Ronni Spoll, if that message was indeed from you, it was great to hear from you! But there’s a typo in your return address and I almost remember what it should be but don’t quite.

——

Meantime, a neighbor’s kid who’s just starting out on that big growth spurt kids do was sitting in his front yard, looking bored and alone for some time and needing cheering up. Probably he was on weed-pulling duty, but even chores could use an occasional excuse for a break.

I went out there with a peach from Andy’s for each member of his family and said if they needed any more to let me know. “I went to a local farmer,” I told him.

He looked up at me.

“And they’re good!”

His face perked right up at that and he looked me in the eyes and then, without a word, got up to go take them inside to share and I thought fondly, I remember the teenage boy years: they don’t instantly find the words for everything they’re feeling, but love and food and time and they come out their best on the other side.

He’s a great kid.

I bought some Hemskirke apricots at Andy’s for my friend Nina on Tuesday and she dropped by tonight to pick them up.

The muffins were cool enough to offer. I’d looked up the raspberry cupcakes in Sweet and even though they’re great, I wanted less fat and sugar, so I thought I’d play with it a bit.

They’re not too sweet, I warned.

I like not too sweet, she answered.

One bite and she really wanted that recipe. I told her I’d have to go write it down quick, I had winged it on the fly. So before I forget what I did, here goes:

Oven at 350, I used paper liners in my 12-muffin tin

1 c flour

1 c almond flour

1/2 sugar

1 tsp baking powder

about a half tsp salt.

Mix.

Separately, whisk:

5 tbl melted butter

1/2 c Greek Gods Plain Traditional yogurt, which is quite thick and has zero runniness

2 eggs

1/2 tsp almond extract

Mix the wet ingredients into the dry, spoon out into the muffin tin, put three or four raspberries on top of each (that have been carefully patted dry with paper towels after rinsing) and sprinkle across the top with turbinado sugar or, what I had on hand, Costco’s organic sugar.

I checked them at 22 minutes and took them out after 23 after a toothpick test.

Nina said they had a bit of a marzipan aspect to them, and I said, Yeah, I like that, and she said she did, too.

And then she happily took her apricots home along with a muffin for her husband, with me saying, If you have more than you can eat, make those muffins–only put a cut-side-up apricot half on each one. (Let the skin of the apricot hold in the juices because Andy’s Hemskirkes have a lot.)

She was looking forward to it.

And a good time was had by all.

(I should go look around here to see how similar this is to the last time I did a batch along these lines.)

Edited to add, and if you ever wanted to hear Sandra Boynton’s voice, here’s your chance. Avec des petits pois.

The obvious thought occurred to me today, and I sat down and wrote a note to the lovely woman who’d made and mailed this vyshyvanka in the middle of the war.

I cannot begin to imagine how that was for her, but I am grateful she did that for me.

I told her I’d worn it to the General Consul’s talk last night to quietly convey my support for Ukraine. To show good thoughts but also individual actions towards their country’s well-being.

Ukrainians are going through the worst and yet I find they’re just the nicest.

The second speaker put up a slide that stated that war intensifies and quickens deeper human connections.

That instantly rang true.

I figured I was typing away in the middle of the night the seller’s time and that she would get to wake up in the morning to that, and the thought of her happy surprise she had coming just made my day. She had so earned it.

Man it feels good to have that roof done. Our year on the waiting list is not a rare thing around here.

Now that I knew they wouldn’t all show up and get in each other’s way, it was time to make an appointment with the stump removal guy so that we can finally redo that section of fence that fell. There’s a board about four by six feet covering the spot but only by the grace of dog has he not shown up on our side but the one time in his puppyhood when his owner learned he likes to dig. I’m sure he could jump it, for that matter.

My pear tree is in that corner.

I dragged the hose over there tonight–yup, still doing that–and as usual made a point of not looking towards that board and into the neighbors’ back yard.

Their dog has learned over time that this is mine and I am here and he is there and we’re all cool with that.

Turning the spigot on, I said quietly to myself towards that brindled medium-large I-don’t-know-what-breed, wherever he was, I know you want to water this tree. But I’m going to.

I sent a card and note off to Dad’s old Army buddy Walt south of here, not knowing if he would ever get it because he’d apparently moved and knowing that he’d survived at least initially after having been hit by a car. At 95.

Turns out he did.

He sent me a hand-written card in return.

On its front was a painting at the LA County Museum of Modern Art, Diego Rivera’s Flower Day. The link is to an ArtNet article telling the history of it: it was that painting, and Rivera, that sparked New Deal public art commissions in the US. I’d had no idea.

What leaped out at me the moment I opened that card, though, was a symbolism Walt had no way to know anything about: when my dad died, my friend Afton sent me a white calla lily plant. It has bloomed almost nonstop since. It is by our front door and those flowers and that greenery remind me of my dad and my friend both every time I go in and out.

And now it will remind me of my dad’s friend. Walt. Who sent the sweetest note. “Dear Alison,” it begins, “Your dad and I were best buddies and my only regret is that we ended up living so far apart.”

And yet they kept that friendship going to the end of my dad’s life.

I feel privileged to have a little of Walt now in mine.

Grieving Highland Park, the morbid and angry thought on this Fourth of July was, What could be more American these days than a mass shooting with innocent parade-watchers shot dead?

And please, please, please, can we vote out the people who are okay with us having more of these?

So I picked up the needles to create a little solace.

Now, here’s where I admit out loud that all along, there’s been this feeling hovering around this baby blanket of, this isn’t going to be the only one.

Yonder daughter came over. Loved that I was making it.

But…

She’d been really hoping I’d make a white cashmere/cotton one like the one I made her other close friend, so beloved still by that baby who’s now five that when they moved to the mom’s native New Zealand and left nearly all their belongings behind, that blanket came with. Not having it was unthinkable.

She wanted that level of passionately loving this blankie again, and she just couldn’t see it in wool (side note: to which she’s allergic), no matter how nice. As for cultural reactions, she reassured me that whatever the immigrant grandparents might think, the prospective parents are thoroughly American and white is no problem at all.

Okay, I’m at 11″, let me just finish this one first because someone is going to need it to be already done and I just don’t know when nor who they are yet. It still feels like the right thing to be spending this time right now on, and I’ll have months to get the other ready.

So it turns out that the way to get me to finally pit over three pounds of small sour cherries at once that have been sitting in a mixing bowl in the fridge for days is to do it first thing in the morning in an old nightgown, sipping hot cocoa on the side. Spurts of juice turning your hair pink? No matter, you’re taking a shower after this anyway. Juice stains down the front? In that aging Black Watch plaid, who could tell? Or care?

It took about an hour, and when I finally put the now two and a quarter pounds of cherry guts into the freezer there was a keen sense of satisfaction that come Thanksgiving or Christmas, when I really really miss summer and the taste of sour cherries (which right now I do not) I can pull that right out and make a pie out of it, and not a small one either, and it will be glorious.

As I said to Richard a few days ago, I planted the tree, I watered the tree, I picked the tree, we eat the tree.

There are probably two more pounds on it. I’d been saving them for Eric and Aubrie, but it became one thing too many for them as they cleared stuff out to get ready for their move and it had become clear that simply showing up on their doorstep with processed cherries was even going to be too much.

They stopped by last night to give me their houseplants and left for their new life this morning and I will miss them dearly. But: they are looking for a house near my oldest sister. Cool.

I checked tonight. The cherries are not falling off yet. The cool weather these past few days surely helped.

Monday for the next round, then.

1.My friend Karen is as much a political junkie as I am, raised by activist parents, and she was itching to talk about yesterday’s hearing and asked if she could come on over. We ended up talking for hours and solving the problems of the world; now all the politicians have to do is listen to us and they and we are golden. Right?

2. I thought I’d fill out my Real ID application as long as I was on the DMV site paying the car registration. I think their user interface was designed by unpaid interns–it was just so badly written. C’mon, California, you’ve got Silicon Valley right here, you can do better than this. You shouldn’t have to guess on what they meant to say vs what they did say while you’re jumping through hoops. Aargh.

Which means, 3. I’ll finish that tomorrow because there are only so many hours in the day and I’ve about run out of this one’s.

The Jan. 6 Committee’s emergency hearing ended. The phone rang.

It was Anne: “Wow.”

Yes, and I Wowed back. That was absolutely the word for it.

All those men who said all those things because, though she never put it this way, a 25-year-old beautiful woman is invisible in the room against their power–until she speaks truth to that power.

Wow.

Trump yanking the tablecloth and dumping everything, more than once? Yelling and shattering porcelain against the far wall when Barr thwarted him? His hands on the throat of his Secret Service driver? His unmet demand at the Ellipse that the magnetometers be taken down so that people not allowed into the rally because they’d have to give up their illegal-in-DC guns could come in and swell his crowd size? They were hanging around the edges, some up in trees with a good line of sight, flagrant in their numbers, awaiting the word.

Trump wanted to lead them to the Capitol (by car of course, he wasn’t going to walk) and the Secret Service wasn’t having it.

Those are visceral images that even the most far-right voter would recoil from after today’s revelations.

Every late member of my father’s generation who went to war to defend the free world has got to be up there cheering, You GO, girl!

I got a message.

San Diego Jennifer, whom we adore from when she was in law school at Stanford, said she was flying into town for a wedding but there was a problem with her bridesmaid dress and did I have or did I know who had a sewing machine she could use for a few minutes and could we hopefully possibly get to see each other?

It’s been about ten years. I miss her. YES!

When she said what time she’d be getting off the plane I mentioned that it was our anniversary and what time our dinner was set for. She said she could come tomorrow.

Oh what the heck, she came today and when she ran out of time she borrowed the sewing machine, but not till we’d had a great time catching up for far too short a time. Her friend who’d picked her up from the airport got invited in too because of course.

I offered them peaches from Andy’s.

I got to see the complete surprise on Jennifer’s face as her eyes flew open and then closed in ecstasy at that first bite. Her friend’s reaction to her own was simply, Wow. When I offered a second peach, the friend hadn’t been going to ask by any means but she was sure glad to take me up on it.

I sent them off with another two for the road. Those peaches are at their very most perfect today and they should be enjoyed just like that.

Our dinner arrived minutes later. I’d ordered it delivered so that there wouldn’t be any last minute tension or scramble, it would just come, and turns out Richard’s meeting, the real wild card in all this, had gone over. So it was just as well we weren’t wrecking a restaurant’s reservation schedule.

So: 42: Life, the Universe, and he’s my Everything.

Richard’s family had served all the raspberries anybody could eat at our wedding breakfast. His grandfather had a quarter acre berry patch in Northwest Washington, DC in what’s now the Obamas’ neighborhood, where in the 1930s he’d bought the plot next door as well as the one he built his house on and forever after refused to sell it because that was his garden and his raspberry patch. He was born a farm boy and wanted to work some land. (Even if he was the lawyer who wrote the laws governing the new Federal Radio Commission, which became the FCC with him as chairman at one point and–I need to ask my sister-in-law to be absolutely sure, but our memory is that he was the author of the Fairness Doctrine.)

Yesterday’s recipe? We ate it for breakfast. It had to be raspberries. Go Grampa H.

And I get a second visit with Jennifer when she brings the sewing machine back. We’ve made an appointment to go out to lunch.

—-

Before I forget, for those who missed the announcement. The January 6 committee said today that they had new information and were holding an emergency hearing at 1:00 Eastern Tuesday, with some of them flying back to DC for it after having gone home for the Congressional recess.

It should be interesting.

My friend Jennifer who got a Blenheim apricot tree as her chosen house-warming present not too many years ago invited me to come on by to help pick some of those apricots today.

There’s been this pandemic.

I would not have recognized the tree, it was so big and so loaded with fruit. Wow! I almost didn’t recognize her kids. They change so fast.

She worked the picker while I reached up to get ones that were too high for her kids so that they could have the lower ones to be proud of helping out with. The tree intermittently tossed a few good ones down to the littlest and the kids added to my basket again and again. There was love and happy Brownian motion and scampering and me dropping an apricot under the car oops and her little daughter scrambling to retrieve it for me and a good time was had by all.

I remembered what her husband had said years ago: how, when they were engaged, she’d gotten a diagnosis that could mean their time together might be very very short. It might mean that he’d never get to be a dad like he so much wanted. And yet, what he most wanted with his life was to be married to her.

They stood by each other through the worst from the first. A recovery and years and four kids later, they are living happily ever after and sharing the depth and strength of that love. Simply being there today felt like such a privilege.

I happened to be walking towards my front door from my car with that basket just as the new mailman pulled up, the second time I’ve actually gotten to see his face (the first time being yesterday while you were here, Anne.) I held it out and offered, saying my friend and I had just picked them off her tree. He took as many as his hand could hold, so clearly he was a fan, so I offered him more and shifting the first to his other hand he did, he took two more.

With just the happiest smile on his face. It surprised me but it made my day, too.

Jennifer got us off on the right start with the new guy.

I turned on the computer this morning.

I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen the Washington Post have nothing on their home page but the headline, along with the top half of a picture to scroll down on to see in full: Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade.

I gasped.

I’d actually thought that somehow with all the public feedback and blowback, all the explaining of the real world implications, from ectopics to you name it, they would hear us. That they would see the humanity behind the outcry, if not the doctrine of stare decisis. One thing that draft leak did was to clarify for the public just exactly how that would play out in actual lives and why it mattered.

Who voted them to be theocrats over us? What about state institution of one particular religious point of view? Wasn’t the whole point of the founding of America a trying to get away from that?

For the record, the official Mormon Church position on abortion is essentially that it’s between the woman, her doctor, and her God. That ideally it should never be done for convenience, but medical matters are simply medical matters and nobody else’s choice to make in any case.

I was as pro-life as anyone when I was young, but the older I’ve gotten and the more I’ve seen of how things play out across lives of people I know and of people I only tangentially know, the more adamant I’ve become that no one has the moral authority to decide whether a woman should take on the life-changing tasks, the risks, the bodily changes, often permanent, the discomfort, the pain, the putting her life on the line, not to mention the rest of her life, for a pregnancy–except the person going through it. And her doctor.

I badly needed a distraction. I drove to Andy’s Orchard and got my apricots and peaches and threw in some sweet cherries too in anticipation of seeing Richard’s face light up. Heading out of the parking, I spotted Andy himself walking over thataway, stopped the car, rolled down my window and yelled, Hi, Andy!

He smiled and called out, Hi! with a wave back. Made my day.

I got home in time for the plumber and his son (and offered them some, but they had both a peach and an apricot tree at home, the son said, quite happy at being offered, though.)

Turns out: they couldn’t turn the main to the house off so as to work on the valve. Turns out: that wasn’t the only thing broken, the city’s was, too. Which, if they touched and anything went wrong, they warned me, the city would charge me for it and it would be prohibitively expensive, making it sound like, And you don’t even want to know.

They offered me a choice. I could make an appointment with the city, which would likely take about a week, and they could come back then–because they had to be there when the city turned it off and when they turned it on again–or.

It was a Friday afternoon at 3:25, I figured there was no chance.

But there is a substantial amount of water in that strong drip below the toilet and it adds up fast (the bathroom was flooded when we woke up even though we had something underneath to catch it) and wasted water in this drought apparently got the city’s immediate attention.

And so we did it. With my permission, the plumbers killed a $225 hour waiting on the city guys, who graciously stayed long enough for them to do what they needed to do so the city could turn it off and then on again in one trip.

The city main valve is replaced. Our main valve is replaced. That toilet’s valve is replaced. The toilet is fixed. The other toilet that usually is fine but sometimes gushes randomly so we’ve simply been turning that valve off when it’s not in use? The one that the valve has started throb-pounding hard when you do that? Yeah, it’s got a washer loose inside and it’s going bad. So that valve’s replaced. They didn’t have the part on hand for that second toilet, so just keep turning the valve off for now and we’ll deal with it some future time.

They did it. $700 later we have reliable, nonleaking bathrooms again.

Fifteen minutes after they left, the doorbell rang, and it was my friend Anne now of Oregon. We had such a rare, grand time catching up. I’ve missed her so much since she moved away.

Anyas, peaches, getting stuff fixed, friends.

Antidote after antidote. Small on the scale of things but huge re the day.

The cherry on top? Commenting on the reef afghan I was working on, turns out the plumbers’ wife/mother is a knitter.

I finished clearing some old Piuma cashmere out of my stash today that was very very bright. Blocking helped lengthen it a bit as the water eased the lacework flat but that’s all there was. Fern lace. That bit of STABLE is over: I have now outlived a small portion of my stash.

While munching a couple of dried slab Blenheim apricots from Andy’s and considering how they should be even sweeter this year because we haven’t had fires clouding out the sunlight. No smoke particles.

An hour later someone posted this article.

That’s my route home from Cottage Yarns. Man. Glad I didn’t go today. Mandatory evacuations is not when you want to get in anybody’s way. But that shaded area on the map… I fired off a note to a friend whose daughter and family had finally managed to buy an old house and had done some of the remodeling themselves to really make it nice for their two little ones to grow up in.

They’re okay. Yay for firefighters who are willing to work at a fire when it’s 102F out. We cannot pay them enough.

Near a substation, looks like? Waiting for PG&E to be found at fault in 1, 2, 3…

The missionaries checked in to ask if it was still okay that they were coming for dinner tonight.

I’d totally forgotten I’d signed up a month ago.

We do that, though, we feed these kids along with everybody else and in gratitude towards those who helped feed my own boys when they were out there.

As I remember the woman who asked me my son’s favorite cookie recipe, baked a batch of those cranberry bars, and then since he was no longer in her area she and her husband got in their private plane and flew it to him still warm from the oven!

I can never match that story, but at least I can put on a dinner. I had cream, and chocolate tortes went in the oven just as fast as I could get them in there.

But the point wasn’t the meal. It’s that somehow that act of sitting down together in one’s home to break bread allows a coming-together and a tell-me-your-story that went round the table and welcomed in the love. Man, it felt good.

It had been three long years since we’d had dinner guests. Maybe it wasn’t the wisest idea quite yet? But maybe it was just exactly what kids who missed their families on Father’s Day needed the most, and it was a privilege to get to fill in the best we could.

We sent them home with half a torte and raspberry muffins.

English Morello tart cherries for a pie, second round of ripening.

Did I get them pitted yet? I did not. But I did knit a good start of a cashmere cowl and two and a half rows on the coral reef, which goes so slowly that I have committed myself to a row a day. Minimum. Even if that row takes an hour. That way I don’t get discouraged and I do get to see progress.

The colors themselves say hey come play with me! That brilliant Matisse blue is toned down somewhat by what’s within it and they’re brightened by the Matisse.

Meantime, I have suddenly and in great delight been requested to make a baby blanket for the best-friend-of. So now I know what my plain-knitting respite project from the craziness of the colorwork is going to be after I finish that cowl; I just have to pick which yarn it’s going to be.

How do you ask someone what various colors might mean to them culturally when you want it to be a surprise?

To be continued.