I gave up on sweet-smelling flowers, much less fruit, and pruned the mango a lot last week. It looked so shrunken afterwards but it was overdue. It was supposed to have ripening mangoes by now. It was just sitting there, the limbs getting a bit longer but nothing else, when last year, it was starting to flush in January. January!

Three weeks ago I did, reluctantly, prune just two branches, my first time ever, baby steps towards seeing whether that would change anything. Oh boy did it. One, and actually one that I did not, almost immediately sprang into the flush of growth you see here–but the other one I pruned is shaded by the rest of the tree and is still taking its time.

Now, how you prune a tree when you don’t know what its long term growth patterns are is a mystery. What I’ve seen in its first 18 months: the trunk goes up. Then it curves over. Then the branches hang down in the winter. Then they do a wavy curl back upwards in spring, and whether they harden that way or not, whether the new sprouts that showed up at the top in the last two days will continue upwards for long, I don’t know. It’s not a trunk–it’s a puzzle piece.

Cut the branches to about two feet long the first two years, Fairchild Gardens says.  Okay.

The reddish new growth on the lower left of the tree? I’d read that the trick is to cut just past where there’s a grouping of leaves rather than a single one. I did. There are five new not leaves but full branches from it. I like that rate of return.

Cut where there’s a single leaf you’ll get a single branch. Or so they say.

But I found for the first time and bought a pair (and you do need two layers) of bigger frost covers for the coming winter, and I mean big, like, ten feet tall big. So now I don’t have to worry about it growing larger this year than I can keep protected.

I didn’t prune all the branches (see last photo). Maybe there’s still some last flowering hope? The bees so ardently love those blossoms, and so do I, and now that I know my next-door neighbors have a beehive, I can only imagine what their honey could taste like.

Whatever. I think my tree is suddenly going to be much, much fuller. Next year we will have mangoes.

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.

(Christmas light bulbs in the background.)

I’m told there was heat while we were gone last weekend. The mango thought so–after sitting there since February, this bud tip finally started remembering what it was there for.

And that’s that for now. The house will be sat and we are off to Alaska in the morning to see Sam and her husband. If I don’t get to the blog while we’re gone, know that we are glacier watching and moose dodging and I’m told there’s a stuffed 12 foot grizzly in the airport to show tourists what not to mess with. I will need to verify this for myself.

And this time I’ll remember my phone.

1. That Black Jack fig tree planted March a year ago has a tiny fig for fall growing at almost every leaf junction and one single big spring fig left that the squirrels didn’t quite get to before I clamshelled it away from them.

I’ve never picked a fig before. I assume I wait till it’s darkened (given the variety) and softened, right? Still hard as a rock.

2. Somebody went to the AT&T baseball park in San Francisco a few days ago and put their drink down in the cupholder attached to their seat.

And–sorry, couldn’t get the link to the photo to work, it’s inside a Yahoo group–a fledgling peregrine falcon landed and perched on the edge of that clear plastic cup, its talons huge and in each other’s way. A small red straw poked out between its big yellow toes, its big eyes taking in where it had suddenly found itself.

Well hello!

3. And most important to me. My friend Carol is a knitter whom I get to catch up with every year at Stitches and, when I’m lucky, by random chance at Purlescence during the year. She worked on the recovery post-earthquake and tsunami of the nuclear power plant in Japan (side note to my local friends: that Carol.)

Ever since I met her years ago I’ve been trying to put my finger on just who she reminds me of. And now I know.

Yesterday I was off to see my much-loved Dr. R, the doctor who saved my life in ’03, to wish him well in his imminent retirement. I left early because there was no way I was going to be late for that one.

Which means I had time.

I stepped off the elevator to a very surprised face as someone did a double take at seeing mine. A lupus event damaged my visual memory years ago: I was stuck on, Carol? Wait. That’s not Carol. So, so close, but no. I know I know…!

As the woman in great excitement started catching up with me almost instantly the question was settled. Heather! I hadn’t seen her in 24 years! She’d been a lifeguard at the therapy pool where I met Don Meyer and his wife Amalie the year my lupus was diagnosed.

“Your face is the same! It hasn’t changed!” Heather exclaimed.

Everybody who had attended that now-closed pool had to have a prescription to get in and everybody knew it: for the most part the people there were the types who looked out for each other. It was a good place.

I told her I’d run into Don a month after Amalie had passed and that because of that, he’d had some support in his last five years. (I didn’t add that his son had moved in at the end to take care of him nor about his setting up a blog with our encouragement here and all the interaction he got from that–sometimes the details are too many and need to wait for later, so I’m putting these in here and hoping Heather sees it.)

Amalie was gone. Don was gone. She took that in, sorry to hear it.

I got to see happy photos of her sweetheart and her son.

And I’m just now realizing I can’t believe I forgot to tell her that Conway? Remember my tall, large, stooped, slow-moving, cheerful friend Conway who used to chat with me every day after his exercises? They’d thought he had ALS. Turns out he’d had bone spurs growing into his neck and spine, which they operated on and he started to regain mobility before he died. From a heart attack at that pool. I was across the country at my 20th high school reunion, but I’m told the lifeguards, joined soon after by the paramedics, did CPR for 16 long minutes trying to save him. She might well have been one of them.

If you read this, Heather, his widow moved to San Diego to be near her grandkids. Then she passed. Then her granddaughter there went off to college–and met my son: and they are the parents of my three sweet little grandkids, ages 1, 3, and 5.

Small world.

I got to see Heather today.

Small world.

Who told me who her favorite doctor was, so much so that she drives in from across the Bay to be seen by her.

I asked Dr. R. whom I should go to should my Crohn’s come back; he demurred a bit and asked which others had I seen–at the hospital, the clinic, whom had I liked best?

It had been seven years since my surgeries but Heather had reminded me of that one that had done my throat endoscopy and I said her name.

He was pleased. He told me she was very good and that I would be quite happy with her.

And between my experiences and Heather’s, I knew he was right.

And I probably would not have thought of her first had I not run into my old friend, been recognized by her, and had the time to talk.

The tomatoes. I browsed, ordered, planted seeds in March and transplanted them when the weather warmed up and did all the things you do when you’re pretending to be a gardener. I know you’re not supposed to plant them in the same spot from year to year; I didn’t have a lot of new places to choose from but thought here and here might be okay.

Turns out those were not the best spots for morning sun when the UV is highest; I was looking at them from my height and not seedling level. Direct sun doesn’t hit them till nearly noon. Ouch. Once the June sky gets going, though, I think they’ll grow tall enough to do okay. I just don’t want it to be ironic that this is the year I finally sprang for the heavy-duty Burpee cages.

Monday I think it was I stumbled across three tomato plants the squirrels had planted together by a tree trunk. I had promised myself I wasn’t going to waste water on any junk tomatoes again but look, that’s a cherry tomato on that one! Hopefully that could only be a Sungold offspring. Hopefully.

Except that it was starting to wither for lack of water because, I mean, who knew it was behind there? These had to have spent most of their lives in the shade. Clearly there’s hope for my own.

The next day I found a fourth plant in front of the shed. This one was smaller–the gas cylinder for the grill blocked its light. I moved the thing out of its way.

The one with all its leaves curled and withered is still standing and its tiny tomato is a bit bigger every day. How I don’t know. The other two in that trio bloomed today when they didn’t even have any sign of buds when I first found them. Water is a wondrous thing. I guess I’ll know soon enough if and which plant is worth keeping.

It turns out the way to get tomatoes to grow well is to plant them last year.

Just kidding on the itchy part.

The Yellow Transparent apples are twice the size they were last week and just a few weeks away from picking time. Crunchless and definitely a cooking apple, but a prolific one. Bonus is that the critters don’t love their tang.

And here’s the finished bit of froth from yesterday, blocked with the scallops left as is. It wasn’t till it was dry that I realized I’d been seeing Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s photos of the wedding shawl she’s been making for her daughter and that that same stitch pattern had jumped onto my own needles. Knitting is contagious, clearly.

And now the next Venn diagram begins.

The philodendron (The Man Eating Plant as it’s always been fondly referred to around here) will from time to time produce a tiny leafy bit that encloses an actual new leaf and then that green outer covering dies away. The plant grows a little faster than geologic time, but not by much, so I’m sure we get a new leaf in the summer but I’m not sure we get much more than that in a year.

The latest new leafing out seemed…different this time. I noticed that just enough to remember today and go oh, that’s why!

Because that abnormally swollen not-actually-a-leaf-cover finally opened up.

We’ve lived here for 29 years and we have never seen the thing bloom before.

Hiding in there was this weird blob that instantly reminded me of Margaret’s wool.

Years ago, this elderly friend at church gave me some wool yarn she’d had since the ’60’s or so, when natural scratchy wool with the lanolin mixed in was the fad. Over all those years, the lanolin had splotched and dyed it randomly yellow and I knew from my handspinning classes that there was no washing that out. It just was.

I didn’t love the stuff but I was determined to try to at least do something with it, for her sake. And so I stuffed the whole two pounds’ worth in my dyepot to make the coloring a little more deliberately random. The bad part is, I did it without tying enough ties around the hanks because I didn’t want to bother and I told myself it wouldn’t matter even though I knew I knew better.

It. Felted.

I mean, it felted! Like crazy. Random parts of random balls, all in one big hopeless tangle. I threw the whole mess in a closet and didn’t want to deal with it and was grateful Margaret never asked.

My folks came to visit awhile after and Mom discovered that wad. She insisted on pulling it gently apart and untangling it. I tried to say it wasn’t worth her time, but she wanted to do this for me and so she did.

It took her two days.

Only a mother… A mother who knits, that part helps, too, but still, only a mother loves us enough to take on such a task.

So yeah. Looking at that blossom? I had to look it up to find out I should be calling it a spadix. But to me there’s really only one description for that thing. Yarn barf.

Today just felt like the day.

It was also the day I decided to test this mobility thing after a month of staying away from driving. I went to the dry cleaners. I dropped off a return at the UPS store. I went home and checked my messages, rested, ran another errand, went home and checked my messages.

Picked up Richard and asked him to drive now; sure, no problem.

He found himself turning right on a whim and we went out for ice cream because the day just needed something frivolous.  Came home and the first thing I wanted to do was check for messages.

When we walked in the door together there was a beautiful dove on its back on the patio, its chest glowing peach in the fading sun. It surprised me. Its fragile legs were red, its splayed feathers a riot of white and black.

Its closed eyelids a bright light blue.

All this color, not such a drab little bird after all; who knew? But what a way to see it so vibrantly. It must have hit that window hard.

There was no sign of the hawk. And a Cooper’s won’t come back for something it didn’t kill–it is not a scavenger.

I was not about to invite the ravens around.

Richard called his dad to catch up a bit, and in the course of the conversation I asked DadH how long it takes if I… I…don’t want to dig in the spot in a year or two and get totally grossed out. I knew he’s been an avid gardener.

Six months, a year at most, he encouraged me.

And while we were talking that message came in.

I knew…

I went outside. I picked up the shovel. I immediately hit rocks. Lots of rocks. The previous owner had made a pathway of them and many many years later they went down pretty far and maybe they always had.

I wanted to see how far. I didn’t care. There was sunlight and there was room and I’d long wanted that spot and I wanted to make it work and if I had to dig under every stone by hand to pull it out I was going to do it, and I did it. There was a large root from the tree cut down over a year ago; I worked around it. I spent about forty-five minutes working those stubborn embedded determined hard gray planet-bones out of there and putting them aside to where, later, they would help hold the water in place for me and work with me.

It all looked like the scattered weeds and grass and dirt on the right before I started.

Yes I’m still supposed to take it easy. But sometimes, sometimes, hard physical productive work that anticipates the bounty of the future is exactly what life requires of us.

And then when I finally had that small gash in the earth wide enough (about 40″) and deep enough and soft enough to add soil to and plant my pea seedlings in, then, at last, it felt it was time to go to work on that dove’s final resting place. I took a few steps to the left and behind the mango tree. Its roots wouldn’t be that far over yet (and oh good, they weren’t) but eventually the little bird could offer it sustenance.

Here, moss grew on the smooth surface here and there.

The spade slid right in to its full depth. Such a different experience.

And again. Then I put it down, walked back to the patio, and unlike my usual careful measures picked the dead dove up in my bare hands to take it to its new place.

It was so beautiful. It was so soft. I was sorry it was gone but grateful to it for how it would feed my fruit. Then for all that I’d dug the dove was so long that I wondered if it would fit in there gracefully and with a pang I wanted its spot to do it honor.

Somehow the space was wide enough after all. I put it in deep and packed the soil back around it. I put a bit of the moss back on the top and watered the spot to settle it all in. Then over to the peas.

The message. My uncle, my love of an uncle, the one who invited us to stay at his house any time we were in town, the kindest man you could ever hope to meet, quietly let go of his pancreatic cancer and the stroke that had made his last few days all the harder and with his family around him, slipped away this evening to where he waits to embrace us all. As he always has.

The Washington Post put the story on their front page within an hour. Maybe they’ll correct the number of grandkids by morning.

The Salt Lake Tribune’s, here.

An Indian Free peach, the one peach tree I’ve got covered in birdnetting. Never used the stuff before other than in pre-netted cages and tents. The new branches, of course, start tiny and grow right through the stuff or curve around in a balled-up wad of leaves while trying to, making for a weird shaping to come–and harvest isn’t till September. Any voices of experience, feel free to chime in here because I’m only pretending I’m knowing what I’m doing.

The Fuji is far too big to cover. I just do my plastic-clamshell thing to fruit as high up as I can reach and call it good.

There was a small squirrel sitting on the fence today eating one of those very unripe apples. He flicked aside the first of the peel, but other than that he ate and ate till that entire small fruit was gone. Then he took an Olympian leap to nearly the top of the tree for another.

This is a far cry from that apple tree’s early days where the squirrels would pick one take one bite ick no toss pick bite repeat till they’d stripped the entire thing in a day. I guess the long drought has impressed on them that food is not something you ruin. This is the first year of plenty in their lifetimes.

Meantime, I hanked up eight cones of yarn today. Scoured two but reluctantly decided to wait on the others till I had more space for them to dry in, but I got the chore part done. I wound up three that had already been scoured.

That, and I knitted.

Because last night I was at the wheel and the drive band broke. Really broke. Well that one’s done. I asked Richard, “Do we have any string in this house…?”

Unscoured tightly twisted merino? You bet I considered it, but no. No spinning today. And so I put my Kromski niddy-noddy (nope, not seeing it on their site but trust me, it’s a gorgeous piece of wood and well engineered) to good use and felt a great sense of accomplishment.

My hand brushed against a leaf and something hard hit it.

So I hit back. On the leaf.

That hidden snail shell hit the ground with a hard enough bounce to it for me to easily hear. Was that?! Oh absolutely. Ewww. (Crunch.)

And so I went down the line of leaves at the edge of the raised bed (of which there are many more than in this picture, but it does at least show some of the damage they’ve  done) hitting the tops hanging over the lawn, knowing that in late afternoon they’d all still be on the undersides. I didn’t have to touch them and I didn’t have to poison them. (The main slug and snail bait is supposed to be animal friendly but it has been found not to be.)

I have an ancient pair of Birkenstock clogs that never enter the house these days but stop at the back door–so no worries about tracking in the slime.

This is for the peaches they ate right inside their clamshells. A satisfying, awful crunch. (Leaves swishing through air sound again.) Crunch. (Slap and swish.) Crunch. Again and again and again. Dozens of snails became fertilizer doing my yard favors rather than being this invasive species wreaking so much destruction. They’d devoured every single one of my Sharlyn melon seedlings that I’d so carefully babied.

I didn’t get them all but I got so many that it’ll be far easier to search through for the remainders without fear of the slimy horrible hordes dropping on me.

It was that simple. And it took me 29 years here to figure it out.

1. So then I tried spinning just the plum and the red sparkly today and got these 272 four-plied yards.

2. The tart cherries are trying to catch up to that color as fast as they can. You can tell which side the sun hits them on.

3. This video of Glenn Stewart rock-climbing city hall and banding baby peregrines.

4. It was the last Thursday night knit night at Purlescence: attendance has been low of late (all those political debates on Thursdays, I’d say) and they really did need the extra space for classes. So of course it was quite the turnout tonight. I’m so glad I got to go (thank you, Richard) especially given that I’m not driving yet.

5. Meantime, we got the very happiest of messages: Crystal, our seven-weeks-premature new grand-niece, after a month in the NICU was pronounced healthy and allowed to go home today. Her parents are ecstatic. We are, too.

I was thinning the Fuji apple tree–a task I have never had to do before, but this year for the first time the tree is loaded–when I learned that a cluster is more connected within itself than to the tree, so instead of reducing three to one I suddenly had none of those particular ones for September.

Oops.

The tiny ones at the bottom are from the year-old columnar apple, which started off with nearly as many apples as leaves. I figure one for us, one for the neighbor, one for backup and that’s plenty for the little thing to have to do for now.

Meantime, with all the yarns I’ve plied on my wheel of late, still this silk leaped out of my stash and onto the needles for now. I figure it has its reasons.

A Dancing Queen and a Red Lion amaryllis that my dad gave me for my birthday several years ago.

And if you look way in the background, that’s my Baby Crawford peach that I planted in January in front of the fence and the third-year Stella cherry at the far left.

It’s the most amazing thing. You gouge a little hole out of the dirt, plunk in a stick, cover it up and it turns into fruit all on its own, for years and years and years to come. Well, not the amaryllises but they earn their keep, too.

And on a side note, just because it tickles me. The Grammy Salute to Music Legends that just happened: my cousin David, a musician and actor in NYC, just flew to LA along with his almost-95-year-old dad to accept a Grammy award on behalf of David’s late grandfather, Harvey Fletcher. The inventor of stereophonic sound, not to mention the first audiometer (I’ve seen it, it’s at Johns Hopkins, built into a gorgeous wood case) and hearing aids. For what he did for the world of music.

I love that my uncle got to be there and accept that. Rock on!

It caught my eye and I went looking for the seeds. From the San Jose Mercury News last summer:

“Sharlyn melon
Tips: One of the most difficult summer melons to grow, it’s also one of the most expensive. A perfect Sharlyn will melt in your mouth like cotton candy.”

And that is why two Sharlyn seedlings went into the ground today, surrounded by Wool Pellets (the little brown raw-wooly stuff around there) to keep the snails away, hold water in the ground, do a little fertilizing and all the other good stuff they said but the best reason I can say right now is how fast a squirrel made an about-face when he got close enough to get a whiff. Highly gratifying.

The English Morello cherry was growing through its 36″ tent pretty badly and I was impatiently waiting on the arrival of a bigger one. Seeing leaves on the outside the old may be why a squirrel took a flying leap at it today, only to be bounced back instantly to where it had jumped from–that thing was pretty taut. Trampoline!

The new one came today. Carefully taking off the old NuVue, it was a little startling how much bigger the tree instantly was. It really had gotten squished in there, it wasn’t just my imagination. Photo is of the tree inside the new, with a frost cover around the bottom till I go buy more stakes–it needs them.

The Gold Nugget mandarin, having doubled in height since January, is also quickly outgrowing its 36″er. When the cherries are picked I’ll move the new big tent over it.

Meantime, we just had a hot week and the buds on the mango have finally, finally started to swell. If I could bottle the perfume we’re about to get I could make quite the fortune. Heavenly.

Somehow, “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” instantly sprang to mind.

She was tucked in and snoozing before I pointed my phone at her. Given that a mourning dove will drop a small twig and call it a day on the nest building, I was wondering a moment there if we were going to have an egg roll. Or egg drop soup, anyway.

And yes, the mandarin’s tent is inside a cage these days after a raccoon pushed in one side but couldn’t get through.

Almost ripe.