This is a long shot, I wrote to the church’s chat list, but my check engine light… If anyone happens to want to go to the Kings Mountain Art Fair on Monday…

And that is how I ended up spending the afternoon catching up with an old friend so that I could catch up with more old friends. Sometimes people just need to know what they can do that would help. She found a wedding present for her son at a neighboring booth; I found the time I had hoped for of visiting with Mel and his son Korey.

I bought some of their gorgeous work and surprised them with soft Mecha hats. Korey was amazed at how well his was going to go with his favorite sweatshirt.

As I was leaving he picked up this beautiful little bowl and said, looking me in the eyes, I made this. He wrapped it quickly in paper and added it to the bag on my arm, knowing how much I would treasure the gift.

I now have something much prettier than that old plastic case to put my hearing aids in at night.

And all of them got peaches from Andy’s, because of course.

Sabrina always, always addresses the congregation starting with an enthusiastic, Aloha!

Booger, wrote the closed caption.

And this is why I try not to randomly laugh in church at the wrong moments.

I had peaches and plans. I was going to Kings Mountain Art Fair, the one time all year I get to see my old friends. Mel had messaged me that Kris hadn’t been well enough to make the trip but their son had and they were hoping and looking forward to seeing me.

I was almost to the freeway when I saw it and pulled off the road and called Richard.

Who said the obvious: do not drive the car with the check engine light on except to come home till we can get it looked at. Yeah they just looked at it last week. Still.

(Did the mice come back to the engine compartment and do more damage. Sounds like a definite maybe.)

I thought, I’ll stop by Trader Joe’s…no don’t. Tomorrow we’ll… no you won’t. Monday we can… No you can’t. All afternoon I kept reminding myself that things were abruptly different and we weren’t going anywhere. Not unless we can rent a car on a holiday. We might try.

I moped a little while and then thought, if I can’t go then I’m at least going to get the house a little more ready for guests so I can feel good about that.

We both did. It felt good. And yeah, there’s yet another blanket from the soakstorm being washed as I type.

Great to be over the 10-day bug and the fall and mobile again.

We were going through serious peach withdrawal: it’s the last few days of August, the season is short, we knew they’d all be gone soon.

One of Andy’s employees was new (to me, at least) this year and started off seeming down. I made a point of being a friendly face. And you know what comes next. Maybe.

Only, the last two times I went in I didn’t see her and wondered if she still worked there.

Today answered that question nicely. She got two flats from the back for me, one Cal Red, one Angelus.

I waited till I was rung up and then pulled two soft Malabrigo hats out of my purse and asked her to pick a color.

Okay, this was a first for me: she laughed–I’d never heard her laugh before, she hedged on accepting one, and finally explained, I have so many hats. My mom’s a knitter!

My turn to laugh: I’m not going to compete with your mom!

I totally made her day, she totally made mine, the hats came home with me but the love they convey was completely present.

I almost typed ‘his’ all those times.

I bet she still gets that a lot.

From the late Gracie Larsen, then head of the Lacey Knitters guild, founder of the Lace Museum in Sunnyvale, friend and mentor whom I simply lucked into as a member of my local knitting group.

And instigator of my lace shawls book. When I didn’t believe in it she sure did and pushed me forward. After Martingale published it, at the next Stitches West Gracie surprised me with this exquisitely fine lace leaf in a sandwich bag with a tag offering congratulations in tiny writing. So that I would have a piece of her to remember her by forever.

And oh I do.

People moved away, the group fizzled to nothing, and it was a treat to see her like clockwork at Stitches every year manning her guild’s booth where anyone who wanted to learn any kind of lace was offered guidance on the spot. Tatting, knit, crochet, you name it.

I had almost forgotten this leaf. It had been so carefully tucked away.

So this time Richard did the Saturday Trader Joe’s run.

He wanted to reach over for something and found himself saying, Excuse me, ma’am.

She looked up at him. And asked, Are you a ___ high school parent?

I am!

She said, Are you a ___ elementary school parent?

I am! Or was.

And… Is your wife that sweet little thing?

He laughed telling me this part and said he’d answered, She is!

And does she still knit?

She does!

He came home and told me he’d given her this address and I said, I’d better write something good tonight then if Penny’s going to be reading it! I’m so sorry I missed her!

Back when the Barbara Walker books of my childhood were republished in the late ’90’s (I used to pore through Mom’s copy of the first one in high school), I taught myself lace knitting from them, and when I started, I was only using lace weight and tiny needles. I made wedding ring shawls, ie ones so fine you could pull them through a ring. I was quite proud of them.

I also made a few people a smaller scarf or stole on those size threes. But I had to really love and admire you. I was new at giving away my knitting, much less making anything like that.

Penny was not my kids’ teacher, but she was one of the teachers at that elementary school when my kids were there and she got one of those. Only a handful of people ever did.

Hi Penny!!

We were the parents of three, soon to be four. We had just moved across the country where we knew nobody and had more than doubled our mortgage payments. Things were quite tight.

Monajo simply randomly decided that it would be a great day to go visit the new young couple, and with a call and a would-it-be-alright, she stopped by. The surprise was that it was with beautiful homegrown veggies from her garden.

And what a garden. I had no idea. In this city of postage-stamp lots, she had at least an acre with a creek at the back looping in a half circle near the very old bay tree that had grown multiple trunks into what she loved to call her fairy circle, with a very large hammock suspended at the center.

She was a master gardener and loved making arrangements. One day she donated a large number of her flowers in order to teach a flower arranging class on a Saturday at church.

However you place them, visually, you want things to be in sets of three, she told us. Upper, middle, lower, is the traditional Japanese way, or…

I got there late–kids’ schedules and stuff–and there were very few left to choose from, and this was not my field of expertise whatsoever but I tried, I really tried.

She came over to see how mine had come out and helpfully said, Let’s get you started.

I looked at her.

Well, actually, I thought mine was done… (Thinking, and I will never be as good as you at it but that’s okay because we have you and you are a treasure.)

She was the original instigator of our December Birthday Club. She would have turned ninety at this year’s.

When I saw her infant great grandchildren I understood why the delay; those babies had needed to arrive before their mothers got on planes.

The flowers at her memorial service today were glorious, as you knew they had to be and where they had come from. Her children have their mother’s master’s touch.

And there were these tiny seed packets with a note for every person who came: explaining that sweet peas had been Monajo’s favorite flower. She had passed while they were in full, glorious bloom. These were the seeds from those flowers, and she was inviting us into her garden one last time and forevermore.

Conversation with a couple after church who remind me of us when we moved here with young kids. They’ve lived here about three years. Nice folks, quite fond of them.

A quick mention in passing and the guy did a double take: “I had no idea you were deaf!”

Me: “Thank you!”

I explained that that’s why I always hold my phone in church–for the captions.

Ohhh, his face said. He got it now.

A chance encounter at the curb before they leave in the next day or two and all of us grateful for it. Messages sent are a help but eye to eye is so much better.

We’re not using our second recyclables bin this week, I said; do you guys need the extra space?

Oh thank you yes we really do.

What they put in my bins last week could have gotten them rejected: that would be considered trash, that one could have been too heavy, but now they knew what the stricter rules are with the city’s new contractor.

It was not going to be a problem, and I knew they were good for it.

The issues of last week were irrelevant anyway, as long as you sort right: tomorrow’s the big Clean Up day where you can even set furniture out and they’ll take it. Slap a Reuse label on good stuff and it’ll get donated to charity instead of being landfilled.

I apologized for any stress I might in any way have added to all that they’ve been going through and thanked them for their realtor who introduced me to her contractor who cleaned out our shed for us for a good price.

At the last, the sister wondered what on earth to do with the big Rubbermaid bins her mom had labeled Block Party: where should all that go? Paper plates, bowls, cups, it was all still perfectly good.

I’ve been trying to get the annual block party going again, I told her; I’d be glad to take it.

I didn’t say, I got zero feedback from the neighbors on my initial query on the subject–but if I were to say that in her parents’ loved names and with their party stuff let’s do this and celebrate our late neighbors who brought us all together in the first place and kept us going for years and years, making so many connections and memories, and now we have six new sets of neighbors to welcome in in this square block since the pandemic–

–I think for that, yes absolutely a good number of them would come. With her parents’ help we were halfway there already.

Didn’t go Monday. Didn’t end up going Tuesday, but c’mon, when you’ve got your daughter in town, in August no less, ya gotta have some of Andy’s divine peaches for her and we’d finished off the last previous one together, so off I finally went.

Maybe going on a long drive would get me out of my head a little better.

Some acquaintance-friends who are grieving and under pressure were not thinking straight and did something stupid because they did not think it mattered, did not think we would find out, and did not realize just how many problems they were causing. It was likely physically beyond either of us to fix it if it turned out it went as far as I was afraid it might (later: turns out it didn’t.)

Grief is not a get-out-of-rude-free card.

Forgive as you would want to be forgiven, I told myself again and again. Make it better the best you can, not worse. A year from now, this will be nothing.

Miles and miles and at last suburbia gave way to golden hills and quiet.

Andy’s Orchard. There was the woman I’d given the hat to last month. It was so good to see her.

And then–I think it’s been two years since I’ve seen him, and probably only once since the whole Covid thing–Andy himself stepped in from the back room to talk to her.

He saw me and his whole face lit up in the warmest smile, and I tell you, he had no way to know how much I needed that. Such a lovely man. The two of them turned my day around completely just by being there and by who they are.

I brought home some perfect Kit Donnells and a variety of deeply golden nectarine that Andy himself had brought home two seeds of from the then-Soviet Union. Silk Roads.

And thought wistfully of these friends who, having no idea what they were missing, were last week the only ones who have ever turned down my offer of an Andy peach.

A friend’s milestone birthday celebration and an arriving plane that was four hours late and so was the hour and nothing got written last night.

James Beard wrote, in a cookbook that was given to us as a wedding present so that gives you some idea of how long ago, that the only way to eat a mango was in private in the bathtub.

I’m not sure I’d ever seen a fresh mango at that point so that description stayed with me.

Fast forward. I didn’t have a box the right size to put four of Andy’s peaches into nice and upright and you can’t stack those, so I took a small paper bag, put them in in a line and  held the thing shut with one hand and supported the weight with the other after texting my neighbor.

Her teenage son met me halfway and carried those balls of fruity juiciness just as carefully. He knew.

I knew they didn’t have enough bathtubs but they could make do. Most definitely.

They are! They’re actually eating the leaves. Goldfinches love sunflower leaves specifically and this site recommends planting them near your veggies as a decoy because you might as well make use of this, right?

They said it mostly happens in California. I have questions.

My phone could see the details my eyes no longer can, and upon embiggening that’s exactly what those two birds were.

But I like my sunflowers… So I took a bit of bright pinkish-red thick yarn and tied it around the upper stalk of the one they were going after the hardest.

It didn’t take long before I saw another one swooping in–and then whoawhoawhoa!!! it about did a backflip in the air trying not to continue in that direction. Close!

It went to ground. It started eating the weed seeds. The little tiny stabby ones that attack your socks and wedge themselves into the yarn and you can hardly see them but man can you feel them. Hey you guys! Eat those!

Next thing you know we had a small flock doing exactly that.

Postscript: Most cities around here canceled their fireworks, given the intense heatwave and the wildfires already going, but it turns out the ones closest to us were still on. They apparently were moved so as to be completely over the water, which means we could stand in our front yard and see almost everything. Well into it, the kids and mom across the street finally opened the door to ask questions; we called to them to come on over, our place was on enough of a rise that they would see a lot more from here.

They had lived all over the world and then here the past few years and the kids had questions about the Fourth of July. I couldn’t hear much over the booms but Richard gave them a bit of Fort McHenry history.

There was one again! Did you see the sunflower?! Oh that’s so cool!

And then yet another sunflower. YES.

And good memories were made for all.

I told a few people part of the story. Here’s the rest.

We got front seats on the plane ride home. Nice. But whatever plane model it was, they were the tightest seats we’ve flown.

My 6’8″er likes the aisle seat and I don’t generally have a problem with the middle but after trying it, man; I moved by the window.

But I felt doubtful about having put my knitting in between us (and rightfully so–I know how much tall people need that legroom.) I moved back to the middle a moment so I could lean over and ask and be able to hear the answer: “Is this a full flight?”

The tall African-American attendant had looked even before we sat down like her day had not been going well at all and that she was trying to do her job better than she at all felt like at that particular moment. My annoying seat-taking had clearly not helped. And she was right, a 5’5″er taking two tall seats is a jerk move, even if I was planning to move not only out of the way the second anyone asked for one, but into the hated middle.

She said it was. I stayed in that center seat, resigned to my fate.

What I didn’t hear was that the other flight attendant, a white guy on the short side, had gone, Whaaaat?! It is not!

There is no under-your-feet space there and the overhead bins at the front fill fast. You are limited in what you’re allowed to have on your lap.

I had a book and a small project in a ziplock that also had hand knit finger puppets, which I handed one-by-one to Richard who handed them to the parents of the four small children who came on. Have a great flight!

The attendants saw.

As boarding continued, I was looking for a tall person carrying nothing.

It was nearly over when I spotted the guy: he was an older black man, he was walking with some difficulty, and the backpack he had was being carried on his far arm where I didn’t see it.

Something joyful that I completely didn’t expect seized the moment and I called over, Would you like a seat?!

His face lit up. How had he lucked out like this. YES! I don’t know how to describe it other than it felt like, oh, we finally get to meet each other!

I think I surprised her. The attendant who’d lied to keep me from hogging the window readily helped him with his bag while he sat down, grateful to finally be off his feet.

There was so much love radiating from this good man, whoever he was. By way of conversation he asked if this was our first flight? It was his second.

His English was very good, but the accent and the… I didn’t quite catch which country he had been evacuated from and brought here but he was so grateful for the warm welcome.

I tried to knit but there was simply no space for my arms. I barely managed to hold up my book.

We were in the air now and it was loud and I was deaf. He had a smart phone. He didn’t know how to get it to do what he wanted from mid-flight, and the buckled-in attendants held out their hands for it and we passed it down to them and they connected it and found the movie he wanted to see and again it was a moment where we all came together for him. Welcome welcome welcome. From all of us to all of us and particularly to him.

He transformed our day. He transformed us.

Called a friend this evening who’s at 13 days post-op, asked her her favorite ice cream. Yes she was up to a visit, and yes please!

Rick’s Rather Rich’s Computer Chip it was, and I am late getting back here to type.

Meantime, a hawk rescue on the main cross-town route was posted by the chief of police. Leaving me wondering, do cop cars always have thick soft blankets in the trunk? They should, the more I think about it. Good thing theirs did.