needing them. And I took my box of peaches that could kill me if I touched them and left with them to try again later.

Except that I had come near closing time because that is when the potential UV exposure that would trigger a lupus flare would not be a problem standing at that membership desk. Coming at a less busy time of day with the bright sunlight streaming in could put me in the hospital.

I’ve been a weekly Costco shopper for years and have spoken highly of you again and again. I like that you treat your employees well.

But they need to treat the customers well too. My experience has been that you certainly do. But these guys blew it.

One other thing? If you have it in your records that I bought two boxes of the recalled peaches from you then your requiring that I prove that I bought those peaches from you by my physically bringing them in (too late on the first box now, folks, and now I know why so many of those peaches went bad so fast), can you see how that might not go over well? Why wouldn’t you simply refund the bills of everyone who bought them?

Thank you for hearing me out. If you are who pressured the fruit packer into doing the voluntary recall and cleaning their lines, thank you for that, too. But please? Could you take a moment to refund my account fer cryin’ out loud? I did everything I could tonight to try to comply. Thank you.

——-

I hit send on this letter. The page I got in response was this:

Michelle told us she’s been baking ganache-filled cupcakes, and I can just picture the chocolate being folded into the flour mixture. Sing it with me: While my Guittard gently wheats…

George Harrison died not in London as I would have thought but in Los Angeles thirteen years ago, and it turns out a pine tree was planted in a park there in his name.

We’ve had drought across California, we’ve had heat, and in the end the city was sorry to have to notify Harrison’s widow as they took it down that it was gone, promising to plant a new tree to replace it.

It had been done in by the beetles.

Malabrigo Rios* blankie before the blocking: it looks like the side view of the grater we used to get lemon zest for our clafoutis. Latest batch: fresh blueberry.

(Pro tip: if you use the springform pan out of sheer habit like I did, and you, um, don’t get the bottom snapped on quite right, a quick cookie sheet under there before putting it in the oven and then you’ll have a giant popover! And clafouti too! All of it good and you get to enjoy it sooner, too.

And…the blankie after the blocking. I love how it looks like fireflies coming out to play.

(*Rios means rivers in Spanish.)