A couple we know called and asked if they could drop by; they’d been baking and had some snickerdoodles to share.

Sure!

So as we were visiting, I mentioned having this rootstock-regrowth Yellow Transparent tree whose apples were ripe and needed to be processed into apple butter or applesauce; they’re great for those and mushy and terrible for eating out of hand.

They would love to!

And so the four of us found ourselves outside picking apples as the sun headed down. They said how many should we take and I said, the whole tree–please? (It isn’t very big.)They laughed. They got all but the smallest that just weren’t ready to go.

Apple butter needs apple cider–so much better than mass-bottled juice. We had some, thank you Trader Joe’s.

They went home happy to have a tasty project to work on with their boys and we got to be done with that tree for the year. They’ll have four sets of hands coring those apples, and you don’t even need to peel them for apple butter, especially not those super-thin skins that give the variety its name.

And the snickerdoodles were delicious.

Afterwards I baked this recipe with some of Andy’s Yuliya apricots after all that talking about fruit and desserts. Why not, it’s our you-crazy-kids day from when we were 21 and 22. One more year till we get to be Life, The Universe, and Everything!

Our longtime arborist came yesterday to give me a quote on cutting back where the trees had grown over the house again.

Chris remembered when the mostly-dead olive his men had taken out had been over in that one spot and it just wasn’t that long ago. He kept exclaiming: Look at all the cherries!

His eyes got wide when I said, Yes, and I’ve picked them twice already.

It is one prolific tree. I offered him some, but he said another client had actually already gifted him some. Beat me to it.

I showed him all the fruits on the mango, and he marveled, It was just a little stick! Look at it!

The first time he’d come, he and his wife had had a babysitting crunch and he’d brought his little boy with him. Remember that hat you gave him? he asked me. He loved it!

That six year old is a teenager now and his baby sister is–She’s HOW old?! I asked.

It was not lost on either of us in that moment that kids and trees tend to change before your very eyes, so slow you almost don’t see it and so fast you marvel in awe.

I told him my oldest grandson was ten now. He laughed and proclaimed, You win!

I later asked my friend Nina if she’d like some just-picked sour cherries. She was thrilled. Since we’re all vaccinated, that was the excuse for her and her husband to invite me and mine over for the evening. (Out of curiosity, I weighed the Rubbermaid container before we left: it was over three pounds and even now, the tree is loaded.)

Man did it feel good to sit and catch up as if life had never changed so drastically for so long. We met Calvin and Hobbes for the first time at their house thirty-something years ago, and we have made so many memories since. It felt great to be making new ones.

Holly’s coming by Monday. A bunch of cherries darkened nicely today but I think they can make it till then.

(Last week’s photo. They’re darker now.)

I Huck Finned her over by the fence.

Friends of ours dropped by with a jar of homemade strawberry jam and a loaf of banana chocolate chip bread by way of excuse for coming to say hi.

I asked them if they’d like to pick some sour cherries.

Sure! said Phyl.

I’ll wait, said Lee with a smile, sitting down to visit inside with my husband.

I had been daunted by the number of cherries still to go on that tree. They are small and they are many. But being able to offer something she was quite delighted to have felt great. We went through the leaves looking for the darkest reds together and between us we got her enough to maybe make a batch of jam, which is what she was aiming for, and since she’s putting them straight in the freezer for now, that’ll give the tree time to ripen more of them for her.

I’m pretending I’m not hoping for a jar. But I think I will mention I’ve got some Ball 4 oz mini jam jars taking up space in case she needs any.

I was trying to pick only the darkest ripest ones, but the sun was going down, the going was slow, and it was getting harder to be sure and I left the rest for another day. And because there were so many of them.

I would say there are at least two full 5 quart bowls’ worth left on that little tree.

It still amazes me that you can plant a stick in the ground in the winter and a few years later wonder what you’re going to do with all this fruit.

Wait, what? Live in a towering 2977′ Tinkertoy/Lego/AtAt mashup on a lot that is smaller than the footprint of my current house? $1.6M? And it’s only been on the market for 706 days? What? C’mon, people, snatch this one up, pronto!

I was looking at video of the San Jose peregrine nestlings pushing/falling/jumping out of the box today and the thought suddenly occurred to me: I had never really noticed that the dark feathers that grow in first and most prominently are the ones in their faces. The ones that make them look more like peregrines to their parents. (Debating to add about that moment years ago when a two day old hatchling that had barely achieved the white fluffball stage died and a few hours later the parents fed it to its siblings. The kids were hungry. Thus my thought that blackening cheeks are likely protective.)

In the 97F heatwave over here, two of my apricot seedlings grew visibly since yesterday, three did not, and the last one seems to finally be kicking the bucket after a long decline. But it may yet surprise me.

Suddenly there are so many. This is pretty much just one branch and after I picked a bowlful of the ripest.

I quickly squished the seeds out without fussing with any pitting gadgets; they were small and soft and gave way quickly. Sprinkled some sugar on, zapped for two minutes, threw it in the blender, all very quick. A tart sauce made just sweet enough, put on diced mangoes.

Recommended.

June sunlight hours and a hot day today and one of my two spring breba figs that I’ve been watching and watching and waiting and watching is suddenly rapidly browning up from its prior green. (The summer-crop ones on the tree have a long way to go still.)

It’s been protected by lengths of stabby citrus thorns but now we’re getting serious. I pulled some bird netting around the limb and hooked it onto them top and bottom like a malicious-looking velcro: can’t land on it, can’t reach to peck through it, can’t climb to it without those thorns in the way.

Can’t even leap at the fruit from the fence, because the neighbor’s raspberry overgrew the top and there’s an old rose bush below so we’ve pretty much got that covered. Go ahead. Take a stab at it. No wait, don’t.

Tomorrow’s post could be titled The Thorn Birds, but I don’t think so. I think that fig is mine.

Meantime, I spent three days this past week organizing yarn and trying constantly not to grab the nearest and prettiest and just start something on the spot because that’s way more fun than deciding whether to group by color, brand, or how much I adore it: the very act of having it in my hand made my needles crave dancing. Good.

Now I have to narrow my choices down to a single ball to start–and then go and start.

Finally got the pictures to come through!

The amaryllises suddenly all decided at once that it was spring. Today there were more.

The Anya seedling from 2020 with the late one that sprouted not quite six weeks ago: actual apricots are going to be awhile yet, but they’re doing their part.

The peaches all somehow still seem to be on the August Pride tree, entirely untouched by critters. Maybe the sweet cherries deflected them? I don’t think I have ever yet actually tasted a peach from that young tree and I’m trying not to get my hopes too high, but I think this is the year.

Over on the knitting front, I’ve been keeping a small project by the bed for when a certain someone is taking his time getting ready to call it a day so that it’s peachy fine with me if he dawdles. Size six needles, a fair number of stitches–it was just something to keep randomly plugging away at.

But a row or two slowly does add up and last night to my surprise I realized that hey–I need to cast this thing off. It’s quite done.

I forgot to take its picture…

The problem with only focusing on what you want, she groused silently at the scrub jay, is that you cut off what you could have had.

I had chased it out of my Stella tree on seeing it yanking away in there. It got its not-yet-dark red cherry. The rest of the cluster, pale and small and far too unripe to nourish anything yet, was left on the ground.

There was knitting, too, but the picture is somewhere off to lunch.

To answer CCR’s question, apricot seeds need several months of serious chilling in order to be able to sprout in the spring. I had them in the freezer from late summer till early winter, then the fridge while I was debating when to start them.

Pictures from May 9 and May 22 for the kernel in my second batch that sprouted long after the others, right when I was about to give up and toss it. Even then it grew slower than some of the others despite the warmer weather.

It’s also the one that got moved into a pot that was half topsoil/half the newly-arrived Lobster Blend from the coastofmaine.com folks. That’s when it suddenly took off–It definitely approved of the upgrade.

And in the random surprises of nature department: remember that dying apple tree my husband cut down that grew back a different variety from the rootstock? They were mushy as all get-out, but sour till the last moment so the wildlife learns to leave them alone.

They go bad fast after picking. Second day. I figure that tree’s best characteristic is that it consistently blooms right when the Fuji does.

Two years ago I found dozens of snails hiding inside that hollowed-out area and though it was just totally gross I squished them. No poisons.

Friday I discovered the tree’s revenge on them for eating its blossoms. That Yellow Transparent is determined to live no matter what.

My sister asked for two of the Anya apricot kernels a few months ago and I sent her some.

One never came up, one almost made it–but then faded away, and I had no more to offer; she was going to have to wait another year. The one small hope was that while I was cracking them open for everybody one went shooting away from me and had not been seen since; maybe it was somehow wedged under the dish drying rack and would finally show up? (Not as if I didn’t look repeatedly.)

I would have mailed her one of my seedlings if I’d thought it could survive days in the dark.

This afternoon my daughter opened the freezer, looked at the door, and went, Mom, why is there a kernel in your freezer?

It had not been cracked open. It was not the one that got away–oh wait. Obviously yes in its own way it did, but, huh, how on earth did that end up there. I think–I’m not sure–that there was one too many to get the little Rubbermaid tub lid to seal, back when I had them all, and it had just been put next to the rest on its own and been long forgotten.

The mail had not yet come. I shot off a note to Marian but didn’t wait to hear back because I knew what the answer would be and put it in what seemed to be a strong envelope. Inside that envelope I put a corner I’d just cut off from a padded envelope and had taped the cut edges shut around the kernel.

She got back to me quite happy about this before the mailman picked it up. I had already put three stamps on the thing to bribe the post office not to mess this up.

Sometimes, just sometimes, you get a second chance.

I don’t know if it’s the sheep’s-rear-stinky wool wedged in the tree keeping the squirrels out or the sounds of squawking peregrine fledglings occasionally coming from my computer, if they can even hear that from outside. But whatever, something’s working and there’s still fruit on the trees.

Speaking of squirrels, I’ll mention it here for my mom, who’s not on Facebook: my cousin Jim reports that he and his family were watching a movie tonight when they heard a thud, scampering, and lots of squeaks. Everybody went running to see what on earth?

A squirrel (it wasn’t a very big one) had fallen through the skylight, the cat had chased it, and it had leaped for the nearest hiding place–which happened to be the toilet. Somebody had the presence of mind to whip out their phone and hit record for posterity. It was trying to get out, it was now trying to retreat and hide from them but wait let’s not drown, and the poor thing looked like a Mark Rober video reject.

They got a big thing of Tupperware and corralled it and Jim felt it shivering through the plastic. He got it outside, I’m sure shutting the door behind him first so it couldn’t dash back in, and tried to let it go.

It just stayed right there and kept shivering.

His daughter’s studying to be a nurse. They got some rags and bundled the poor soaked thing up and she confessed to petting it for about ten minutes to calm it down while offering it some cat food. Which it finally nibbled at.

At last it went off to go be a squirrel again at owl o’clock. Watch that curfew, kid.

Jim reports (not needing to mention the whole pandemic thing by way of context) that it was the most exciting Friday night they’d had in some time.

Well, will you look at that. Photos at last! Lemons! And sour cherries!

We know from experience that if you go to Santa Cruz on a Saturday you’d better go early because there are only a few routes over the mountains for the millions of people in the Bay Area who might want a bit of ocean in their weekend. I did a bit of knitting in the car and in the parking lot as we waited for the place to open and it felt great to have good wool in my hands.

Mutari‘s chocolate bars are expensive but are the best there are–and the vegan offerings in their shop are many. It’s our daughter’s favorite spot.

The kicker is that our melanger had been going since yesterday afternoon but that was just going to be bars. She wanted hot chocolate and truffles, specifically, theirs.

I chuckled over their Wild Bolivian–and we bought one to compare, because that was the label of the nibs in our machine. Their chocolate is always tempered right and roasted to perfection because they’re pros who know what they’re doing. It would tell us what we could aspire to.

Us, we just play with our food.

And it’s all good.

I’d been wondering for awhile if the very overloaded branches hanging straight down on the Gold Nugget mandarin would bounce back up once the weight of all those oranges came off them, or whether after growing that way for so long they were stuck like that.

Turns out they did rebound nicely.

My back suggested I stop picking at seventeen pounds, with about three more to go; not bad at all for a young tree.

Michelle cut, I pushed down on the juicer. After we all drank some, there’s nearly a gallon in the fridge and we haven’t even done all the picked ones yet.

I’ve decided it’s a kid-friendly variety: not tart, really, just sweet (but not too much.) A bit bland. Maybe I should have picked them in April? This is the first time we ever got enough to juice, we’re newbies at this.

But it is the one type of orange that gets sweet even if it doesn’t get the amount of heat that other varieties need to do so, and if we want tart, hey, there’s a Meyer lemon tree right across the yard.

I found that fingertips dangling down in our little 1980s machine did a good job of collecting the pulp into one spot as the juice continued to spin out of it. Grab it out and go for the next one.

I’m trying out that lobster shell compost. It was black and velvety rich and finely crumbly in the hands and you could just hear the plants swooning. I mixed it in to about 60% organic bedding soil and pretended I knew what I was doing. (I only buy organic after getting soil from Costco a few years ago that was full of little green plastic beads.)

The youngest Anya seedling is the guinea pig. It’s pretty dwarfed in that 15 gallon fabric pot but given the vigor of its roots I didn’t want it to grow through my 5 gallon in a month, seeing as how it is, in fact, a tree.

On the other hand, it’s too heavy now to move it much. So it’s in a good spot because it had to be.

The fabric pots dry out fast, but the other apricot that’s in one is looking really healthy and happy. They do not like soggy roots so those are a good counterbalance to my tendency to overwater based on the fear that I can’t go out in the bright summer sun to rescue them before evening’s safer UV levels.

The bigger thing is: I finally went to the new audiologist today. It felt so strange to just go do a normal errand out in the wild like that.

She was a peach. And she was thorough. I’ve been dealing with hearing aids since I was 27 and never before has someone tested to see how well I lipread.

There was the standard man’s voice speaking words into one ear, then the other, where you try to repeat each word back. She chuckled at one guess: “Well, that’s creative.”

But then, taking her mask off from the other side of the thick glass, with the lighting not super good for it from my view, she went through what was clearly the same list of words as I sat in the anechoic chamber–and I zipped right through those with confidence. Only had two I didn’t quite get. It was absolutely revelatory to me. I had NO idea I was that good at it. I knew how much I need to see people’s faces, but…!

She examined my hearing aids and said they were eight iterations ago, and now they can do all these other things.

Cool. That’s what I was there for. My old ones sometimes turn themselves off randomly and are clearly at the end of their lifespans.

When she said Oticon would take two weeks at their end, I asked if I could pay for overnight shipping? I want to be able to hear grandkids sooner rather than later. She checked into that and, yes, they could do a rush job on the whole thing, sure.

A week from Monday my cracked ear mold will be history, I will have much better background noise cancellation, and we’ll see how it goes.

And even with that rush she charged me about $1500 less than the last time/last guy. Nice.

As she was writing things up, there was a computer screen next to me with two audiogram charts (no name visible) with five slightly wobbly lines that curved up a bit and then down again with Xs and Os marked along the way for right vs left ear, but these other lines too were marked for–tympannometry? I don’t know, and five seems odd when you’re talking ears but that’s what was there.

When she got done, I motioned towards the screen and said, “It looks like middle school band members trying to read the music.”

She glanced at it and guffawed. “You ARE creative!”