Two weddings 850 miles and 24 hours apart. Got to one dress rehearsal dinner, at least (the one I escalatored my skirt just prior to) but there was no chance on the other.

This afternoon, one bridge over the Bay was closed down for repairs and all traffic rerouted. We’d taken the cheap flight via changing planes in Vegas so as not to have to take the 7 am return and we didn’t have a lot of extra time.

Michelle had opted for the 7 am return–and they canceled the flight on her after she got to the airport.

T h e  T R A F F I C.

Richard’s cellphone rang as we were finally crossing the second bridge: did we want a ride? Phyllis knew we’d be coming in and that we’d be tired.

Yes oh please yes–but–we’re not actually home yet…

We saw some of the wedding party entering the hotel as Phyllis was looking for a parking spot and figured we were good.

I apologized to Nina for my shoes: I hadn’t had time enough to open the suitcase to find the other pair. She laughed for sheer joy of the day.

So much more later, but man, it’s late in the time zone we’re feeling.

One of those days when I ran All The Errands.

And got to see a Red-tailed hawk soaring overhead. My day was complete.

Oh wait, not quite. Almost forgot the YouTube link: we have three female falcons this year at San Jose City Hall and fledge watch is coming up soon.

“You’ve always liked to garden,” he said today.

“Yes, but I didn’t for years,” I answered, saying that I think it was because having grown up an outdoorsy type and being so sun-confined with my lupus, I think I was afraid that if I broke out of that at all I’d get more and more reckless with it and so I’d kept that side of myself tamped down hard. For years. It was just easier not to have to look too up close at that sense of loss. Years ago, when getting to see my children grow up was a long way off and by no means a sure thing and I was doing everything I could, I suddenly realized one day that I’d just spent six months without even once walking all the way around my own back yard.

Now I feel like I’m reclaiming not just it but me. I deeply need to dig in the dirt and to see life coming forth from it. I picture Parker planting the seeds of all his apples and it just makes my day every time: from my botany-loving Grandfather Jeppson who died before I knew him and yet whom my Dad says I take after to my grandson, a straight line down the ages through every circumstance.

I reminded myself of that conversation with my husband as I went out to put my tomatoes in the ground at 6:00 pm. It was a little early in the evening for May but I had a lot to do. I kept my back to the sun and hey, look! The first actual tomato!

Oops. My critter cover didn’t fit over that tall tomato cage. I need to figure out how to set that wiring around them all, it’s been wrapped too long and wants to sproing inward on itself a little too hard. Might take two sets of hands and Richard was off at a ham radio meeting.

All these tomato plants were planted at the same time in the same seed starter kit. Two were moved into a bigger pot early on and put outside in direct sun; a third awhile after; and the rest, well, they were left in front of what wasn’t a great window for sun exposure to begin with. Look at that difference, and the roots far more so: a gallon of soil held tight vs, for the smallest, no discernible side roots, only the white squiggle it started out of the seed with. Same age.

Problem was that I’d needed more soil and buying more soil meant being out in the sun at the nursery during business and non-rush-hour hours and finally I simply did it.

The little ones will catch up soon enough.

And yes, I blogged several weeks ago about planting new seedlings. They were from the same batch as these and they all died in the first 24 hours. I transitioned the rest more gently from scraggles in the window to being in bigger pots outside to in the ground and I waited till I had most of them too far along for the snails to go after.

And then I went looking for baby apples and snapped clamshell covers over all the sweet Fujis I could find and as many of the more sour, less vulnerable Yellow Transparents as I could. Some of last year’s clamshells had given up the ghost; I clearly need more. A good problem to have this year.

“Can I write about it on my blog?”

She told me sure, anything that raises awareness. Get checked.

My oldest was 27 when her melanoma was diagnosed. It was a highly aggressive type. She had had to go to the doctor twice in two weeks for something utterly unrelated when he surprised her by saying he thought that that mole had changed since her earlier appointment and he wanted to check it.

Mole? Who was talking about the mole?

He had actually biopsied it several years earlier but he didn’t let that stop him from doing so again–it just felt to him that something was wrong there.

They took out four inches to quite some depth from her arm. She didn’t have to do chemo and she didn’t have to do radiation because he’d caught it so very early, possibly in its first two weeks. She did have to have frequent checks thereafter; melanoma can recur anywhere.

Her experience got me to stop ignoring the spot my husband had been saying he saw on the top of my head. Mine was basal cell and at least eight months old by that point, and I’d just shrugged and written it off as another manifestation of lupus. Which it was not. By that point they had to take out over an inch of hair permanently from the center of my scalp, leaving a thumbprint indentation in my head and a cowlick that are there still. I was lucky.

She is past the five year mark and heading towards six. No return of her cancer. It just dawned on me, writing this, that wait–so so am I. Although, basal-cell, paid attention to, is not a big deal. Melanoma is very much a big deal.

A doctor had a bad feeling about it, trusted his instincts, and insisted on checking again.

And so my daughter is alive.

The mango with a dab of unsweetened grape Koolaid solution to keep the birds away. The ants were starting to be a problem on the flowers; I sprinkled cinnamon around the base of the trunk and over one flower cluster where one was being obstinate about not letting go and they all disappeared and have not come back.

We learned about honeybees when I was a kid, complete with a field trip to a building that had an active hive going and a bee tunnel to outside at the back of the place so as to keep kids who have no sense and might have allergies and any possibility of stingers as far from each other as possible.

I learned that insects, of all things, dance to talk. Honeybees, anyway.

And so here I was Sunday night, flashlight in hand, looking for the center of the frost cover to get it up and positioned over the Alphonso mango tree just so when movement below caught my eye.

I got down on my knees to see.

There was a honeybee on the ground, looking, frankly, dead. Or maybe it was just too cold. But there was another one walking in rapid ovals or figure eights, I’m not sure, and wiggling just so at intervals while another honeybee circled in the air a little above. I remembered that the longer from one end of the dance to the other, the farther away from the hive the coveted flowers that had been found.

I watched. It was a very short back and forth, back and forth. Here be food (or maybe a good place to swarm to, I’m not sure). Come.

And I noticed that it was doing its dance right next to a clear white Christmas light resting against the ground looking brighter than I had noticed before. But then how often do I stare at the filament part in the dark. It offered concentrated warmth as the temperature dropped around it.

I shined my flashlight at the dancer and seemed to distract it a split second but it went back to its important work. I wondered if my tree lights flicking on automatically had confused the bees as to when the sun was supposed to set.

That morning I’d found I think four honeybees in a tight faces-in-together cluster on that cover with another coming in to join them and another over thataway. Whether I interrupted the early stages of a swarm or not I don’t know, but they didn’t mind my sending them away by, as always, patting the back of the fabric as gently as I could to help free their legs from it.

I continued covering the mango for the night and at the commotion of the movements above the ones that had missed nighttime roll call at the hive moved along to places unseen.

They say that honeybees are placid and not inclined to sting. Finally, having seen it again and again right in front of me (not to mention my hand hitting where those stingers are), I believe it. And I feel privileged to have been the wallflower watching the dance in the night.

I’m reading the news from Baltimore, where my daughter lived two years ago, recognizing some of the local spots and dealing with the small stuff here as a way to cope.

Phone spammers. I know, this was supposed to stop with the Do Not Call registry but there seem to be more and more of these of late.

If they say, “Press 1 to be taken off our list,” do NOT press 1. If you do, you’ve engaged with them and they then claim they have a business relationship with you, ergo, they have permission to call. I usually simply leave the phone off the hook till they’re gone.

But when I actually heard a human rather than a recording a few days ago, I broke in to tell the guy flat out, “Why would I hire you when the only thing I know about you is you’re willing to break the law? Y’know, the Do Not Call…”

But he had hung up before I could finish that second sentence. Wait, wait, I wasn’t done with my spiel!

I cornered the person in charge of the sign-up for taking soup and cookies to the Ronald McDonald House at church this morning and asked when the next time around was going to be.

I didn’t say that the last time I took a pot of soup there I’d made it in my stewpot, which spilled all over the car. I did say what I now had to cook the stuff in. It makes it a lot easier.

Heather (yesterday’s post) was delighted when I told her what I immediately planned to do with her old crockpot. And it was so much better than my old one…

…Which, when I described it to her, the bright orange and brown and flaking teflon interior, she grinned in recognition, Oh! My mom has one like that!

I had to laugh at my inner surprise–of course she did. From the ’70’s. Hadn’t I noticed I was getting older?

We’re selling everything, she said, we’re not taking anything with us. We’ll start over after we get there.

When she told me their travel plans, that made more sense. Her husband’s about to start his medical residency in Boston. They aren’t going straight there, though; they’re going to Massachusetts from California by way of Alaska, driving, so as to let the grandparents see their little ones. Road trip!

She sent out a note last night of a few things that hadn’t sold at their garage sale, saying, please, come, take, free now, it’s all going to charity in the morning, if you want it it’s yours.

I told her I’d bought my crockpot at eighteen–nineteen, though, come to think of it, it was after I’d moved out of the dorms. Crockpots were a new thing and a huge fad and not cheap and given that I was paying my college tuition for the year out of my summer job money, it was quite the splurge.

It has, though, one can definitely say at this point, seen better days. It had a teflon surface and if you ever want to see what those look like this many years later, well, as Richard finalized it this morning, “We’re not cooking in that” (this would not be a change) and I said it needs to no longer be taking up space in our house. An easy agreement.

Sentimental value object upstaged by actually useful sentimental value object: I am badly going to miss Heather and Jared when they’re gone and I will think of them when I slow-cook apple butter. Or take a pot of soup to the Ronald McDonald House at Children’s Hospital (and not have to borrow a safe crockpot for it. They then have you transfer the food from yours to theirs when you get there.)

Heather’s little cooker will help take care of patients and their families here while Jared’s taking care of patients there. I like that.

She almost didn’t tell me what the price tag had been at the yard sale and she almost didn’t let me pay it but she relented.

And so I finally have a big crockpot again that I would actually be willing to put food into. My late ’70’s sunflower-orange-and-brown one (I kid you not) is hereby utterly evicted.

I love most that I now have a memento of a young couple I adore and whose kids I hope someday will go to Stanford so I can get to see who they grow up to be. Because I know they’ll be adults to look forward to.

Meantime, got any favorite recipes?

He banked left, then quickly right, twirling around at the last like an Olympic ice skater’s grand finale just outside the window. Seeing that he’d gotten our attention, (me: Did you see that? Husband: Yeah I saw that) he nodded, hesitated a moment, and then went back out in the manner he’d come in.

Oh. Right. The birdfeeder’s gone empty–I’ll get right to it, thanks.

So yes, the Cooper’s hawk is fine after being attacked by that raven yesterday. One can only marvel at his timing with the thought, as if it were a wild creature’s intention, that it was nice of Coopernicus to let us know.

I had what I hoped was just the yarn.

I asked my knitting friend Kevin at Purlescence for advice on how long to make it, having never been a teenage boy (and having never actually met that particular teenage boy). Short beanie? Brim? He laughed and said make it as long as that skein will let you take it. (I only had the one.)

And, I thought, he lives in California now but the whole of your life is ahead of you where he is. Look at my oldest now. Alaska! He might need it. And so I think it came out long enough for a good brim. (I cast off with–here let me go look at this strand a moment–a single yard left over.)

I sent off the hat: Malabrigo, because only the best would do.

There are pages and pages of story here and most of it I don’t know and never will but this I do know: that it was one of the most important things I’d ever knit.

His father later exclaimed to my husband, And it’s so soft!

And it all started because I forgot my phone…

Skype. Three grandchildren four and under.

Daddy, holding the baby, hands the iPad to the two-as-of-this-month as they walk down the hall together so that Hudson can show us something.

Remember Etch-a-Sketches? How you shook them up and down really hard to erase the picture?

He was so proud of being trusted with that thing and he really carried it off: the ceiling, his face, the floor (and I couldn’t tell what-all else) at race track speed as he pumped his arms up and down, while on our side of the screens we were absolutely helpless with laughter.

Still giggling.

Twenty-eight years. It took twenty-eight unfathomably long years.

Debbie married someone who grew up here, and I grew up with her and her brothers. She stayed in Maryland while my husband and I moved to her husband’s hometown when we were at the baby-and-toddlers stage of parenthood.

So from time to time I would be back visiting my folks (before they moved away in retirement) and from time to time she would be visiting her in-laws.

But every single time she came to town, I would be out of town. Or sick, memorably, pneumonia one time and I forget what the other times. And every single time I was back home, she was out of town. Again and again and again.

As her in-laws’ health slowly failed in old age, their kids would come to visit, and one time I looked at this guy in church who was the spitting image of Curt and went, You’re…and he, knowing my parents’ daughter was in his growing-up ward, went, You’re…? Yes. And so I shared with him what I’d written when her brother my age had died and he passed it gratefully along to Debbie and all her family.

His eighty-nine-year-old father passed away last week. With all of his children in town and one of them by his side in the middle of the night comforting him as he slipped away at home. We should all be so lucky.

The funeral was today, and the children were admiring, sober, funny, thoughtful, with a tear or three. Debbie’s husband recounted several of them going on a bike ride with their Dad setting the pace; he finally had had to say, Dad, we need a break a moment, would you mind slowing down a bit?

And then he asked, And guess how old Dad was then? Seventy-seven. He rode 250 miles a week. If the mountain went straight up he rode straight up, none of this zigzagging slowly because it’s too hard. Here to San Francisco and back, all the time.

The children addressed their mother directly with great love as she sat quietly in her wheelchair watching the proceedings. Her hair was perfect and her dress was beautiful. One child after another thanked each of their parents’ caregivers by name. It is hard to be a long-distance child in such circumstances and those good people had loved their folks and had made it possible for them to stay in their home as they’d tended to them.

Their mother’s Alzheimer’s had taken any semblance of recognition away from her long ago and yet they addressed her as if she were wholly here, knowing that someday she would be able to look back on her life and hear and know every word. This was for her. This was for them all. This was for all of us.

At the end, as people filed outside, I found myself gradually making my way towards that wheelchair, carefully, not wanting to get in the family’s way.

Debbie was tending to her mother-in-law. I waited.

She saw me and as my face lit up, waiting, waiting, she looked like doIknowOH IT’S YOU!!!! We threw our arms around each other, then held each other at arm’s length, taking each other in.

And in that moment I knew that over all those years and all those frustrating, missed opportunities, it wasn’t just me, she had wanted to connect like that, too. And finally, finally, there we were.

How ARE you?!!

I was sure I had seen familiar backs of the heads at the front of the chapel and so I had. The crowd parted enough right on cue then for me to see: her parents had come from Maryland, too, and she turned to them. Her mother had the same moment of wait, do I–OH!!! (Hugs!) And in excitement she turned to her husband to share the joy.

He wasn’t quite getting it. To be fair, I might well have been a teenager the last time he’d seen me. He wasn’t quite hearing the name in the noise or putting it together or knowing that face but I gave him a quick hug anyway and I knew they would fill him in later. I can just hear it: Wait, that was Lawrence and Frances’s daughter?!

His wife asked after me, after my parents; yes, they’re in good health, yes, Mom still walks a few miles every day, they’re doing great!

Someone from home. For the three of them and for me. Love, stretching all the way back to my birth and Debbie’s (and my father-in-law grew up with her dad!) and all our parents as newlyweds and young parents. All those memories suddenly come together in one chapel far away in California.

I miss Curt and I am sorry for his family’s loss. I do know that after all the hospice care, it’s a relief, too; they know their dad, grampa, and great-grampa is free to look down on them now with all earthly sorrows fallen away.

But what a deep sense of joy. So much love. It was always there. Loss let it be seen.

So I lamented that the hawk hadn’t come up to the picnic table to say hi up close since we’d cut down and replaced the trees on the side.

Well, why hadn’t I said I’d been missing him? And so suddenly there he was. Perched on the back of the chair, all but waving a talon hi on the other side of the window as we took in each other’s presence on this fine warm (91 degree) day. He fluffed out his feathers.

I loved how he was framed by five, soon to be six blooming amaryllises; he started craning his head around and–if I’d only had my camera!–looked straight up into a deep red one bowed down just above his face.

When he was ready to go, he turned and lightened the load as birds often do before lifting off.

And the Red Lion will bloom a little brighter next year for it.

Me: The scan was fine so I can cancel that appointment, right? (I feel fine. I don’t want to be a patient. I’ve been a patient a lot. Now it’s my turn to just plain be an ordinary person while I can for as long as I can and I’m pretending I never have to do the patient thing again and just let me enjoy my break while I have it, willya.)

The nurse: Um, no, you better go.

The specialist: The scan was not quite so perfectly fine.

And that is how I ended up having a procedure done today that was an inpatient one done under anesthesia back in my mom’s day. I did not know this doctor, but he struck me as being terribly weary of inflicting pain on the innocent. But the thing is what it is. I had no idea what other burdens he might be bearing; my heart went out to him. I wanted badly to comfort him, to tell him it’s his job to do his best to keep us healthy and it’s our job to be grateful for his efforts and skills and caring. It wouldn’t bother him if he didn’t care, it’s a sign he’s a good person. As for my end of things, it would be just one day–or the start of knowing what to cope with, and knowledge itself is power over illness, along with all the love in the world.

I at last got him to laugh when I told him I was going to call my daughter and tell her what I did to celebrate her birthday. He did seem better after that.

And the verdict is (roll the drums, blast the trumpets): no bladder cancer. The Remicade and Humira side-effects haven’t gotten to me yet. And I say (waving my magic wand, making it so) they never will. So there.

And the knitter in me wonders if I should knit him a hat. A warm and soft one.

The hawk had clearly just had a meal because he hadn’t quite finished cleaning his feathers yet. He fluffed them out a bit, content.

The bird feeder had been empty for a few hours and I’d been waiting for the sun to be less intense before going out to refill it–and so there was no potential prey in sight but to look at him that’s not what he was wanting just then anyway.

It was clearly the male of the Cooper’s pair and as in so many years in the past, it was nesting season and he had stopped by for a visit: claiming that fence was a territorial display, definitely, but he was people watching, too–he’s always liked to do that this time of year.

With the olive and buckthorn trees gone missing he hasn’t been coming close to the window to gaze in at us like he used to, though.  (Grow new trees grow!)

I’ll take whatever I can get. I got to commune a few minutes with this magnificent wild thing, taking care to blink slowly from time to time so he would know he was the dominant one and that it was safe to be here.

Love love love having my hawk stop by.

A raven caught me suddenly noticing him too a backyard away and up in a tree. No bullying and stealing from Coopernicus this time, buddy–git!

Immediately it took off to dense bushes to the left where I couldn’t see it.

The hawk went where it wanted when it wanted and in no particular hurry after that.