Of course I went back. We’d eaten the last peach. Besides, having not bought any of those monster Flavor Heart pluots last week I had to.

This time I got to meet Andy Mariani himself, the rock star of great fruit as far as I’m concerned, and if I sound a little starstruck, he’s worked hard to earn it.

UC Davis created a great peach that’s too ugly for the mass market? He sells by flavor; Baby Crawford is now a customer favorite. The Kit Donnell in my hand is bigger than the Lorings were and was bred by Andy himself from those Baby Crawfords and named in honor of a friend of his, a fellow rare-fruit enthusiast.

He told me about a customer who asked him if she had to wait till the peach turned red to know it was ripe–she didn’t know that some peaches come in yellow and even green and red is not always an option.

And he picks his ripe.

I brought back last week’s box and got it refilled with various fruits and like in a good chocolate store, his manager wrote down the varieties alongside each row. (Never mind that smaller but not small plum squeezed in there where it could fit, we know what it is.)

I was curious about the Greengage plums listed on their site, but it wasn’t till I got home and found an article about their orchard that I realized there had been some right on that table the whole time and I’d skimmed right past them.

I’ll just have to go back. Twist my arm. We’ll just nibble on these first, shouldn’t take long at all.

Ellen got to see all the fruit trees last week while she was here, and walking around the yard she said she loved how the place had all these nooks and crannies.

In the drought-absence of a lawn I have gained a respect for the lowly dandelion: they don’t stab and they don’t grab or prickle and they delight little children at every stage. I have just a few.

But the ones that love a desert… I’ve got the worst of them by now but I want the rest gone before the rains come. I’ve seen how fast they can flower after a shower–one day. One. Day. Across species.

And so, it being our allotted watering evening (9-6: not allowed) rather than coming inside between trees as I moved the hose around, timer in my pocket, I stayed out there, my entire upper body against the little pricker factories, pulling as many up by the taproots before sundown as I could.

And came in at last, dead tired, and explained to Richard why I hadn’t come in during each eight minute interlude to, y’know, go knit or something: “I was weeding a good nook.”

If only I had thought of it a day or two earlier I could have shared some of this with Ellen–and likely there would have been more. She, though, gave me a nectarine from her travels in the Central Valley and pointed out the tiny dimples: the farmer had told her the unusual rain striking the skin had done that.

So the story: I exchanged emails last winter with Andy Mariani, the owner of a well-loved orchard a ways south of here, and he was delighted to find someone who knew of and liked Loring peaches like he did.

I didn’t think we got enough chill hours for them to grow here. (But he’s in a slightly different subclimate.)

Yes he did have a few trees. Get back in touch with him come summer and he’d be glad to put some aside for me.

A tad late, I remembered all that and shot him off another note.

The market stand was sold out, he answered Thursday, but if I could come Friday they would be picking the very last few that morning. Maybe three pounds’ worth.

I don’t care if it’s just one single peach, I said, for my first Loring in thirty-eight years it’s worth the trip!

And so they managed to find ten peaches for me tucked among the leaves and set them aside. Michelle and I got there, and the woman at the counter asked, You’re Alison?

She offered samples of a Silk Road nectarine, too. I prefer peaches–but that was like no nectarine I’d ever tasted and would have been worth the trip down all on its own. I’d never had one run juice to my elbows before and I did not know they could have such an intense, interesting flavor–so some of those came home, too.

I did not get the name of the dappled, pretty, ripe, green–cherries? So they were. In almost-August. I’d never heard of such a thing.

We came home with our treasures and cut up our first Loring. That first picture is not a trick of the camera angle–that thing was 508 grams.

Michelle closed her eyes a moment and pronounced, Now that is a peach!

Relief! After all that buildup, it just couldn’t be a letdown, it couldn’t…and it wasn’t.

We took one to Timothy at the chocolate shop. “You didn’t go to Andy Mariani’s, did you? You did? Yes!” He shared it with his employees. Our favorite hot chocolates showed up at our elbows.

The one I later shared with Richard needed one more day to ripen perfectly but it had bruised slightly from all the juice and a little jostling and needed not to be wasted. He too pronounced it good, though I told him Michelle’s was even better.

At least I got to send Ellen off with homegrown Meyer lemons. She’ll just have to come back next July.

She sent me a picture and Richard sent me some from his phone and they’re too big to go here and I’ll try to shrink them tomorrow for you.

But let me just say that Ellen is absolutely as wonderful in person as I always knew she would be.

She’d had a huge drive from her trip to Fresno to make it here. The funny part is that at three and a half hours into it my doorbell rang and I opened it with You’re here!

And it was my next-door neighbor. And so Richard and I got to talk to her a little while and I was halfway walking her back over to her house when Ellen pulled up in front of it. And Ellen? That’s the neighbor who just missed being in the big tsunami in Phuket and who then spent a month driving a relief truck to stricken areas long after her vacation was supposed to be over. Because she could.

We had such a good time! She and Richard and I went out for chocolates and sandwiches at Timothy Adams, then dropped him off at home and headed for Purlescence.

I had no idea one of the regulars listens to Ellen and her twin sister Jan’s podcasts–she did quite a doubletake and went, Are you–are you–!

It was a treat to watch Ellen belong on the spot among my friends just like I’d felt with her as she’d stepped out of her car the first time. Heather got to tell her she’d knit a hat for the Warm Hats Not Hot Heads campaign. Everybody introduced themselves.

It was late by Ellen’s time but she let me bring her back inside after the shop to dip some of the strawberries she’d bought us driving across the Central Valley into some sour cream and sugar as we three chatted some more. It was a struggle not to be selfish with her time. I am so glad she came.

And she brought nectarines and a melon and plums and tomatoes and good news about a good farmer who’s making a difference re water usage there.

Richard took pictures of the two of us….

Drying: a warm hat in half bamboo half pearl flecks. (My airport project a few weeks ago, finally blocked.)

Yet more zucchini to ditch somewhere on someone. Maybe I’ll take some to knit night tomorrow.

With Ellen. Twinset Ellen of Minnesota, who propelled the whole Warm Hats Not Hot Heads campaign, where she got about a hundred knitters together online, with India T of New Hampshire as our third organizer/cheerleader. The idea was to create a hand knit hat for every member of Congress to send them tangible testimony from their constituents that we wanted them to stop fighting and to sit down and do their jobs working together, and one House member actually referenced our campaign in a speech on the floor! He wanted us to succeed and that did us a ton of good. We felt heard.

We didn’t quite make it before the weather got too warm to consider wearing hats and people kind of gave out. But we got one for every Senator and at least half of the House and mostly coming from the members’ own districts.

It’s all her fault. I threw out a stray what if/if only and she went YES if, let’s *do* it!

A huge thank you to every one of you out there who knitted those.

She’ll be here. I get to finally meet her in person, and we’re going to Purlescence together. To say I. Can’t WAIT! does not begin to tell it.

Sunday night, just after the lemon pie launching: a Welcome Home party, old friends, a bunch of Mormons.

There were more people than seats outside so a bunch of us simply plopped down on the grass  in a circle off to the side to chat, surrounding a thirteen-month-old at his level. He was just starting to take a few wobbly steps (you can do it you can do it!) and the grass was soft on his feet and cushy for falling. Grass is a rare and wonderful thing these days and I think we were celebrating it, too. Formal we were not.

Out came one of my Peruvian finger puppets, one of my brightest and prettiest. A parrot. His toddler big brother got a puppy.

And that puppy never again left those hands no matter where he ran, jumped, or skipped–success! New favorite toy! I told the young parents the puppets were theirs to take home and that hey, I had just ordered sixty more.

And I thought they had when they left early to put their boys to bed, even though the baby was totally at the hold, look, and drop stage. We all glanced around and it seemed to be gone and that was fine and we went back to our conversation, but a few minutes later I spotted the parrot still there next to the guy furthest away from me.

I motioned towards it in the grass. “Hey, would you flip me the bird?”

Startled, and then the both of them totally cracking up, the guy next to him pronounced: “You did NOT just SAY that!”

“Hey, anything for a good pun.”

Such a rebel.

(Oh, and, I can’t take its picture because it went off with another three-year-old today during his family’s farewell party as they move away. Someday those kids will all have a grand reunion and compare finger puppets.)

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…)