It was a bit of a cri de coeur: I had tried leaving individual messages, gotten no response, and finally wrote to the whole ward.

I have a tart cherry tree, I said, and I’ve been getting up early in the mornings to pick from it hoping to beat the risks of the low UV exposure at that hour and it’s flaring me and I absolutely have to stop. But it’s a crime to let those cherries go unpicked, and the last of them are ripe now.

Save me from me, I wrote. Email me first so we don’t get forty people with a handful apiece, but please, come get yourself some pie cherries from my tree. It’ll be hands-and-knees work, though, because the ones left are mostly down close to the ground.

The only answer I got last night was from a friend insisting she was going to pick them today–for me.

We agreed to wait to see if anyone else answered first. People were being too polite, not wanting to shove to the front of the line, I figured (I mean, how could anyone not be passionate about pie cherries, even if that first person wasn’t.)

I got two messages this morning: one from a friend who admitted she’d long wished she had a tree like mine and that sour cherry was her favorite pie, too, and she would dearly love to have them. Could she come by after her dental appointment?

That would be great!

The other came in a few minutes after the first, from N’s daughter, saying, That’s my mom’s absolute favorite, I’d love to come pick them for her.

Several hours after I’d heard from her mom, I told the daughter that I’d completely forgotten till that moment, but, I had wire racks from old ovens around the base of the tree after seeing a ground squirrel next to it: they won’t come up where they can’t dig down, and I didn’t want it chewing on the bark and roots. Those might be rough on her mom’s knees.

That was it, she was coming with her kids. She called her mom and then told me they were on their way over.

Meantime, I was on the phone with the doctor’s office and they said I needed to be seen but I needed to have a covid test first, and not just a home test.

The daughter took pictures of her kids holding up their treasureboxes of bright fruit with the cherry tree as background and it just made my day.

They held some out: did I want any?

(Always, of course, but I had so much in my freezer.) I opened the door a crack, trying not to breathe in their direction: No, I’ve got plenty, thanks, though!

They left, I sent out a note to the ward saying the cherries were picked and thank you everybody, and I headed off to the clinic.

The grandmother read that and dashed over, hoping she hadn’t lost her chance to at least get some. Turns out she had missed that phone call.

Richard had been in a meeting and I hadn’t interrupted, so he didn’t know that the daughter had come by; he just met the grandmother at the door (trying to keep his distance because of the covid exposure), and a moment later found her crushed, saying, It’s stripped. They’re all gone.

(While the daughter had been going, Mom, answer your phone…)

And everybody’s having a good laugh over the whole thing now.

Oh, and the covid test? It was negative.

Our friend the patient and her husband got their pie.

Our mutual friends came over and picked cherries to make their own, bringing a much-appreciated gift of chocolate.

And I awoke this morning with the startle of an intense realization that the reason I couldn’t make myself finish the row on that afghan yesterday and just. get. going. was because I’d started the sunflower where a tree was supposed to start soon and that would not do. You don’t pile up motifs in a corner like that. My fingers were waiting for my brain to catch on before I created any more work for them to have to undo.

And now the sunflower has been transplanted to where it belonged all along.

Another baby apricot tree went off today to someone who’s wanted one for a year. That felt good.

P made it home from the hospital but was not up to visitors after the transition, as one would expect. So we polished off the two-day-old cherry pie and I made a fresh one for sharing with her tomorrow, and the fact that there was leftover crust means I just pulled a pumpkin pie out of the oven, too. Variety and all that. A visit or a doorbell ditch or a wait for now–we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Falcon pictures. The ones with the overhead are from the first night, where Soledad landed on the falcon catcher, ie the Rotunda below the main building at City Hall. Today she flew up all the way to the top of the 18-story building, while the boots-on-the-ground crew cheered her on.

Got up. Picked sour cherries. Put the bowl standing in a plate with a bit of water in it so that any bugs would freak out and come out but not be able to get out, as I do, and they did, and thus drowned a few I would never have known were in there. Left it there a few hours and never saw a single bug remaining inside the bowl.

We visited P in the hospital, and she looked a lot better than the last time–they have been throwing every anti-viral and anti-bacterial at her, and she needed both.

I did not know that shingles could invite bacteria along the inflammatory path. Not what you want in your brain.

I caught my breath when I saw her half-open her eye for a few seconds; she hasn’t been able to do that for weeks.

We talked about hospital food. “It’s actually pretty good.”

Yeah, we said, Jesse Cool took over the menu just after the last time I got out of here–matter of fact we went to her restaurant for our anniversary dinner a few nights ago. So good. She’s got a Michelin mention these days.

I asked if I could bring her some sour cherry pie next time and she perked right up at that idea. “Yes! Sure!”

I knew her friend from Ukraine passionately loves sour cherries, so I asked her if she would tell them they were welcome to come pick a couple of pounds, a good pie’s worth, and she grinned, picked up her phone and started typing. I told her I’d email the couple, too.

Which I did, and they’re coming over Monday–after the friend has had a day to recover from the vaccinations she just got, because, reasons.

I bet I’m not the only one who brings our friend pie.

He was running late, but at least that would get him past rush hour for the long commute home.

Friends of ours moved far enough away that they were able to buy a house, one with enough land to plant a goodly number of fruit trees, is the plan, after they clear out the neglected overgrowth.

They are really excited about it but didn’t know where to start.

He works nearby, and today was an in-office day and that was perfect: she’d been hoping for one of my apricot seedlings for awhile and it was waiting for her.

He picked my brain while we picked cherries together. You want the squirrels not to devour everything? Plant sour cherries, tart apples, and see the Indian Free peach there? The downside is it needs a pollinator. The good side is that not only are the peaches great, not only is it resistant to leaf curl disease, but the peaches are sour during the growing–right till the very last when at ripening they turn sweet and the squirrels take awhile to catch on that the rejects are the good ones now.

Also: that row of bushes? That’s California coffeeberry, and the tiny fruits are supposedly edible but bland (never tried it) but a big food source for the birds that like to nest in it where they’re protected from the hawks. The Bewick’s wrens take cover in there, and since they are mostly extinct now except in the Bay Area, I’m pretty protective of them.

And then we talked hawks: mine, and their red-tailed family they love to watch. Cool!

Clearly it’s been a good move for them and their young kids, even if I miss them.

I told him Morgan Hill is a hike for them, but if they want to sample the best stone fruit varieties before planting, Andy’s Orchard is absolutely the place to go.

They will be there.

Do me a favor. Please, please. If you can, and you haven’t yet, go get a Shingrix vaccination. The old shingles shot is so much less effective, and the Shingrix one so much more so and with so few complications, that the old one has been taken off the market.

The old one is what my friend had had, and she is back in the hospital today.

I’d never heard of shingles in the brain.

(Late update: they now say en route to, not in the brain. Yay.)

Yeah I should certainly know it by now and I’m sure I do but cellphones make it too easy to just look up someone’s number without thinking about it.

So I typed her name in the search bar and hit the familiar old string of digits.

Now, there are two old friends I wanted to offer cherries off my tree to, and I figured we’d do one tonight and the next in the next day or two as it works out for them and I had decided to call this one first because it’s been the longest since I’d seen her.

The other friend answered that call, to my unspoken astonishment.

I looked back down at my phone: at some point in the past I had thought of the one and typed out the number for the other and I have no idea how long it’s been like that. Huh.

Turns out friend #2 was very much in need of a visit: she is having heart surgery as fast as they can get her meds to the right levels for it. Tomorrow would be good. She had not known she was a heart patient.

We visited while she munched on cherries–“Mmm, those are good!” But not for too long; we didn’t want to wear her out. I had no doubt her husband could use the human time, too, because caretaking and worrying is hard stuff.

Their cat sniffed at and then tried a tentative, ginger step into my upturned wool felt hat on the floor, testing to see if it qualified as a box, and we laughed as she decided that it was actually just too small to curl up in and walked away.

But she had to come back later to try again just to be sure. It was just the right depth and slightly oval and she really wanted to own that new nest. But she was not a small cat. She was our comic relief.

We shared a heartfelt prayer and the sweetest feeling wrapped around us all. So much love.

“Divine intervention,” said Richard when I marveled over that misplaced phone number, and pronounced it again out of sheer gratitude: “Divine intervention.”

I grew up in a house and neighborhood with wood siding in an area dominated by brick homes reminiscent of the colonial era–after all, George Washington himself made use of the blacksmith shop a half mile away. Tradition.

So there’s been this odd interest that I wouldn’t have guessed I had at seeing what a brick house looks like if you could see how it’s built.

A war is not how I wanted to do that.

I sent a private note of admiration for her talent and of support.

In response, she sent me pictures: shredded drywall, pock marks in the bricks behind where that drywall had fallen from, a tennis ball blasted across the room, broken things, crumbled things, but overall, the walls were intact. Or enough so, anyway, and she vows to rebuild. This is her home. In Kherson.

Her mother’s, though, was closer to the dam that the invaders had blown up and it is ruined. But she’s alive. And they will come back from this.

This is the woman who created my cherry tree gerdan, the most intricate one I have. It took me a year to decide to spend that much–but I could just hear my art dealer father exclaiming over the skill and talent that went into it and how much of my own family’s history it reflects. All those summer trips to pick-your-own farms, all those hours and hours of jarring and jamming.

My own Stella cherry looks just like this right now.

I am so glad I got it.

She’s working on a new design right now as a way of coping (bead on with confidence through all crises, paraphrased the knitter to herself, nodding her head) and I am checking her shop every day because I want to see what it will be and because, having seen what she personally is facing, it feels even more imperative to help. There is the World Central Kitchen–and there are individuals. I can’t do everything, but I can do some things.

Getting to wear her artwork is just the cherry on top.

They’re doing something of an experiment: it’s that time of year when the coming-up medical residents find themselves assigned to random new hospitals and towns, the universities are letting out for the semester, Silicon Valley layoffs suddenly erupted in waves again, vacations, people move in, people move out.

So they decided to have the two wards that meet in our building do so together rather than sequentially. Just for June and July and let’s see how it goes.

Generally, the Mormon Church keeps congregations small enough to be personal in the hopes of nobody feeling lost or ignored in the crowd.

And so suddenly there are a lot more small kids running around, more background chatter, and some working out of who does what when responsibilities overlap.

The Zoom that I use for captions got switched off after the first meeting because the other ward didn’t know of anyone who needed it. Oops. One of ours, halfway through the second meeting, suddenly realized I’d put my phone away and dashed over to the relevant laptop to set it up again. Thanks, Davi!

It also means there’s a whole slew of young parents who don’t know a thing about handknit finger puppets bought in bulk from Peru.

There was a wiggleworm of a toddler sitting behind us who was determined for awhile there not to sit still nor quietly today despite her daddy’s best efforts. He was single-parenting it and had several older kids, too.

She was adorable. She was a handful.

Once she was actually doing what he said, so that we wouldn’t be rewarding and reinforcing unwanted behavior, Richard, who could hear them, nodded to me: Now.

And so a vivid pink puppy dog with black eyes and nose got passed over the pew to her profound delight and her father’s relief.

She was clearly three, just old enough to be among the kids invited to come sing a song to their daddies for Father’s Day. She stood at the very front up there, pink puppy jammed hard onto not one but two fingers and clearly barking energetically along with her singing as far as she was concerned.

The song ended, the Primary chorister motioned to the children to exit stages left and right and back to their parents and they dutifully started filing down the (four? maybe five) rather shallow steps to either side.

Not her. That was boring and slow and she was not going to do that. She gleefully leaped over the edge of the pulpit fast before any adults could see what she was up to and jumped to the floor, puppy held proud and high in triumph.

We lost it. It’s a shame that that was just out of reach of the Zoom camera, I’d want to show that video at her wedding some day. You GO, girl!

One of the things we wanted to do before Michelle leaves was to stop by our old favorite haunt together, Timothy Adams Chocolates.

But the Sorry We’re Closed sign was up. We stood in front of the door, surprised and disappointed, while inside, Timothy saw us, threw the door open, flipped the sign over and welcomed us warmly in.

We were in luck: they were both there. Hugs all around.

And of course we bought chocolate, both liquid (I highly recommend the Madagascar Valrhona 64%) and not. Loved their new looks.

Adams is the designer behind it all, so I asked him if this one particular one over here with the colors and lines: was that inspired by Piet Mondrian? (asked the art dealer’s daughter, giving the name a French accent because that’s my second language. Dutch, not so much. While talking to someone whose last name is Holland.) Frank Lloyd Wright?

He laughed. And then he showed me the secret.

Just like everybody’s grandmother, he had a collection of favorite artistic–wait for it–buttons. In a jar. He shook them out. Gold and shiny, roses here, abstract there, he hunted, turning them over to see the tops, till he found it.

My Piet Mondrian wannabe, the raised lines of metal, there you go.

They’d already rung us up and I hadn’t seen it in time so I’m just going to have to go back to get my Grandma Mondrian button chocolate the next time. (Edited: Wait. They actually do call it the buttons collection? I had no idea. It’s the dark cream caramel one.)

We will be back.

This one hit close to home for me.

We have friends who are identical twins, I’m guessing late 40s, who own a house together. One of them was giving a talk in church today and started with the usual teasing about which one is the evil twin brother.

But then, as he went on, he told the story of something we’d known only the barest outline of.

Recently, he was supposed to meet up with a friend over dinner. He was dog tired that day, getting more so, and finally let himself realize he just didn’t think he could manage it; he was just going to call them and cancel with profuse apologies and go home and rest.

He sent up a little prayer to ask if that was the right thing to do, just to, y’know, be sure, because sometimes the small decisions matter more than we’d think.

What he didn’t expect was an intense feeling of, NO!! GO. TO. THAT. DINNER!!

How…but okay, so he turned the car that way.

He didn’t even get out of the car. He couldn’t. His friend saw him and took one look and called 911, and he ended up in emergency heart surgery.

He stopped the story there a moment, took a deep breath, looked around the room taking us all in, our physical, actual presence and his own, remembering, and continued.

If I had gone home instead, he said–my brother was out of town. He would have come home and… I don’t… My friend saved my life.

It’s the first Sunday of the month, so there was no assigned speaker at church today: just, whoever felt so moved could get up and say what they felt.

A woman I didn’t recognize was the second to the podium.

She started out with, We lived here 31 years ago…

And I found I had just gasped under my breath but out loud, TObie?!

It was!

She said how befriended they had been by the ward back then, and now they’d come full circle: their daughter was coming for a program at Stanford and it was a chance for them to visit and tell old friends how much they loved them and how much their faith and love have grown over the years since we’d all last seen each other.

Her husband spoke, too, and came off the stand and gave Richard a big hug.

I knew they would be swarmed after the meeting and I wanted their kids to enjoy this, so I took a turn of my own.

Thirty-one years ago, I told them, I was a newly diagnosed lupus patient and got sent to the indoor therapy pool that was across the street from here; it’s closed now, but, one day someone dropped a roll of film there. There was no way to know whose it was except to get it developed.

It looked like a set of wedding photos. Except–the groom looked like Michelle-the-lifeguard’s new husband, only the bride wasn’t Michelle, and they were suddenly quite afraid Michelle would come in and see these while they were quietly querying every client who came in.

Do you know who these people are? when it was my turn to be asked.

Sure! That’s Steve and Tobie, thanks, how much do I owe you?

I watched their jaws drop in tandem just like mine had when I realized who was here–and then we all laughed. Steve, I said, you’ve got a double out there!

The pool folks had let themselves see all the ways the guy didn’t entirely look like Michelle’s husband after they knew it wasn’t him. Phew!

So many stories I could tell about our friends, and every single one of them would make you happy like they do me. Such good folks, so long missed. How often do we get to catch up after half a lifetime? (Or I should say in a nod to my mom, a third of a one?)

When the new neighbors moved in, I was talking to the mom one day and told her, looking up at our Bradford pear street tree (pictured), that it was just a stick in the ground protected by stakes when we bought the place.

And see that ginkgo? I asked, nodding towards the tall gorgeous tree two doors down from her. That was a year old when we arrived with our small children, I told her. We’ve gotten to see that grow up, too, that much in just these many years.

She has now seen how in the fall the ginkgo’s profuse leaves turn a brilliant yellow, as if radiating back to the sun all that had come to it during the growing season. It is gorgeous.

Her house had had a messy, sickly, kids’-ball-eating street tree (sorry, kids, we tried, maybe the winter winds will blow it out of there) but the former owner took it out years ago and it was never replaced.

Yesterday, to my surprised delight, it was.

There is a beautiful new ginkgo tree in her front yard and she and her kids will get to watch it grow up and get to say to some new young family moving into the neighborhood some day, We planted that.

Holly was going to be about half the distance here anyway, so could she?

Yes please? (YES YES YES ohprettyplease YES!) We hadn’t seen each other since before Covid and a lot of life had happened to them since then.

And so she picked me up and we went out for lunch.

Came back, stitched and knitted and talked. So much to catch up on. How’s the remodeling going. How are the kids. How’s that adorable little grandchild? Pictures!! Yonder daughter of mine finished her East Coast-zoned workday and joined us for a bit. We laughed. We had a great time.

But there was rush hour–so much rush hour to try to dodge and we kept it short.

I forgot the oranges we were going to pick but did send her off with an apricot seedling for her family to remember the day by. May it live and bloom and thrive along with all of them. I didn’t get its picture, much less hers, but I’m putting this one in to show her what hers looked like on April 30. It’s a lot bigger now and just starting to put out side branches.

And then she was off, north and east and back towards her own life.

While I suddenly realized I’d had my skirt on backwards all day.

How toddler of me.

So next time the laughing will pick right back up from that point.

What was her friend’s favorite color?

(She knew what that question hinted at.) I dunno; blue, I guess??

They have been each other’s bestest through years and all kinds of life experiences, and now there’s going to be three thousand miles between them. The friend dropped something off at our house a few weeks ago and her face gave away how painful it was for her that the Silicon Valley downturn was taking her friend three thousand miles away.

I gave up on the blue I’d ordered (some of it still isn’t here yet) and started just going with the off-white afghan that already had the bottom edging done so I could get it to her faster. And yet, and yet… No matter what I told it, it kept telling me that that one was actually for… And I wanted to get it done before moving day and my hands just haven’t been letting me do that much of its heaviness at a stretch…

But. I had a blue afghan. I did, and it was all ready to go. I’d bought the fingering weight yarn years ago and had dyed it three gradient shades from royal to navy and then had eventually knit them together. It was even 2/3 cashmere like the white one, though 1/3 fine wool rather than cotton. I’d offered it to someone a few years ago and they’d chosen another option, I’d offered it to someone else last year and they chose another option, and I kept thinking, it just hasn’t found its person yet. Why is it so hard to find its person–I know they’re out there, someone for whom it has to be blue.

And then I’d forgotten about it.

A certain someone just walked in the door after a farewell dinner.

Where she told her friend, You have to open this before I leave so I can relay to my mom the look on your face when you do.