Another ripe fig, and again, very very good.

On a totally different tangent, that title is both a pun and a statement.

I remember a conversation with my favorite high school teacher, Bill Cormeny, the one time I got to see him after I’d graduated from college, gotten married, and, you know, all that grown up-type stuff. He taught history, my mom was in the school’s English department and I was back visiting that day.

He found out my husband was in grad school and thoroughly approved: being married and in school? That’s the way to start out! Teaches you what’s important! Teaches you humility! Teaches you–he chuckled knowingly–poverty.

Man ain’t that the truth. I think this was when we were living on $600-something a month, rent on campus was $200 and we had been married a few years and had an infant. The memorable splurge of a year was when we bought a carton of ice cream. Many times over the years since I’ve reflected on his words and reminded myself to keep holding onto his wisdom, to not let materialism trip me up, because he was right.

That child of ours sent a link today that reminded me of that good man. I’m sure he would love to hear this little bit of new history.

Missouri’s governor with his vetoes was not obeying Missouri’s state constitutional requirement to keep the public defender’s office funded.

I wonder if he ever had to make do on a fellowship with a wife and child, if he ever learned… At least in grad school you have the relief of knowing it’s a temporary thing, but still.

After a lot of wrangling and being ignored, the head of that state office finally hit on a novel solution. The law said he could appoint any member of the bar there to take part if the poor were going unrepresented, and so he did: he ordered Governor Nixon himself to serve in a case.

I like it.

I said something about her lug.

“What’s a lug?” asked Catherine, picking up her flat of Kit Donnell peaches.

We had already eaten the entire flat of them that I’d bought Friday, the morning after our trip home from Texas (they were that good), and with Catherine wanting some as an excuse went back down to Andy’s today and got more: some for her and some for Michelle and some for us.

“That is,” I told her.

She exclaimed over them, sniffing one in her hand and declaring it was like an eastern peach! Here, smell this! I knew just what she meant. Back home. I thanked her for being someone who was as enthusiastic over a perfect peach as I was.

After she left, though, finding myself unsure about that definition, I went and searched around.

One site says it’s slightly less than a bushel.

Another says it’s a way of packing peaches in particular and can include several layers’ worth. (Nope! Just one, but they were cushioned.) Another said that it was an old Southern term and generally meant a big flat, like what I sent her home with.

Whatever gets that juicy, fragile fruit home safe and sound.

A hawk, possibly a Sharp-shinned or maybe even a Cooper’s, circled close overhead as we sat in the rental car in front of my father-in-law’s a moment this morning and set the GPS for the airport. And again as if tracing the cul-de-sac in the sky. As we pulled out, it went ahead of us a bit and circled one last time in good-bye and then away, and I exclaimed to Richard that it was the perfect ending to our visit with his dad. It had been *so* good to see him this past week and the hawk coming so close was like a connection between Texas and home, a sense of till-the-next-time.

There was more to come.

On the flight leaving Dallas before ours, there was a family–a dad, a mom, two little girls about four and five and a baby–who got to the gate just in time to preboard but it was clear it had been a hustle and a hassle making it at all in time and they were stressed. Their flight was late, which had helped a lot. The dad was trying not to be cross. But his face gave him away.

It was a risk… I didn’t want to be putting him on the spot and I didn’t know how he would react when all I knew about him was that he was not feeling overly charmed by his cute little girls in just that one little moment. But who would want to be judged forever by those public moments when you’re not the perfect parent. I wavered.

But by then I’d already found two cute ones in the depths of that purse and they spoke for themselves: these were, first and foremost, for the parents. A pink flamingo with black beak and eyes and a black condor, the tips of its wings and tail edged in white.

Meanwhile, the guy looking at their boarding passes was finding something not immediately right and making them stand there and stand there and stand there while everybody else was waiting to go on that plane (no pressure!) and what that did was create a sense of anticipation while giving me enough time to get me over my fear of reaching out. So there you go.

A small tap (it was the dad, I couldn’t reach the mom without falling over a trash can or a kid), his turning around, and suddenly his face lit up and then at me in wonder and then the mom’s too and they were surprised and thrilled and the wife said, “These are so cute! Thank you! Did you make them?”

“I wish, but no, I buy them from Peru but they are hand knit. We’ve had little ones,” I smiled, nodding at their children, who hadn’t caught on yet that these were for them.

They thanked me again and it was like that was what the no-nonsense airport guy needed to be done with them and he sent them on their way past the gate.

As they headed away I was relieved and glad to have seen the best in both parents having immediately come to life. That was the gift they gave to me.

Lynn picked me up and we went to the new yarn shop in town, West 7th Wool, where I picked up a souvenir skein of Malabrigo Rios and she, some Findley. We had such a good time catching up.

Then tonight I went to go answer everybody and found my mail had somehow disappeared from the laptop and it just wasn’t coming back up in any way I could figure out. Huh. I handed it over to the resident geek, and as he handed it back a minute later he remarked, You haven’t used this in a long time.

Speechless.

…Still speechless.

I didn’t dare touch it as I waited for my father-in-law to come back in the room, and when he did, I told him that I certainly had used this mail on this machine in the last five years and there’s no way I had left it at such an old message. “She’s here,” as I handed him the laptop, opened to…

It was at a thank you note from his late wife for the chemo caps and there she was, wearing the light lavender one.

A silent, upwards, thank you, Mom, as he took in his beloved’s face again.

I forwarded him a copy.

A quick Cooper’s hawk report: one landed on the fence and watched me today like old times–warily, but it did.

I loved it for coming and as I felt that, he suddenly relaxed and fluffed out his feathers and took in the day, and a fine day it was. It was so cool seeing him so at ease.

But after finally getting him to come back I’ll be deserting him by not filling the feeder.

Richard mentioned that we should pack an umbrella.

There was this Californian moment of oh…! I remember those! (Haven’t used one in years)… (Running and checking the Ft. Worth weather report again. Ours, 79F, theirs, 99.) I remember the surprise from the first time we went there that the oranges and juice were so much sweeter in Texas for the heat.

We are off in the morning to take care of his dad. The house will be sat, the tomatoes ripening. If you don’t hear from me, the plan is also that Lynn there will be taking me to sightsee West 7th Wool yarn shop Saturday afternoon.

Sweet will be the times spent.

It dawned on me this afternoon.

The dolly had been in the garage. The male Cooper’s hawk has always liked to perch on it on the patio, but it hasn’t been there the last few months and I hadn’t even thought about it.

We used it a few days ago to wrestle a very large hand-me-down ceramic planter given to us by a friend who was moving back East, and as long as we had that thing out I’d left it in its old spot for now, a little wistful at the memories of seeing my favorite raptor on it.

And there you go. The hawk came back. So there it stays.

Meantime, when my folks had their hands full with small children, they were living in a very small house and four daughters in one bedroom was getting tight. They bought a lot in a new neighborhood starting to go up, and two of their old neighbors liked it enough that they came, too and so the three families settled into their bigger places still just a few houses away from each other.

One was Wendy’s family, and so she and I have known each other since we were born.

She lives in New Jersey these days, and she and her husband were briefly in town. They met up with us at the airport before their flight tonight and we were very glad for there being a Starbucks outside the security line where we could sit and catch up a bit. Tomorrow they’ll be in Philadelphia where her folks live now–at the same time two of my sisters will be in that town from out of state, and so they’ll get to see each other, too, and I’m so happy for them. I’d love to be able to thank Mr. and Mrs. B in person for being my backup parents all my growing up.

(Childhood memory: Wendy: You want to come over for dinner? Me, running across the street: Hey, Mom, what are we having for dinner? Okay, can I have dinner at the B’s? …I can’t tell you how many times I did that, even though my mom is a great cook.)

There’s nobody who knows you like the ones who have always known you.

We were fresh out of peaches…

Two weeks ago we asked at Andy’s when the Lorings would be in. Today we asked again as we came in–and I laughed when they said they were picking them tomorrow. We were one day too soon.

But hey, a reason to come back in the same week? Incentive to share Baby Crawfords? Cool. They were so good last year that I planted my own in January, with thanks to Andy for that variety. (The white one there is a Silver Logan.)

My friend Nina has wanted to make the drive down there with me for some time and just hasn’t been able to yet, so tonight I brought some over to her to give her a better idea of what I’d been talking about.

The great juice of summer dripping down everybody’s arms as the slices got passed around her loved ones: the way a peach is supposed to be.

Bigfoot came back tonight.

Now, in hindsight, there are a whole lot of better names I could have picked for that pattern, even if it amused me enough at the time to think it was actually a good idea. It was when someone told me, “Well, I can tell *you* have small feet” (and I do…) It’s been out there that way for nine years now and, um, oops. Sorry.

The longtime owner of the original brushed-kid-mohair shawl, the yarn dyed by Lisa Souza, told her sister (who delivered it since she lived closer) to tell me she loved it, she treasured it, but in our warm climate she simply never wore it–it made her too hot. She’d decided she was just finally going to ask would I mind? Was this okay? She was sure I could find the right person to re-gift it to and she really really loved it but it was a shame to have it just sit there.

(I couldn’t for the life of me have told you what I’d given her.)

Oh! Right! That one, the one that was actually in the book, dyed in Shade Garden colorway! Sure, I said, stroking its softness, although I might, y’know, actually keep it and wear it myself. Or not. We’ll see. Was it okay if I wore it?

That got me a laugh.

I’ll add a picture in the morning; we had a great visit and it’s late. (Ed. to add, there you go. And I would have given it to the sister who brought it back to me and let it stay in their family but she’s a redhead who does not wear purple.)

Before I forget. Actually, I wasn’t there because it was held outside in the sun, but Richard went and helped flip pancakes at the Fourth of July celebration at church Monday morning. I knew the old veterans that would be stepping forward in turn to say where and when they’d served, and I knew there would probably be younger ones that might surprise me to see them in uniform, too.

But hey, lupus, and so you get this report second hand.

He told me who one of the speakers was–a young dad who’s here for grad school and because his wife grew up here.

It took me a moment as it sank in. A Brit?! On the Fourth of July?

Richard was grinning as he recounted the tale. The guy had started off by taking a good, appraising look all around and then back to his audience with, “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

And then he’d said some of the things he’d found that he liked about America.

People in the stores call him sir all the time. That would never happen back home!

You can have all the water you want at a restaurant.

He named a particular fast-food joint.

Drive-ins. Drive-ins!

(And actually, at one of those drive-ins, his little boys can come inside and watch the people slice the potatoes and then fry them up and hand them to them to eat. High entertainment for small children while still at the pace of the actual food.)

“Goodbye, and Thanks For All The Fish.”

I read that email, scrolling past the dolphin photo, inwardly pleading, NO. Oh please no!

It was true.

I put my carry-around cowl project in my purse and headed over to Purlescence. Sandi and Kaye were both there and we exchanged grief and thanks and hugs and memories of the good that had been.

But it came down to this: over the last ten years they had taught many how to knit, to crochet, to spin and to weave, and they knew some of those would continue to teach others. But they themselves had had very little time to make anything–they both described crafting at 4 am because the imperative to create felt so strong and had been kept in check for so long.

And so they decided to retire, and Purlescence will close for good August 28th.

But…but…but…but… !!!

I’m happy for them. I’m very sorry for all the rest of us. I’m glad we got to have that community gathering place as long as we did–and the wait for Stitches next February just got much much longer.

Dani, the instigator of my mango tree, came over with his love Svetlana with a special gift from his mother in India: actual fresh Alphonsos, sent from the tree he’d grown up with so that we could know what we had growing out there.

He took them out of the jar of rice he’d carried them here in, showing us the traditional storing method. “Here, smell this!”

A deep, wondering (will it smell like last year’s blossoms?) satisfying whiff… I am in awe that he was willing to part with them.

He told us his mom was as enthused as he and I both are that my tree is growing here and doing well. Even if the weather’s been too cool and the tree too young this year for it to produce yet, it did bloom last year. So next year. Now that I know that warmth makes a difference in inducing flowering from the buds, not just in protecting them from harm, I may buy a plastic greenhouse cover for it. There’s one with a zip-down window to keep it from overheating.

We took them outside and showed them the tree and Dani took video, I think to introduce us to his mom, although in the few seconds he had it going I didn’t figure that out fast enough to tell her thank you. To Dani’s mom, if you see this: Thank you so much! And to Dani and Svetlana, Thank you to you, too!

I reiterated my promise that they will get one of our very first mangoes. I can’t wait to share back.

A little more on Alaska: I’d been disappointed I hadn’t seen the twelve-foot grizzly we’d been told was on display at the airport; the kids had said it’s to warn the tourists not to be stupid.

While we were waiting for departure, our last chance, there it was after all. Look closely: past its glass display case there’s a row of seats and at the end closest there’s a man sitting hunched over his cellphone, not knowing he’s being used for scale.

Other than that we did not, to our knowledge, go near a bear. We did, however, see one single crow: at the edge of a bay, fearlessly divebombing the backside of a retreating bald eagle that had flown low over the boat we were disembarking from.

Nope, not a fishing boat, guys, sorry.

More on that tomorrow.

We interrupt this travelogue to bring you a special announcement:

The giant fig. Our very first Black Jack fig. (Tadaah!) Maybe the biggest fig I have ever seen–it was huge.

When I planted the tree last year I had no real idea what I would get, just that Ruth via Purlescence grew three kinds and that that was her favorite. How big they would get, how they would taste, how much the strawberry color would fill up the inside vs the probably-blah plain interior edges (or if it would even be strawberry colored) I had no idea.

Widely strawberried it was, and I’d show it to you but that after the thing was split top to bottom and shared it didn’t last long enough for that.

Black Jacks set two crops, the main, and the breba figs that set at the end of the season and ripen in spring. Brebas are supposed to have less flavor, not having gone through the full heat of the summer. And we’ve had a fairly cool year so far.

This was our only breba that made it through the winter and past the squirrel gnawing of spring. I guarded the last of the ten jealously with a plastic clamshell and tape and cinnamon on top and nylon mesh fabric around the trunk that the raccoons didn’t like stepping on and this was the long-awaited payoff.

Now THAT’S a fig! Are the main ones really supposed to be better than that? Wow. Just, wow. Thank you, Ruth!

I am finally motivated to set up the tall heavy (I can’t even move its box by myself) crop cage over that dwarf tree. Definitely. There are a whole lot of small green summer figs growing fast and just since last night the birds started taking small peck marks out of a few of them.

Probably because they couldn’t get to that one.

Every single one of those figs is worth whatever hassle it takes to protect them. I didn’t really know that before.

We visited the Anchorage Museum, which is partly sponsored by the Smithsonian: the place was gorgeous (those long vertical strips of wood around the stairwell–so, so pretty) and a lot bigger than I expected.

There were native artifacts and history. There was a piece of oil pipeline. There were representations of native and settler homes and boats from various times. There was the obligatory taxidermied musk ox, “lovingly donated” by the family of the late hunter who had taken the trophy.

I read that and quietly guffawed at the mental image of his family dividing his estate, everyone groaning at all the living room space it would take up, the fact that shooting one was for a time highly illegal (relative to theirs I do not know, I saw no date), and trying to foist the thing on each other with someone finally going, I know! The museum!

Maybe that’s not fair of me, but it amused me.

Almost white, almost plastic-looking waterproof traditional jackets made from tanned Arctic animal intestines for easier weather days out fishing. Coats with fur turned inwards for colder ones, and sometimes, they said, a second coat would be placed over the first. Brrr.

I had resisted pulling out the iPhone, not having seen any pronouncement on cameras being used but knowing they’re usually frowned on, while feeling that my quilter mom just absolutely had to see this gorgeous quilt: it was done in the tiniest pieces of the thinnest hides–I knew she would know just how much work went into that thing. (And Bev, I thought of you, too.) It showed the influence of the Russians who had come for sealskins and converts, mixed with the natives’ own patterns.

I let a certain taller one talk me into their going back upstairs and snapping a photo of it for me.

Then there was the woolly mammoth tusk. We are talking some serious ivory here.

And there was Donna Druchunas‘s Arctic Lace book in the gift shop. I bet it flies off the shelves there, too.

Sam, a knitter herself these days, asked us if we wanted to see the musk ox while we were there? She’d never been.

Hey, couldn’t keep her from having that experience, right? And so Saturday we went to the Musk Ox Farm in Palmer and took their walking tour of the grounds.

Domesticating a species takes 250 years, they told us, and we’ve had 50 so we’re on our way but we’re not there yet–so please don’t put your hands past the fences.

(A few days later at a different farm we would be told, as reindeer walked freely among us and looked us in the eye while licking alfalfa from our hands, that the difference between caribou and reindeer was that the reindeer had been domesticated for about 250 years. Alright, I see where that number maybe came from.)

Parents were asked to keep small children close so as not to spook the animals into thinking small creature=wolf. On the flip side, when the man who set up the farm with its first set of animals 50 years ago was approached by a small dog, the musk ox had taken their human’s small size relative to their own as meaning he was defenseless and they closed ranks in a circle around him as they do to protect their young, horns pointing outwards and ready to charge the threat on his behalf.

Cool.

The white along the tops of the spines of many of them: the guide said they weren’t sure but they think that’s to reflect the sun away during the summers so they don’t overheat.

The curves in their horns? Those tell you about how old the animal is. Short and stubby, you’ve got a young’un; the next year they start to turn forward, and at I think she said four you get those iconic half loops in front. Most of theirs have their horns trimmed to protect the humans but she pointed out this one old guy over there that had the full set.

Back in the museum/gift shop, my sweet husband was the one who picked up the musk ox-topped knitting needles and asked me if I didn’t need these? Then the grampa in him wanted me to take a soft little stuffed one home. And we couldn’t come all this way without some qiviut. We just couldn’t.

We’d just been told about the musk ox playing with a fifty-pound ball given to the farm after the oil pipeline had been built, y’know, something for the animals to play with or rub their backs on or something.

They’d managed to get it rolling down the hill, and bam! Right through the fence! Oops.

So for now, mine is playing with a ball. It’s a deep red. It’s a mere ounce, because I just could not bring myself to spend that much more money on yarn when a single ounce would make me just as ecstatic.

The book? While we were out in the fields (yay sunblock and hats and I’ve been holding my breath but no major flare yet) I’d asked them if they had it and explained that Donna Druchunas, the author, had been the text editor for my own knitted lace book.

They were delighted at the connection and told me enthusiastically, Oh yes! It flies off our shelves!

I had previously wondered what on earth was holding me up that I hadn’t already bought it. Now I know. It was waiting for me to support the husbandry of the very animals Donna had written about as well as Donna herself with that purchase. It was worth the wait.

I got to meet Sherry in Idaho today! Except she wasn’t in Idaho, she came here and we got to swap family history stories. She’s a hoot.

At one point there was a bored toddler being watched over by his parents in the lobby we were meeting up in and he started whining.

I looked at her and over to him and back to her and asked: Finger puppet time?

She chuckled. I think so!

Which one of us is more spry?

She laughed. I grabbed one out of my purse, asked the mom and then gave it to her, got to watch her face light up and then his and went back over to Sherry.

Who told me a little of some of her own finger puppet-giving experiences. I’d forgotten she’d taken up the sport. It was great.