Nope, no Stitches.

Woke up too sick to get out of bed, started barfing nonstop, went from no cough to “sounds like pneumonia” in three hours (X-ray was clear for now) and spent five hours getting fluids pumped in me at Urgent Care. Just got home.

Not what I wanted.

Mel and Kris Kunihiro were going to custom-make me some extra-talls of their rice bowls for me to pick up. I’ll see if I can reach them on FB. I would gladly reimburse anyone who picked, say, four of them up for me if they have them.

Okay, back to bed.

(Ed. to add in the morning, they didn’t bring those bowls so that part is all good; we can wait till next time I see them.)

First peach flower of the year. I wish I could send a whole armful to New England. (Don’t miss that second video down on the Washington Post site…)

Not quite a snowbank of them yet.

Two days till Stitches!

After yesterday’s 82 degrees, the first two peach buds of the season swelled and turned pink on the August Pride today.

We have the sweet, sweet sound of the dishwasher doing its second load. The part was the right part. The repair worked. And it didn’t die after one round like last week. Would I go to that parts place again in that sketchy part of town where the owner had to unlock the door to let me in, um, probably not. (The guy in Fremont hadn’t had it.) But we don’t have to shell out yet another hundred-forty for the motherboard after all and that is a huge relief.

Coopernicus (pictures of him here) did a swoop around the patio and together we got to see him with wings and tail stretched wide right on the other side of the window. Gorgeous. A birdwatching trip from the comforts of home.

I did a quick run this evening to the local Trader Joe’s to buy a favorite thing for my favorite man.

Frozen green figs. Who ever thought you’d find… Well okay so I got that too.

Going to my car, there was a man sitting in his next to mine, waiting, lights on. Clearly his wife too had run in for just one thing and was being distracted by all the finds one finds in that store.

And facing the rear in the car seat in the back was a very little girl.

Her mommy had left. She couldn’t see her daddy. Bedtime was bearing down on her too and she looked like a baby who wasn’t quite crying yet, but it was sure coming.

I smiled my best grandma smile and waved hi at her.

She stared.

I waved and smiled again and put my fresh-pressed apple juice in the car. I’d bought four. It was going to be a squeeze in that fridge but my Richard likes theirs better than anyone else’s.

She looked like she might be okay with being here after all.

The man rolled down her window and I told him, Cute baby!

But what he’d wanted was for me to hear: “Bye!”

“Bye!”

“Bye!”

“Bye!”

We waved and bye’d at each other a few more times, the world a friendly place for a child too small to have more than a word or maybe two that she could reliably express yet, but by golly she got to put it to great use and she made my day.

At the last, I changed it on her to a double-word sentence of “Bye bye!” and reluctantly pulled my car out of that spot, time to go.

She made Richard happy too when I got home and told him about her.

I just looked at the remote-read on the thermometer under the mango tree. Forty-six and heading down. Time to turn on the Christmas lights to keep it warm and safe for the night.

It’s been a good day.

I’m so tired let’s see if I can proofread this right. Happy tired.

Their goofs meant I totally won. Not enough other people could find them, I think.

We had this one spot behind the plum tree that was a perfect space, now that the weed trees were gone, for another, specifically a bigger tree than some of the others I’ve put in. Not being in a raised bed meant that much more allowable height, and it likely wouldn’t shade the solar there even if it got out of hand (which it won’t.) And the neighbor on the other side of the fence there had once so hoped out loud that we would plant a peach near enough to reach over her side a bit.

If we put one there it could go that far but it wouldn’t have to–perfect.

And I could plant a standard size without having to look for a semi-dwarf.

The only problem, and the thing that had stopped me previously, was the roots I would have to deal with that would surely be left over from those weed trees.

I only considered it because I’d fallen in love with a gorgeous specimen of an Indian Free peach two weeks ago, the last one at that nursery, and by the time we decided that yeah, we really did want it it was long gone and from every other retailer I called, too. Bare root and potted both, sold out.

That’s what happens when Dave Wilson, the grower, describes it as the all-time best-tasting peach they know of.

And: Indian Free (developed and named by Thomas Jefferson) does not get peach leaf curl disease. In our foggy area, this is huge. It produces in September and October, long after my others are done for the year. The peaches are tart and presumably, like my Yellow Transparent apples, uninviting to squirrels until full ripeness–at which point, suddenly, wow. The peaches, anyway.

Once we’d agreed on it I didn’t want to lose a year’s growth to having to wait. One last try. I clicked on Where To Buy for the variety one more time this morning, even though I hadn’t found anything at all within three hours and I’d spent an hour and a half on the phone yesterday asking.

But I’d wondered about this one retailer I hadn’t called–because clicking from Dave Wilson to ProBuild had been a complete bust, a page that said they sold building (only) materials. The end. Well then why…?

How about if we try clicking “handout”? For another retailer, that had been a dead link so I’d ignored them all but let’s try it.

Turns out ProBuild does have a nursery on the side with a list of what they stock but the page is not on their site but on Dave Wilson’s instead. Huh.

Indian Free. There you go.

I called them.

Sure, we have five! Bare root. Do you want us to reserve you one?

I told them nah, I’ll be right there–well, as in, coming from… Thinking, it would only be about an hour, right? I figured I was safe and I wanted to pick it out myself. (I had to pick up the dishwasher part on the way. It was an hour and a half.)

Those who have driven the steeply twisty Highway 17 over the mountains with slow trucks and heavy traffic and quickly-alternating vivid sunshine and dark under the redwoods will understand when I say I felt like I had to pry each deathgrip finger off the steering wheel when I got there, but I got there.

More or less. There was no sign with that street number. There was no sign that said ProBuild. I saw a nursery, but I wanted the one I’d talked to and I did not want to make that return drive in rush hour traffic. I figured I just hadn’t gotten there yet. (Wait! Is that Golden Fleece?! Gunilla! It was, or at least their old place, but I did not dare take the time to find out.) I kept on going, but no, the numbers were going the wrong way. Turning back, it really was San Lorenzo Nursery at 235 River over there. No sign of the word ProBuild anywhere, not even on the construction-supplies place next door.

I looked around a bit and asked for help, and when I explained the lupus/I need to stay out of the sun thing, the guy was wonderfully helpful.

I saw four. (Come to think of it now as I write, maybe they’d put one aside for me over in the area marked Holding after all–I’d better let them know I already got it.) I picked out the one with the thickest trunk. “There aren’t any on Citation rootstock, right?” (Semi-dwarfing.)

“No,” he apologized.

I hadn’t expected one; “They didn’t make any this year, though, I don’t think.” (He agreed, with a look on his face of oh, so this lady knows!)

They hadn’t been planted in paper pots as the season had gone on. The price hadn’t been quadrupled. There was a long sand and soil bed that he pulled the one out of for me and then he wrapped up the bare roots in plastic for the drive home. The tree was still dormant. This was good.

$19.95 and no tax on food-producing plants. Twenty bucks for a lifetime of perfect fall fruit, and from a really nice group of people.

I drove back over 17 with the tree going from the far back to partly into the passenger side next to me. I knew now where the mudslide had been, where the lanes were going to be narrowed. I was in no hurry. (Yank that wheel lady and you’ll have a faceful of twigs.)

UV levels went down to 1 and it was time to start.

I hit root. Root. Another root. Chipping away at the biggest there was a sudden smell of eucalyptus. There were earthworms doing their best at it all. I pulled one way back, then got sensible and got out the clippers and got rid of it.

I ran off to get Richard. And back home again. We were losing sun time fast and you don’t leave a bare root tree drying out.

In the end I did my best and simply straddled it over the chipped-away big root down there in the dirt, knowing it was dead and this was alive and the peach would win. Not perfect but I’d made a pretty darn good big hole and it would do. I mixed in soil amendment and raised the level around the trunk to just so high below the graft point like I’d seen the pros do.

I stepped back and looked and it was suddenly just overwhelmingly gorgeous. That’s a big, healthy tree. I can’t wait.

Found a guy who said he’ll call tomorrow when he has the dishwasher part in. Beats waiting two weeks on Sears.

It wasn’t till hours later that I realized that Sears, on the other hand, would let me return it if it doesn’t make the machine work. Here’s hoping supporting the little guy over the big corporation turns out okay.

Went to open the oven at dinnertime and yelped and then walked around the corner to show Richard what that was all about–holding the door handle out to him, the one from the upper oven, the one that, like the right half of my stove, still works. (We wrestled it back in place. Dinner was inside there–we were motivated.)

And after all this we need to figure out what’s wrong with the leaking fridge, although so far it’s still cold where it needs to be cold.

I think my kitchen is on strike.

Milk Pail turned 41 today and Steve threw a cheese tasting party in celebration and that it wouldn’t be the last. We got the invite.

Seeing the Wensleydale with cranberries, I said, “I’m going to tell you something I bet you don’t know.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

I told him that Wensleydales ate too much for how much wool they produced and so the commercial flocks pretty much had vanished except for one flock (actually might have been two, come to think of it) hanging on preserving the breed. And then the handspinning market found out that there was this rare really cool lustrous wool to play with and that was the start of its comeback.

“Cool!”

Milk Pail is the little shop that spent years and finally successfully fought off a developer who’d wanted Steve’s land. The problem being that Steve had had an agreement to share parking with the other businesses surrounding his but one by one they had all sold out to said developer, who proposed building eight to ten stories in a solid block around Steve’s till he starved and sorry about that, pal. The mayor even told the guy’s rep to shorten those in the plans so that they could make better use of Steve’s land when they got it. Charming.

They did a test run by illegally cutting off another small shop from its customers, and its owners caved and sold.

Not Steve.

Years.

City council meeting protests. Standing-room-only turnouts, again and again. Appeals to reason. Because Steve had owned his place so long (the distortions of long-ago Proposition 13 being the unspoken elephant in the room) he could keep his prices very low; a new owner would have to pay current-market-value-rate property taxes in one of the most expensive parts of the country. Local zucchinis at fifteen cents? Ears of corn at twenty? Triple-creme brie? Manufacturing cream for your chocolate torte, which no one else sold? You want local, Steve even owns his own cows now, having saved someone’s family farm.

You had the most and the least well off in Silicon Valley calling the eclectic little place their favorite shop and coming together in their day-to-day, being human together no matter their circumstances. And that is no small achievement.

Steve knew our car situation and that there had been times when Richard had taken time off work so I could go to those city council meetings, and he made a point of telling Richard how grateful he was for that and that I’d not only gone, I had told him when I wouldn’t be able to make one.

It told him the fate of what he’d poured his whole life into mattered not just to him. That had meant far more to him than I had ever had any idea of.

And, he continued, “Have you seen the video? You’ve got to see the video!”

I cringed but I quoted: “If. You. Shaft. Steve!” and we laughed together at that moment when I’d stood at that podium. “Yeah, I kind of lost it.”

“You should show it to your kids! Save it for your grandkids!”

“Four, two” (almost), “and one month.”

“Yeah, okay, a little young yet,” he agreed. “But still. Who would have guessed it. I mean, with your religious background, and you’re a…knitter! I mean-! He grinned, “You really took them on!”

“Yeah, she can be a real rabble rouser,” said Richard, and we both kind of explained our Washington DC/political family backgrounds: you speak up when you see an injustice. You just do. (But then, one does anyway, I would hope.)

And I remembered the city council meeting where I had cast on at the start and cast off at the hours-later finish, wound the ends in with my knitting needles and presented Steve with a hand knit hat to tell him the community was behind him. It was later that I would be telling that city council how good they had it to have a business like Steve’s creating some of the better moments in Silicon Valley and with that memorable phrase announced that my family and I would take it as, then they didn’t want our business. Any of their businesses. Anywhere in Mountain View, if those politicians pocketed that developer’s money and looked the other way. “We have our own,” and I stormed off before their timer even beeped.

Totally earned Tiger Mom cred in his eyes that night. He was unfailingly soft-spoken and kind but someone needed to stand up for him and give it to’em like they needed it given to’em. Darn straight.

I handed out a few Peruvian hand knit finger puppets to two sets of parents for their toddlers tonight.

We had a great time, and let me tell you, that Wensleydale with the cranberries? I have a new favorite cheese. Clearly it wasn’t just the handspinners. I can’t wait to go stock up at the shop.

The dishwasher fix? It was good for one single load Saturday. After much research we unscrewed the door again tonight to check for corrosion, but, nope. At least we found that a new control board (if that works) is half the price at Sears–which helps, because at this point with all the repairs this thing has needed since immediately after the warranty we’ll have spent enough to have bought a Bosch in the first place. If we could find a schematic for the electronics we might be able to bypass the start switch but all links to one seem to be broken. Maytag MDBH945AWB.

A better part of the day was when I was quite surprised to find five new flower buds on the struggling baby mandarin tree. It is much happier where I moved it to.

I did not see the male Cooper’s hawk coming in till he landed on the giant elephant ear just outside the window ten feet away from me. I had twice today accidentally flushed a dove from right next to the door and such things do not go unnoticed.

But I had nothing to offer. Only love and silent gratitude at his presence. He stayed a little while.

I stumbled across a story in the St. Louis newspaper that I thought deserved wider notice: small farmers feeding their families on land their local airport was happy to have them work for 35 years. The airport didn’t have to pay to maintain it and an underserved community worked for its fresh vegetables, lugging in water by hand as needed.

A developer bought that land and the farmers expected that at last that would be the end of it all.

It wasn’t.

They’re getting an irrigation system, restrooms, and a farming-only deed in perpetuity. Across the street.

Point oh one of an inch was forecast for the rest of the day; the storm was supposed to be basically over, with a noncommittal shrug of a chance at slight drizzles tomorrow.

That .01″ has been .41″ so far, and every now and then another cloudburst hits for twenty, thirty seconds (and right on cue, here comes another one and I’m editing that number.) Go rain go. (And another one.)

The roots of the neighbor’s redwood have lifted the ground around our gate and so the latch misses connecting now by several inches, the gate held in place only by a small flowerpot–and so the first time, when I said, What was that? Richard looked out the window searching for where out there, going, Something just fell in the yard.

The trees all seemed to be accounted for. We realized that no, it was the gate slamming that mismatched fence. Let me in! Again. And again. And again.

We may not get a lot of weather here but we’re trying for this Dark and Stormy Night thing as best we can.

Here we go again.

Sitting on the floor, I unscrewed the screws. Here, could you get that one over there for me? Sure, says he.

He gently pulled the door and the cover apart to find the broken latch and the piece it connected to and we adjourned to our side-by-side computers to find the name of the part (which one of those three random numbers was the model number?) and what business might still exist in the area to buy it from. The local appliance parts place that my friend Diana and I once made an outing of? Long gone.

Fremont, the page said. (Oh okay that’s not too bad.) Open till 4:00 on Saturdays. I called them and they said they had two, Richard said something like Oh good! (you’re always on speakerphone at our house, one of the charms of hearing loss) and we looked at the clock, 2:30, and the weather and told them we were on our way. (Don’t close up early!)

Waze, an app that directs you away from traffic accidents, sent us clear around the bottom of the San Francisco Bay and back up. Wave after wave of blinding rain hit and it was just not a great time to be on the freeway or anywhere else out in that but by golly I wanted my dishwasher and he wanted to solve the problem.

They knew who we had to be the moment we walked in their door and opened our mouths. We chatted like old friends. They had an antique wringer-style washer on display; I told them my grandmother had had a live-in maid when my mom was growing up but that she’d told Mom later she’d have given her up in a second in exchange for a modern washer and dryer. We all allowed as how fortunate we were to have modern appliances, even when they’re being a pain.

Richard had actually used a wringer washer and he and one of the men talked about all the things you could get trapped in those: your hair. Your arm. Yup, those were the days.

There was a chance all along that it wasn’t just the latch but the expensive display panel going out again, and one wonders how long one should baby an old machine along before throwing in the towel. But then, just last month we had finally given up and replaced our vacuum cleaner. I do like the Dyson. But one hopes for a little time in between such things.

We got home, we did other things, we chilled a bit after that drive and we kinda didn’t want the hassle, either of us, till finally I said, What’ll it take us? Half an hour?  (Not saying, and that’s if it works.) And at that we both got off our duffs and went back in there and tackled the thing. I filled every last bit of space with more dirty dishes, and after three days of only doing a little in the sink at a time because my hands were bothering me, there were, shall we say, a few.

Connect the new piece, admire how shiny and new it looks, screw. all. those. screws. back in the door–

–and push the button in great hopes.

Nada.

Dannnng.

He wasn’t willing to give up that easy. Did you plug it back in?

Oh right.

Push the button.

Nada.

He tried pushing the cycle buttons, and just like before, they did briefly light up green, the one thing that had assured us all along that the panel wasn’t (entirely?) bad. Then he with his bigger stronger fingers pushed the On button and darn if that dishwasher didn’t cave. It knew who was boss.

The sound of that machine doing our dirty work at last was an immense relief. It finished the cycle, everything was sparkly clean and disinfected more than hand washing could ever do and I’ve emptied and refilled it most of the way again.

Try pushing not hard next time but long, says he. But I’m not touching that thing again till it’s all the way full. It may only have so many cycles left in it and I don’t want to waste a one.

We had the wettest December in history and then the driest January in history, as in, zero rain–my grass sprang up and grew just enough to look green and then froze in place as the top of the soil cracked apart as if it were summer. In this drought if you don’t feed us I don’t water you.

I woke up about 7:15 this morning to strong winds and leaves and limbs thrashing and an overcast but bright, deep yellow sky.

I’ve seen a sky like that–right before a tornado hit, ages and ages ago in a different place and it got me out of bed to go check the weather report, but no, as far as I can tell, it was simply the late dawn against the storm clouds and it faded to gray quickly.

There was an errand that had to be run today not tomorrow whether we wanted to hunker down or no, and so we were on the expressway at late rush hour clearly immediately after the tall eucalypus fell and blocked all southbound lanes. Shattered pieces were thrown across the divider and the northbound lanes where we were and beyond. A busy road–and yet there was no sign of any damaged car, just tree shrapnel. Everyone completely lucked out.

And I mean that, because coming from the other way there’s the crest of the hill and then there was that tree–with a 45 mph speed limit, there was no way to have seen it till drivers were right on it. Just past it, I was waiting at the light at the bottom of the hill while a rush of cars was coming back the wrong way in both lanes across the divider from me. People were doing crazy things, and meantime, the next group of cars was arriving facing them head-on at the light. One particularly panicked-looking woman reacted to my left-hand green arrow as if it were her right-turn green arrow–NO, honey, STOP.

I dropped Richard off a block away (if I had to be out and about he might as well work from work rather than home) and coming back there was already a cop with flashers on and the road coned off and the city’s tree workers were getting right to it. They had a big job there, and that one probably took immediate priority.

Tomorrow we get a ten-hour break in the middle of the day for the earth to inhale deeply of this rich essence of life-sustaining fluidity and then it starts coming at us again.

A good time to be thankful for a warm house to knit in.

I noticed a whole flock of finches not in the trees but in odd spots under what roofspaces we could offer them. Drier that way.

It is amazing how much you can get done in a day when you’re avoiding starting in on the taxes.

Rita: here (at the end) and especially here, where I knew in that moment that I might well never see her again. But I felt I was seeing her with all essence of strangerhood stripped away and she me and somehow it was enough.

I hadn’t seen her since then. Last Sunday I found myself thinking of my old friend. She’d been one of the patients who’d founded our lupus support group way back in the ’70’s, reaching out to others, putting an ad in the paper and seeing who might show up, offering, Let’s talk. She’d been a young mother when she got hit with it with kidney failure, bam, right out the gate.

She was middle aged and I was a young mother myself when I joined the group shortly after diagnosis, and in my first year or two got my first echocardiogram and saw my heart on a screen, had my first EEG, and briefly had kidney failure myself. I held on tight to the hope she offered and I wanted to be as kind and as thoughtful and reflective as she was some day when I grew up. And I simply wanted to get to be her age.

I am where she was then, in surprisingly decent shape all things considered, and I do now what she did: I come to those meetings to give others the hope I had so much needed.

I picked up the local section of the paper and flipped to the back.

I admitted to myself that I was looking to see if her obituary might be in there. Not something I’d done before nor that I wanted to find, just, it seemed the thing to do. Nope, no sign of one.

The emails came in last night and today. I guess I’m not the only one in the group who’d been thinking of her–two others had tried to call her.

Turns out they had found a tumor that explained why eating had become so hard and she had opted to simply observe where this new adventure might take her as it chose. It was a thing to learn, not fear.

She left us a little over a week ago, and I like to think she was letting us know. She was ninety-two or three, not sure when her birthday was.

I still want to get to be her age. And because of her I can see that I might.

Joe was here, inspecting the furnace and ductwork he’d installed a little over a year ago. Not that it really needed it, just, after that CO leak from the one he took out I’m not taking any chances.

Just about the first words out of his mouth this morning were, How’s the baby? Knowing it would make a grandma happy and grinning back at my big grin. Then he told me his worker standing next to him had a five-month-old, so that I could share in that beaming new dad’s pride, too. Happy times.

He exclaimed over the changes to the yard and the trees and the new carpeting in here. (One room done so far on the flooring–it’s a good start.)

I thought about it after he left and realized just how much his work had changed everything: we had known for several years that we were going to have to shell out a whole lot at some point to do what he ended up doing for us (we just had had no idea how serious that need was going to end up being) and we had had no idea how much it was going to cost. We couldn’t take on any other major expenses whatsoever till that was all done and settled.

Freed from that now, bit by bit we are getting this place to what we want it to be. And it feels wonderful.

A few more pictures. (Note that Madison’s clothes didn’t make it throughout the day. Actually, I don’t think any of the kids’ did. I remember those days…)

The boys were sick; did we still want to come?

We looked at each other: yes.

A follow-up call last night. Hudson was now at 102.3, so, just to make sure, did we still want to come?

We knew the risks and said a prayer and still felt like wild horses and viruses couldn’t keep us away and hopefully having already had the flu in September and having had the shot such as it was…

Of course we went. Our grandsons needed snuggle time all the more.

The baby and parents are still healthy and we did a lot of handwashing between kids.

It is amazing how much energy small sick children can have. Parker’s one meltdown was when we realized that we needed to go back to the airport now. We promised we would come again soon and he calmed down fairly quickly and made us promise again. We promised again. Alright then–and he helped take us there after all (giving Kim some one-on-one time with her one-month-old, something I know every new mom with older kids could use more of.) Hudson at long last fell asleep on the way there. I was sorry he would wake up to find us gone, but we’ll be keeping that promise. Soon.

And Madison is a perfect baby.

And we are home again. More pictures later. It was a wonderful, long day but we’ve got some sleep to catch up on ourselves.