We were the parents of three, soon to be four. We had just moved across the country where we knew nobody and had more than doubled our mortgage payments. Things were quite tight.

Monajo simply randomly decided that it would be a great day to go visit the new young couple, and with a call and a would-it-be-alright, she stopped by. The surprise was that it was with beautiful homegrown veggies from her garden.

And what a garden. I had no idea. In this city of postage-stamp lots, she had at least an acre with a creek at the back looping in a half circle near the very old bay tree that had grown multiple trunks into what she loved to call her fairy circle, with a very large hammock suspended at the center.

She was a master gardener and loved making arrangements. One day she donated a large number of her flowers in order to teach a flower arranging class on a Saturday at church.

However you place them, visually, you want things to be in sets of three, she told us. Upper, middle, lower, is the traditional Japanese way, or…

I got there late–kids’ schedules and stuff–and there were very few left to choose from, and this was not my field of expertise whatsoever but I tried, I really tried.

She came over to see how mine had come out and helpfully said, Let’s get you started.

I looked at her.

Well, actually, I thought mine was done… (Thinking, and I will never be as good as you at it but that’s okay because we have you and you are a treasure.)

She was the original instigator of our December Birthday Club. She would have turned ninety at this year’s.

When I saw her infant great grandchildren I understood why the delay; those babies had needed to arrive before their mothers got on planes.

The flowers at her memorial service today were glorious, as you knew they had to be and where they had come from. Her children have their mother’s master’s touch.

And there were these tiny seed packets with a note for every person who came: explaining that sweet peas had been Monajo’s favorite flower. She had passed while they were in full, glorious bloom. These were the seeds from those flowers, and she was inviting us into her garden one last time and forevermore.

You wanted to see the colorway. The tag in the bag says London Sky, but it could be the wrong one? It’s mainly on the brown side of purple, but that could be my cataracts talking.

Knitting intentions aside, it turned out to be a day for running around getting things done. Including a two-hour  trip to Andy’s.

Searching for Lorings, the great peaches of my childhood, is how I discovered Andy Mariani and his orchard I don’t know how many years ago now and it was a treat to bring some home. My family used to drive out to an orchard in West Virginia well after the peaches had been harvested: all the tiniest hardest rocks of fruit left behind would, by the time the farmer called Dad, have had the entire resources of the trees to themselves and by the time we six kids climbed the trees to get to them they were huge. How often do you get to eat a 24 oz peach that streams juices through your hands as you do? And that taste that good?

I did not believe there could be a better peach. Andy gently let me know in those initial emails way back when that, in fact, there is. And proved it when I tasted his Kit Connells and Baby Crawfords.

They’re not on yet and Lorings and happy memories would definitely do for today.

On a side note, I don’t know if you can buy a tree of it yet, but if you ever want the perfect nectarine, the Raspberry Red variety that Andy developed is the best I have ever tasted.

This one was the ugly duckling: it sprouted last year but a heat wave while we were out of town and that was that. My two inch tree. And yet somehow it lived.

This is also the one that had thrips eating the juices to all its attempts at new growth this spring. I squished them between my fingers every night till none came back and looked at my poor sorry little apricot wannabe and wondered: of the five, why was only that one attacked? Is it sweeter? Or just scrawnier and easier to get at? Does it mean that’s the one I should want to put to ground, does it mean I shouldn’t?

It gave itself hopeful little pep talks all spring but there wasn’t a lot to see.

Then almost suddenly, a month into summer, it has the best form and the most abundant growth of them all. All that stuff it went through, it turns out, pruned and prepped it well. This is really only its first year, and look at that!

Someone is going to love this tree over its lifetime. Might even be me.

They are! They’re actually eating the leaves. Goldfinches love sunflower leaves specifically and this site recommends planting them near your veggies as a decoy because you might as well make use of this, right?

They said it mostly happens in California. I have questions.

My phone could see the details my eyes no longer can, and upon embiggening that’s exactly what those two birds were.

But I like my sunflowers… So I took a bit of bright pinkish-red thick yarn and tied it around the upper stalk of the one they were going after the hardest.

It didn’t take long before I saw another one swooping in–and then whoawhoawhoa!!! it about did a backflip in the air trying not to continue in that direction. Close!

It went to ground. It started eating the weed seeds. The little tiny stabby ones that attack your socks and wedge themselves into the yarn and you can hardly see them but man can you feel them. Hey you guys! Eat those!

Next thing you know we had a small flock doing exactly that.

Postscript: Most cities around here canceled their fireworks, given the intense heatwave and the wildfires already going, but it turns out the ones closest to us were still on. They apparently were moved so as to be completely over the water, which means we could stand in our front yard and see almost everything. Well into it, the kids and mom across the street finally opened the door to ask questions; we called to them to come on over, our place was on enough of a rise that they would see a lot more from here.

They had lived all over the world and then here the past few years and the kids had questions about the Fourth of July. I couldn’t hear much over the booms but Richard gave them a bit of Fort McHenry history.

There was one again! Did you see the sunflower?! Oh that’s so cool!

And then yet another sunflower. YES.

And good memories were made for all.

Two volunteer sunflower plants, presumably with the same parent (I only grew one last year) but they did not come out the same variety at all. Cool.

I saw a small chickadee type landing on the multi-headed one this afternoon and I thought at first it was coming to inspect for seeds. Wrong plant, bird, you want the one over there, that’s where they’re starting to fill in.

But that’s not what it was after.

It carefully stabbed then shredded a leaf.

I hadn’t known I’d taken a before picture.

There are more sunflowers along the fence, and I actually planted those, and it bugged me yesterday when the leaves of the tallest were suddenly mostly gone. I blamed snails. And I had spent a lot of time hand-picking them out of my yard.

Side note: some idiot in the Gold Rush days thought he was going to make his particular fortune by selling escargot to the 49er types and imported French snails towards that end. When the business somehow did not take off among that segment of the American population, the snails were released around the river that runs by San Jose Airport. Where even the local wildlife mostly turned up their noses.

But this looked like what I’d just watched.

I found myself flashing back to my late neighbor proudly showing me their garden and the squash plant leaves that were totally shredded: birds had used them to build their nests and Jim loved that they’d contributed to the next generation.

I would never have known if not for that. Birds? Steal zucchini leaves? But of course it made sense.

And now here I was actually watching how it was done.

July 3 is awfully late for nest-building–but on the other hand, if a clutch fails, bereaved songbird parents will throw the year a do-over if the weather is good. Um. It hit 102F these past two days and I wouldn’t call that good for much, but I’ll let them do them.

I’m hoping that means that in another month I’ll get to see baby birds learning to fly all over again. It is always such a kick.

 (That subject line was for my dad. He’d have loved it.)

Sink, bowl, plate, small bowl. Far right, right, middle, left. Faucet for occasionally washing leafy bits off.

Pick up a cherry, swivel it in your fingers to where you feel and see the belly button of the thing pointing towards the left. Gently squish the pit out and grab it with your left hand and into its bowl while dropping the fruit onto the plate with your right. Each hand going in its natural direction, thus less likely to mix up which goes where.

With the small soft tart cherries, doing it by hand is faster than dealing with the pitter and you know you’re not missing any stones.

When I was done I drained the pits and added their juice to the bag.

I’d always wanted to know what the weight ratio of pit to pulp was. So now I know: for my English Morellos, it was 2.29 lbs of fruit for today’s picking and .314 lbs of pits.

The chance of randomly landing that second number hints at a sense of humor of the Divine. Love it.

Okay, so, divide the one into the other and you get 7.3 times and it’s all good.

Don’t forget Thursday’s debate. Whatever one’s political affiliations, we’ll get to see the candidates as they actually are, not as presented by political hacks doing video slices-and-dices.

And so it begins: the brief days that start with an hour of picking/pitting/bagging/labeling/freezing.

These ended up in the fridge all day, mmm, tart cherry pie, but I just couldn’t do it: we had been out of frozen ones and I needed that first bag ready against the winter to come, that sense of getting the work started. One to save, first.

Up to you, he said.

Freezer it is.

Besides, a few more days out there in the sun for the rest and then we will have the perfect reason for a little celebratory baking anyway.

As I flash back to the person who shook our hands in the receiving line in Maryland and told us, Congratulations. You guys picked the hottest day for this date on record.

(Suddenly wondering if that record held….)

I showed Lillian this picture of my blooming sunflower and she was puzzled.

“Where’s the black?”

I explained that it starts off with lots and lots of tiny green buds at the center that become lots and lots of tiny yellow flowers and those become the seeds and yes they’re going to be black.

Six days later, those flowers look like tiny molds for what is to come.

Back when I planted a tomato seedling in a pot and a sunflower popped up next to it, I wanted them both so I left it that way and thought of it as a science experiment.

I’m so glad I did. I love looking out the window and seeing that sun-of-the-earth.

The sunflower is going to be done and gone long before the cherry tomato, which will take off from there.

Meantime, I just ran the ends in on the blanket. It came out of the blocking not only remarkably soft, as Rios is, but the gray shows how a good worsted-spun merino, where the fibers are combed to all run in the same direction, can have such a beautiful sheen to it.

(Foil at bottom to thwart slugs.)

The ordinary weekly chore of dragging the hose around the yard, pointing it towards a tree, setting a timer, BRAAAAAP then the next then the next then the next, repeat, while taking the time to closely see the changes: some week by week, some from even just this morning when my tomato was an inch shorter and the netting tent was tall enough.

This is why I haven’t put in an automatic system. There’s calibrating to varied sizes while knowing the sizes will change but also I seem to want it to make me have to go out and spend one-on-one time with the outdoors in the evening, when I finally can in the day.

Everything’s growing. Everything’s reaching up and out to what each plant or tree was meant to be. The best of the sun to them all.

These are the moments when I think having something living to watch and nurture and see responding to care, even a seedling in a paper cup, is as necessary to the soul as the air that we breathe.

It’s been a long time since someone yelled at me like that. I was not supposed to be out there. I was not supposed to be in their space. I most definitely was not supposed to be picking the strawberries and blueberries that they hadn’t been able to get at underneath that bird netting.

I looked up. The mourning dove on the telephone wire tucked its head under its wing: Not me!

That mockingbird was somewhere but I wasn’t quite sure just which tree. Loud, insistent, and incessant! I was surprised that a bird could make a person who has such a terrible time hearing on the phone know just how big a piece of its mind it was giving me. Nonstop. I almost wanted to apologize to the neighbors, while at the same time, it was totally making my day. Look at this! I’m hearing a bird!

Here, I offered, looking at one strawberry and then tossing it to the ground, that one you can definitely have. And that one. That’s probably the bug that chomped them–that’s definitely for you, too.

I finished picking the ripe ones and headed on inside so it would know I was no longer–what, a threat to its babies somewhere above my head? Did I accidentally chase off its one chance at a late mate this summer? Beats me.

Meantime, my plastic container of sourdough starter had fallen out of the freezer and shattered and my good friend Sue fed hers last night and brought over a half a jar, ready to go.

And so for the first time in too long there is a loaf of cranberry pumpkin vanilla orange sourdough bread that will be ready by lunchtime tomorrow and we are so looking forward to it.

With berries at breakfast to tide us over till it’s ready.

I’ve been checking the one apricot seedling that had aphids for any sign of them coming back. The plant’s not very big yet; it doesn’t take long to check it over.

This evening was a complete surprise: two leaves at the top were browned, drooping, and curled up. Those were completely healthy two days ago!

I lifted one a bit to try to see–and a little green worm crawled out.

Which is how I learned about leaf roller worms and the moths they turn into. The gardening sites said to destroy all leaves affected.

Well, it already did a good job of that, but here’s my scientific experiment (we’ll see how long it lasts.) If I disturb the growth tip at the end of the branch–and this was the main branch–then its entire length will cease to grow until next spring. No side shoots. One of the idiosyncrasies of apricots. But. Would tearing those leaves off do that, and is the growth tip already damaged.

How would I know if I don’t wait to find out?

And it’s not like the worm stage could have laid eggs.

I will be watching that thing like a–wait. Not a hawk.

Let’s say robin.

Now it’s just a matter of defeating the critters. Wish me luck.

Typing fast, it’s late, we went out for ice cream afterwards…

Went to a concert a friend was playing in. Ran into another friend: someone who got one of my apricot seedlings two years ago, only now it’s about this tall, she said, waving her hand at the top of her head.

Cool!

I caught the rabbit nibbling on my sour cherry blossoms.

Then for several days it avoided this strange new thing.

Today, not so much. And it kept going back in there! Hawkproofing, what’s not to love, right?

Meantime, I had this moment of, hey, that’s it: the infamous white beam! And the gray grooved interior wall in the living room! Ours was exactly like that, only a fair bit darker of a shade in a shaded room, terribly depressing, the only thing I really didn’t like about this house. It took us six years to get rid of it and it may be why I dislike gray on walls so much. Our contractor nailed wallboard over ours, but anyway, here’s a listing that takes me straight back to when we first walked in the door here. Same builder, same floor plan. This one has not been changed much.

Picture number 18. See that white beam connecting the refrigerator side to the oven side?

Eileen, DIL of the then-owners, was in the kitchen, phone in hand, as we and the realtor came in. She saw Richard’s forehead matching up with that board and said to the person on the other end, Oh, THESE people aren’t going to buy this house!

What she also knew was that the master shower had been remodeled to be short enough for her Japanese in-laws. The shower head hit him near bellybutton level, and the stall was small enough that he couldn’t fit in it to kneel down under it.

Within a day or two we had a telescoping shower head. Later, the stall became part of the hallway to the new master bedroom and that beam in the kitchen was the first thing the remodeler took away.

So it was kind of fun to explore our pre-remodel house in those pictures without having to actually live in it again.