Note to myself: needle size was 7 for Karin’s Wink yarn. The shawl came out absolutely glorious, just perfect.

I wound Melinda’s Merino Lace yarn with Karin’s blocked and drying tonight. I can’t wait!

I was at the satellite Stanford clinic today for the first time in maybe a year and a half? I wondered if he still played. But it was Friday afternoon, one of his times, and when I walked in there there he was at the piano in the atrium still (intro to Piano Guy in that post).

His face lit up when he saw me, and after finishing one piece he made a point of getting up and coming over and telling me he’d worn that hat I’d knit him just last week.

There were cushy couches and chairs and elderly patients who were taking the time to listen, like I was; it’s not often you get offered a live concert simply for being present.

One woman walking past saw the knitting in my hands, smiled, and pulled out the burnt-orange wool in stockinette stitch from her bag. We had that moment of mutual recognition that knitters everywhere get to share before she continued on her way.

Piano Guy came over to our little group again with a piece of paper, where typed in quite fine print was a very long list of songs. He said he plays maybe 20% from such a list on any given two-hour set, and did I want to pick one?

The elderly woman he’d asked first had apparently picked a Beatles song. I–and I wondered immediately after what had possessed me, but I picked Candle In The Wind, and he smiled and said sure and looked pleased.

I’ve been told he’s a cancer survivor and that he plays there to give back in thanks and to make the day a little easier for others going through such ordeals. He’s a gifted musician, and I wondered what he would do with that piece in that context.

He made it into a searching, honest, positive, uplifting piece of music. I doubt the elderly there knew the words (although come to think of it they likely had kids my age so who knows.) He made it something a patient would take strength from. It was the most amazing rendition. He looked my way and nodded as his hands flew.

And then, hey, while we’re on Elton John he continued on into Daniel my brother…

He was playing the next thing when three young women walked up and singled me out and asked if they could ask me some questions, since I wasn’t doing anything.

Uh, my head was nodding and my foot tapping while my hands were knitting to the time of the music and I was actually quite engaged in the moment, but what I said out loud was, Sure!

The leader plopped down next to me and started talking, utterly oblivious to the scene around her and the look of distress of the woman who’d gotten to hear her Beatles song.

Playing music is a thing you do and become and are in the childhood that I grew up in, not incessant background chatter to ignore.

But they were so intent on their mission that it just didn’t even enter in.

Their questions were not going to take fewer than thirty seconds–I pulled them away down that hall thataway. (Reluctantly.) But they were offering me a chance to help other patients in their own way: they wanted to revamp Stanford’s patients’ website’s user interface.

And fixing that particular site was something I could totally get on board with. It’s been a wreck. If the patient with username and password at hand can’t even get in…

What did you do, did you call?

Yes, I called.

The leader asked the questions, the younger two took notes to compare against each other later. She presented page after page after page, if they had it like this, what would be good/bad about it? What about this? Which do you like better?

The eye is drawn here, I said, and that button up there in the corner is not intuitive–put it here and put a second one there by this and by that. Make it easy. Make it make sense. This? This is trying to put everything on one page, one of the problems you already have. The elderly might not know to scroll. Have a page for this, a page for that–no, you should be doing that before you get to the list of providers, it makes no sense to put it after.

Would you want a dropdown list of all the providers? Or just all your providers? Or a truncated list of yours, based on the ones you’ve seen in, say, the last year?

How many doctors are there at Stanford? (!) All one’s own providers, and that Find A New Provider entry on the next line. If a patient is seeing an individual doctor, do this, but if they’re to see any doctor within a group in that specialty at any given time without getting to choose just the one, then set it up this way.

“I do have opinions,” I laughed.

“We want opinions!” they laughed in return. “That’s what we’re looking for!”

I had totally lost all sense of time by that point, and so it was that they sent me on my way with a $10 gift card for Starbucks in thanks, apologizing that it was so small while I said No, thank you, that’s cool! (Thinking, it offers a sense of discovery: a Mormon inside the ubiquitous coffee chain, ordering hot chocolate and–a pastry? Bagel? What do they have? I just never go, it’ll be an adventure. They had no idea.)

Turns out I walked out the front door with that elderly woman I’d been sitting near and she told me our pianist had left immediately before us. I’d just missed him.

I had wanted to thank him for how he’d played Candle.

But I didn’t really need to. He knew.

The bramble coming over the fence: as much as I could pull up into view is gone now, and thank you all for the advice on what it was and what to do about it.

The yarn: Wink, a get-well gift from Karin of Periwinkle Sheep, set on one of my get-well afghans from six years ago.

I’ve mentioned previously that up till last August we had a whole line of weed eucalyptus trees sprouting profusely from a sucker running along the fence line. They grew to where they completely shaded the back half of the Fuji apple tree and then started to arch over the rest of it. The side that had been shadowed the most gradually became diseased and blackened, the leaves crumpling and falling off and the blotchy branches no longer growing. What was left looked so bad I was afraid it was going to spread and we were going to lose the whole tree.

I read up on apple diseases and the most hopeful thing said that simply solving the lack of light could give the tree a chance to recover and fight the disease off. The eucalpytuses had to go anyway for the sake of saving the fence (and they are ferociously flammable! You do not want eucalyptuses in California, even if they planted a lot of them in the 1800s) and so we did.

This is not quite a year later. In the foreground to the left is the edge of the Yellow Transparent apple and to the right the planted-this-year Black Jack fig. And then there is the big Fuji apple tree. All those branches on the right side of the main trunk are growing and green as of just this one year and it amazes me that it has gone from being very lopsided to what it looks like now. There was nothing alive in most of that area before. It recovered that fast.

All it needed was sunlight and a little looking out for it.

It’s going to need some pretty good pruning soon, and that’s a problem I didn’t think I would get to have.

So, Donald Trump’s campaign released an ad via Twitter: the Donald, the flag, and faded into its background stacks of hundred dollar bills, the White House, and a small group of soldier trudging across a field.

Except, as Mother Jones pointed out (and the Washington Post ran the story too and then apparently took it down, so take this whole thing with a grain of salt if need be), if you do a search for images of World War II soldiers, then (allegedly) that same photo pops right up.

And it’s Waffen SS soldiers. You had to know the uniform or at least look it up, and whoever it was at the Donald’s offices didn’t think to do so, says Mother Jones. He blamed it on an intern (does he pay his interns? Just curious) and it quickly got taken down.

So (if true, and even if it’s not) it proves the old axiom: those who don’t know history are doomed to retweet it.

——-

And I was going to leave it right there at that punch line, but a box arrived in the mail this evening, completely unexpected. It was from Melinda of Tess Designer Yarns. I knew she’d been playing with color gradients but I had no idea and absolutely no expectation of anything whatsoever, much less that she would surprise me with some of what she’d been doing, and look at all that…. Wow! Gorgeous, gorgeous, soft stuff. Just, wow! She did it simply to make my day. I am totally blown away. Thank you, Melinda!

Monday it was a gray squirrel that leaped and did a faceplant into the birdnetting around the mandarin, bouncing back towards me in the middle of trying desperately to get away.

You could just see its brain: Oh… so *that’s* why the others stay far away from here!

Meantime, I got some Karin knitting done.

Took some friends some homegrown yellow cherry tomatoes after dinner, a pretty perfect little snack, and we all chatted for three hours.

Speaking of which.

The squirrels occasionally get past my attempts at barriers and raid those, sucking the juices and spitting out the rest because they don’t actually like tomatoes. There’s not been much loss because they don’t seem to go for seconds and the things were pretty small to begin with.

And plentiful. The Sungold is super-productive, so losing one or two of them a day isn’t a big deal. I also planted a big red type but as the Sungold branches spread out all around the other much slower plant, the one in the center grew a grand total of three fruits. Almost no blossoming.

But so I really want those three tomatoes once they’re ripe: all that water and anticipation for such a small payoff. They’d gone from green to greenish-white and clearly the red was coming soon and I was keeping a wary eye on the critters when I happened to mention this to my friend Robin at the beginning of the week. She told me to do something I’d never heard of before: take some white paper towels, soak them, and wrap one around each tomato. They will dry as white husks encasing and hiding them.

And they did! So far so good! (Do NOT peek during the daylight. They do watch and learn fast. But I’ve learned too.)

Paper towels. Wet white (no dyes seems a good idea) paper towels. I don’t know who thought of this, but clearly they were a (desperate) gardener. And a genius!

Batteries, sun-dried tomato sauce, shrimp, blueberries and raspberries. (Phew!)

Oh wait no that was mine.

He always did have a sense of humor.

And so. I was heading down the milk aisle when I did a double take and stopped to say hi. Totally out of context (and did he even know I was about as tall as him when we’re both standing?) he was lost for a split second (it’s been a year, but it’s been 25 years) and then he stopped, too. Richard was coming right up behind me just then after looking for something else, his wife was right behind him, and so we got to introduce each other all around.

But the funny part was right off the bat when he put on this fake-panic voice and exclaimed, “Don’t look in my cart!”

Laughing, I assured him I hadn’t, and actually the only thing I did see over his shoulder was baby spinach which reminded me we needed baby spinach so I sent Richard to get some after that little meet-up.

But as we got to the far end of the aisle with them out of sight going the opposite direction, Richard turned to me, not quite remembering, wondering, it having been twenty years since he’d seen the guy, “C’est qui?” (Who was that?)

“My cardiologist.”

Yesterday, my old college roommate posted a one-last-time get-together invite on Facebook before her moving van’s arrival today. At a time I couldn’t go.

I’d had no idea she was leaving the Bay area.

And so I drove down to her place this morning and helped clean up after the movers for several hours until it was time for her and her daughter to finally hit the road to their new life.

We did ten years’ worth of catching up as we worked, wondering what had been keeping us all this time. Actually, her husband, though I didn’t say that and I can’t put all the blame on him; I definitely could have done better by her. But he had not been someone I had felt at ease around, though there had never seemed anything quite overtly wrong enough to make me worry about her; she’d seemed happy enough last I saw her.

It had been nagging at me ever so gently, too gently or maybe I wasn’t listening hard enough, that I needed to go beyond the Facebook posts and go see her in person and I’m so glad that at least on the last day I finally did.

What I’d had no idea about…

She was struggling with Comcast, trying (again) to get them to cancel service that was in her almost-ex’s name months after he’d ditched his family, but she was trying to do right by the guy. I finally told her, after they’d told her they would not could not help her, It’s just not your problem.

Yeah, you’re right, she answered, and I thought, Sticking it to him even when he deserves it is just not your style. Good for you.

I admitted to her for the first time that I had run into her grandmother about fifteen years ago and had been given an earful about the guy her granddaughter had recently married–then I quickly changed the subject to, Is she still alive? (Knowing that had to be exceedingly unlikely.)

No, but she’d made it to 93, though.

I said to the daughter, nodding towards my friend, But she got you out of the deal! And she turned around and said to her mom with a grin, Yeah but you got me out of the deal! And her mom told her how very very grateful she was for that, and I thought, you were always a good mom. And it shows in her and you both. You’ve got a great daughter. Whom I wished I had gotten to know more in the time between her being a little kid and high school, and I will do my best to keep up with both of you as best I can now and not let things slip too far away again.

My friend’s was one of the contacts I lost when I got a new phone several years ago. That’s all taken care of now.

And thank heavens for Facebook.

Chocolate to start the day: as we sat down with our hot chocolate just after his shop opened, Timothy custom-made some truffles on the spot with fresh apricots because Michelle had told him I like them (I do!) and he set some in front of us to try. (I really do!) Exquisite.

As was his violet truffle: I grew up in a house in the Maryland woods with wild violets growing in the grass, with parents with the good sense to consider them the flowers that they were, beautiful purple treasures with perfect leaves. This was the essence in chocolate of a happy childhood. Seriously, if you’re ever in this area you need to try this man’s handiwork.

We swung by the next block on our way home.

It was Mr. M who opened the door. I was very glad to see him; he hadn’t been at the annual block party the last two years as far as I knew and I wasn’t sure he was still with us but I’d been afraid to ask. His wife had once asked me, Do you remember, in this neighborhood in ’53 when…

And I’d grinned, I wasn’t born yet.

Oh you!

So yeah, they were homeowners here 62 years ago.

We had a perfectly lovely conversation. I offered to hoist that errant tree branch back over the fence to our side and to help trim back some of their heavenly bamboo that’s up against the fence if they would like some help with it. (I didn’t say, you’ve always kept everything just so and it’s growing wild this year; are you guys okay?)

He laughed off the part about my tree branch and said it was fine and that I was welcome to trim any time, not to worry, and he thanked me for the offer to help. He’s a lovely old gentleman. I woke up this morning after yesterday’s angst feeling like it was going to be no biggie, and it was way better than no biggie: he was a delight.

Off to Purlescence‘s knit swap. Bring some, take some, the only rule at the table is be nice. One of the skeins I was bringing was a pre-wound cake of hand dyed sock yarn, and it was a perfectly nice sock yarn but it was shades of taupe and beige on the orange side and I was never going to knit those colors no matter how much I liked the person who’d dyed them (who has since closed her business. I’ve had it awhile.) I knew Kevin would love it, though.

I walked in through those doors and Kevin was right there on the other side. I told him as I dug it out of my purse that I’d pulled it out of my stash thinking specifically of him and he held out his hands for it with a big grin, not letting it even land on the table, proclaiming it his favorite colors and that he was going to knit himself socks out of it.

Next thing I knew, though, Kathy had that distinctive cake in her hands. I grinned; she told me Kevin knew it would be her favorite, it was, and so he’d instantly passed it along to her.

You can see where this is going.

There were quite a few quite nice yarns and people were admiring them but waiting to see: if someone clearly wanted to pounce on something, then it was clearly meant for them and there you go. People were giving others a chance first, again and again.

I ended up with a skein of Malabrigo that I knew exactly what sale that dyelot had come from. I’d used up all of mine from it. Malabrigo was still a new company then. And there on the floor was the back of a large cotton sweater that had been going to have drop shoulders, i.e. it was knit straight up from the bottom with no armscyes. The shoulder stitches were cast off and the back of the neck stitches were on a holder with two more big skeins of very soft cotton stuffed in the bag with it.

All I had to do was rip back two rows and then cast off and voila! A washable baby carseat blanket, there you go.

I tried to find out whose it had been so they could have that near-instant baby gift; after all, they’d done the work. I got nowhere. When I wistfully mentioned that to someone, they said most of the projects on that table were there because their knitters never wanted to work on them again.

This was true: I had dropped off six or seven skeins of a yarn I’d ordered from China that the seller had claimed was silk/cashmere. It most emphatically was not. It was bamboo, maybe with some acrylic and the very barest amount of animal hair of undistinguishable source. But given what it was really made of, whatever that was, the lacework I’d done in it utterly refused to block out of being a crumpled rag.

I’d put a note in the bag describing why I’d bought it, what it wasn’t, and how it had (mis)behaved. The yarn was nice to the touch but I had put hours into the lie that it was to me. If someone else took it with fiber-reality expectations, it actually could work out quite nicely for them.

Me, I never wanted to see it again.

Someone else definitely did–it disappeared off that table in no time. That was gratifying. I hope they love it.

And there was a sock. A small, single sock. Its mate had apparently never been knit and there was no yarn there that matched it–it was on its own.

I have cold feet in the winter but don’t like it that when I finally warm up enough not to need warm socks on my feet, it wakes me up to kick them off. A single sock insulating my cold feet from each other as I fall asleep is all I need.

And so someone’s sock found a happy home where its wooly handknittedness is keenly appreciated. It even fits. (I think I actually have a matching skein…Stitches West a few years ago and that Canadian guy, right? What was his name? Shelridge Farm! Yeah I bought some too. Here let me go look in my stash…)

So we bought this handy dandy tree limb trimmer thingummy with a telescoping handle a little while ago.

The camphor tree Chris’s crew trimmed back last summer now had watersprouts, long, gangly growths with poofs of leaves at the top–and those twiggy limbs are fragile and a hazard in a windstorm. But the unforgivable part is that they were starting to shade my mango, a mandarin, and a peach.

I worked at it some yesterday, waited for today’s path of the sun across the yard, went nope, not done, and I trimmed some more tonight, thinking, I’m getting better at this.

Um, except for that last one. There was a particularly ugly limb that was mostly over the neighbor’s yard, not too big, I could do that one, and I was sure I could grab the heavier end as it hit the fence and thus improve her view. Y’know, be a good neighbor and all that.

In practice, this is a little harder to do when you’re also holding a twelve-foot pole with a long curved knife with a mini-guillotine at its bottom–and I’m the one pulling the string around here, I’ve seen what those blades can do. Survival instinct got the better of the moment as it fell down her side.

Can’t just leave it there. Even if it’s not very big. I walked around the block to go knock on Mrs. M’s door to fess up and to offer to remove it from her property.

Only, it’s been fifteen years since I’ve been in her house. Paint jobs and landscaping changes have happened, and on her street I was going, now, wait, which one…

That one didn’t seem quite it maybe but the trees I could see beyond made it a possibility. And the lights were on (it was close to sundown), so, hey, I knocked.

There was the dad at the window, washing the dishes as his teenage son opened the door.

I managed not to say anything that would sound really stupid and old to a kid as I realized in astonishment, You’re the cute baby in the stroller while your dad was walking his dog every day!

I told the kid what I’d done, apologized, and said if it landed in their yard I’d be happy to go retrieve it. He chuckled and told me no problem, it was fine. I asked, partly to make sure they still lived there, Are the Ms next door? (And if you read the post in that link, this one is the follow-up: Adele got hers after all, our fourth peach.)

Yes they are.

The limb might have landed in their yard, I’m not sure, I told him.

Turned out the Ms weren’t home–and I don’t have a phone number for them.

And so I have yet again avoided having a conversation with Mrs. M about her large falling-apart Snoopy weathervane she impaled on our fence that, when it broke, she turned the broken side to face us.

It shades my August Pride from 1:30 to 3:30 pm and has been reducing its blooming. Which would delight her if I told her. Um. I was kind of hoping–scratch that, I was hoping a lot–that I could break the ice tonight: I had to talk to her, so starting the conversation, any conversation, would be a done deal. And I could make amends for dumping an unwanted thing on her side.

It’s not like this should be so hard.

(Edited to add in the morning, having written the problem out of my system: of course it’s not. I’ll go talk to her today.)

One hundred and six. When last week was in the 70s. Thank heavens we were able to add air conditioning to this house awhile ago.

Monday is not one of our allowed watering days but on the other hand we are allowed to hand-water on other days. Says the city’s website–but not the flyer they put in our utility bills. Don’t let the word out, I guess.

So I took a gallon of water over to the fig in the pot this evening because I wasn’t going to have that tree damaged for twelve hours’ sake. If I had to, I would have, but I didn’t have to. Sometimes the fine print is on our side.

I couldn’t help noticing…

One single week since I watered the peaches and apples and there were new weeds over in that part a foot wide and deep with runners hopping around madly. I went from zero plans to weed to an hour of putting my entire body against taproot after taproot after taproot, ripping random leaves when I flubbed it. Felt good.

Then I came in too tired to do anything but sit down and finish the very last of the previous knitting project so it could hold no guilt. Done. Karin’s blue merino and stella yarn was already wound and ready to go. And we’re off!

So of course after writing last night’s post I went looking this evening behind the lemon tree and the fence where I rarely go for the tree’s thorns and the prickly perennials back there. Just not a lot of incentive.

To my very great surprise that fig stump of quite some time ago had two sprouts going again, both about 18″ high. They’re gone now, and I would not have known they were threatening the fence again for another few feet’s growth had I not found last night’s new volunteer seedling, triggering my thinking about the old. That definitely worked out well. (Photo is of the Black Jack variety we planted on purpose. I kinneared it with hands high.)

There is, meantime, one young and particularly clueless black squirrel that has been a nuisance. He thinks that if the bird feeder is empty there will miraculously be more if he can just reach it and that any surface is fair game to try from.

No it’s not.

I resorted to plastic bird spikes for the first time ever. He tried taking a long flying leap this morning from the one amaryllis in bloom, which was placed such that it hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility–and I seem to have come around the corner just after he ran as it crashed to the ground, because, seeing me, he acted like, Aagh! Caught!

He did the fast leap leap leap they do when they’re in a hurry but not really screaming fleeing for their lives–and jumped up right smack into the center of the birdnetting part of that tent. It sproinged him straight back to where he’d leaped from.

Wait–what WAS that? While I was just helpless with laughter. Since he was clearly fine.

That tent has street cred now. Not a single squirrel went anywhere near it the rest of the day.

I want to mention: I got a get-well card and a get-well package in the mail today from my friend Karin (I finally got to meet her in person the day in that link) of The Periwinkle Sheep in New York. Lovely, lovely stuff: superwash merino with glittery stellina, superwash merino/silk, superwash merino sport weight. Soft, pretty yarns that my eyes and hands can’t wait to get to, and I’m going to wind the first one up as soon as I stop typing this so I can get right to it. I find them all very cheering; thank you, Karin!

Our sour cherry tree that on its own just couldn’t shake off what was eating it? It’s looking so much better now (and see how much it’s grown back just in the twelve days since that picture!)

I know just how it feels. Recovering is wonderful.

You know how here in the drought we’re supposed to catch the water in a big dyepot while we’re waiting for the shower to warm up?

When you’re in a rush to get ready for church and you’re trying to feel prepared to give a talk, certain people might find it counterproductive to drop their good size 13 black shoe in that pot that got set not quite far enough aside afterwards. Just saying.

A trying-not-to-be-growly, “Dear, would you help me with this hair dryer?”

I laughed, I mean, what can you do, it was just so unexpected. “I was going to dry my hair.” (We got both done, pretty much.)

As we were pulling into the parking lot, Richard happened to say that the best talks he’d ever given were the ones where he’d prepared it and then had just winged it with what it felt like he should say.

Because I was saying I’d written a good talk but it just wasn’t quite…something. It was a perfectly good talk and I didn’t want to admit to myself after all that work and this close to standing up that it felt like I might be disappointed if that’s all I gave.

And in the moment of truth when I was at that podium I did what he’d done and was glad for that conversation. I said I’d prepared what I’d thought I was going to say–and I was chucking it. I set my sheets of paper to the side there.

And then I spoke straight from the heart. I knew a few people there had already heard bits and pieces of this and that but here was the whole of it in one piece.

I mentioned a woman I’d never seen before who was clearly badly struggling with–something that day, and I took a leap and said what turned out to be just the right thing for her.

Someone had seen. And in that moment we were strangers no more and I saw the burden visibly lift from her. I knew no details, just that she had found what she’d needed in that moment. We have to be willing to be present for each other and the smallest interactions matter so much.

I talked of my faults. I said, I was asked to speak on reverence within this Sacrament meeting and yet I’m the disruptive one, I’m the one who gets up and moves away if someone sits down coughing near me. I talked about why. I said, But there is no place for me being grumpy or growly when someone does. None. And I have been, and I apologize for that. We all come here to find peace, not just me.

(It was a no-names public apology to the old woman who’d come in late and coughed on me (again) after having previously given me bronchitis doing so. She’d had no way to truly know what it was like and she had never deserved my grousing–there are better ways to handle things and as you my own blog readers pointed out to me at the time and I thank you for that, she had just as much a right to sit where she wanted to as I did.)

We are here to serve God by loving one another. That only is what we should bring here (or anywhere else). Full stop.

I talked about the first, and then the second big Crohn’s flare, where my immediate reaction to it was, but, but, I don’t need another experience like this to teach me to be a nice person–I think I did a pretty good job of learning a lot the last time around. Do I have to go through this? I don’t want to!

So I prayed.

And the answer to my prayer was this:

All I had was who I was.

Okay. I decided to pray for each person who entered my hospital room after that. I wanted them to feel their work had meaning and they were valued for who they were as well as for what they did. I figured if I could drop that pebble in their ponds the ripples would go outward to countless patients after me, remembering Dr. Rachel Remen’s books in which she said there’s a certain kind of immortality in acts of kindness.

I said to the ward, You can’t pray, really pray for someone without coming to love them.

And thus one Stanford doctor came to confess one day that he’d written in my chart, Patient looks deceptively well. Do not be deceived.

Because you aren’t supposed to be that cheerful when you’re that sick.

I ran into that doctor a few months after I got out of that hospital and I called out his name. He had no idea–and then—-!!! He was ecstatic! “LOOK at you!!! You look GREAT!!!”

Love strengthened life and I was still here.

He had wondered. And now he knew.

And he knew his own caring had made a difference.

I’d been curious for awhile and I happened to look at 9:30 this morning, so I set the timer on my phone to go off at half past each hour all day to remind me to check and write it down: what was our UV rating now? I wanted to know the arc of the sun in real time in terms of my lupus.

The 11 rating out of a possible 12, the highest of today, was at 1:30 and 2:30. Who knew noon was safer?

Richard got home from work to find me on the phone with my childhood friend Karen. Michelle had stopped by and joined in for awhile, now it was his turn. It was great. She so belongs to us all. I’m not a big phone person and he knew it and he knew it had been a long time since we’d chatted and here we were.

Near 8 pm our time we and she finally, reluctantly let each other go. We ate a three-minute Trader Joe’s meal with fruit on the side–dinnertime and all that, we were famished, the last slice of homemade berry pie divvied up to top it off.

And then he went to pick up the phone.

The battery was almost dead. He looked at me, marveling: “How long were you ON this?”

I’d silenced that alarm three times. Maybe four, but I think three. Wasn’t paying attention to any sense of time (and that phone was a surprise several times), just one of belonging.

(p.s. This is for all the young moms out there. Reporters will be interviewing that toddler for her tantrum at the President’s feet for decades to come. And the baby who looks on as if to say, Dude. What are you DOING.)

Jess the plumber came and I have a new toy. It doesn’t leak. You turn it a quarter turn to get full volume. It’s ready to take care of my fruit trees.

The original plumber had not only used a substandard part, he had welded it on so that it couldn’t be replaced without having to pay someone to cut the metal pipe and start over; now though, and Jess showed me, all you’ll have to do if/when we need to is just unscrew this and screw on another. Done.

I told him a little about the guy who’d installed the earlier one, trying to explain how we’d come to have such a mess there. The man had also installed not-up-to-code gas and water lines across our roof that had all had to be replaced and should have been caught by the inspector. He’d tripped over and broken another subcontractor’s lamp as its owner watched–okay, things happen–but instead of apologizing, he had defiantly said he’d done no such thing. And he’d stolen our bicycle tools.

Jess grieved, exclaiming, “That’s so sad!”

YES. Yes exactly. We can buy new tools and pipes. He can’t steal his way to feeling good about himself. And I liked Jess on the spot.

He counseled me, “You have to be careful.”

And I thought, and sometimes you have to luck out. Which I did this time.

When he was done he took a moment to marvel over my yard–“all those peaches!”–as well as the other fruit trees. He told me he used to work on a farm, and it was clear he missed it. I pointed to that that that and that one and said, “Peaches for June, July, August, and September.”

He was so happy for us! Me, I was wistful and said, “I wish I had something ripe I could offer you. Lemons?”

He laughed, shrugged, and admitted, “I wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

But he was particularly taken by the Yellow Transparent apple. Look how it had grown back! He told me it had lived by love. He told me I’d loved it.

I hoped I deserved that compliment–I do love it now but honestly, it took me a few years. First I had to know it better, and a huge thank you to my sister for explaining spring apples to me, much less Yellow Transparents, when I’d never heard of them and couldn’t figure out why by fall the thing was always a total loss. It fruits like crazy and its branches are particularly laden this year, to the point I need twice as many clamshells as I have.

And then he told me a little of his own story. He’d been in an accident when he was a kid: he wasn’t supposed to walk again, he wasn’t supposed to talk again. His speech was slightly slurred but I thought, given that history, I’d take slurred, definitely.

And in the long recovery he’d had to go through everything had all come down to love. Love is survival. Love governs everything, every waking moment, it IS the awakening and the everything.

I recognized that. I’ve been at that edge of life, I know… But he’s never lost sight of it. His very speech reminds him, and he is grateful.

And that apple tree–it just so captured it all for him. It made him so happy.

At the last, he motioned to the big dyepot that had been catching the drips. At about 35 pounds, I admitted I’d hurt my back emptying it the night before, which is why I hadn’t moved it more out of his way than I had.

It was full again. (And then some in the night, but I’d done what I could.)

“Here, let me, where would you like it?”

And so he reverently poured that life-giving water in a circle around the base of that tree.

And it wasn’t till afterwards that I saw how much it had meant to him to be able to take care of it as well as he did of me in the time he was here.