It was a bit of a cri de coeur: I had tried leaving individual messages, gotten no response, and finally wrote to the whole ward.

I have a tart cherry tree, I said, and I’ve been getting up early in the mornings to pick from it hoping to beat the risks of the low UV exposure at that hour and it’s flaring me and I absolutely have to stop. But it’s a crime to let those cherries go unpicked, and the last of them are ripe now.

Save me from me, I wrote. Email me first so we don’t get forty people with a handful apiece, but please, come get yourself some pie cherries from my tree. It’ll be hands-and-knees work, though, because the ones left are mostly down close to the ground.

The only answer I got last night was from a friend insisting she was going to pick them today–for me.

We agreed to wait to see if anyone else answered first. People were being too polite, not wanting to shove to the front of the line, I figured (I mean, how could anyone not be passionate about pie cherries, even if that first person wasn’t.)

I got two messages this morning: one from a friend who admitted she’d long wished she had a tree like mine and that sour cherry was her favorite pie, too, and she would dearly love to have them. Could she come by after her dental appointment?

That would be great!

The other came in a few minutes after the first, from N’s daughter, saying, That’s my mom’s absolute favorite, I’d love to come pick them for her.

Several hours after I’d heard from her mom, I told the daughter that I’d completely forgotten till that moment, but, I had wire racks from old ovens around the base of the tree after seeing a ground squirrel next to it: they won’t come up where they can’t dig down, and I didn’t want it chewing on the bark and roots. Those might be rough on her mom’s knees.

That was it, she was coming with her kids. She called her mom and then told me they were on their way over.

Meantime, I was on the phone with the doctor’s office and they said I needed to be seen but I needed to have a covid test first, and not just a home test.

The daughter took pictures of her kids holding up their treasureboxes of bright fruit with the cherry tree as background and it just made my day.

They held some out: did I want any?

(Always, of course, but I had so much in my freezer.) I opened the door a crack, trying not to breathe in their direction: No, I’ve got plenty, thanks, though!

They left, I sent out a note to the ward saying the cherries were picked and thank you everybody, and I headed off to the clinic.

The grandmother read that and dashed over, hoping she hadn’t lost her chance to at least get some. Turns out she had missed that phone call.

Richard had been in a meeting and I hadn’t interrupted, so he didn’t know that the daughter had come by; he just met the grandmother at the door (trying to keep his distance because of the covid exposure), and a moment later found her crushed, saying, It’s stripped. They’re all gone.

(While the daughter had been going, Mom, answer your phone…)

And everybody’s having a good laugh over the whole thing now.

Oh, and the covid test? It was negative.

Picked another five+ pounds of cherries this morning, only this time I had the sense to pit them before taking the shower they were going to make me need. I froze them in pie amounts and had a half a pie’s worth left over.

Got out two stoneware bowls a few minutes ago, covered them in thawed pie crust, made a half recipe split between them, they’re in the oven, and hopefully we’ll manage to share one tonight and one in the morning rather than scarf an entire one down each all at once. But we’ll see.

Then the phone rang.

Richard’s aunt and her son, the grandmother and father of the groom on Saturday, have just been diagnosed with covid after avoiding it for so long. (Quick thought: let’s see, that’s two of the five people I hugged there that I can think of…)

Me: Are they okay?

He said they were.

Good. Let’s all stay that way. (Hoping hard, knowing that she’s the caretaker to her husband.)

Eight minutes left on that timer. Soon there will be pie.

Oh there you go.

I woke up this morning with the thought, and those people were okay because people who didn’t know them pulled over on the freeway on that mountain pass next to that truck on fire and that steep drop-off in order to get them to safety, at great risk to their own. I just needed to emphasize that point to honor who they are and what they did, whoever they are.

Meantime, I finished a random Zoom-meeting-knitting hat. It started with an intended recipient but the overtwisted stash yarn was nah…not what I was looking for… But it’s done, and someone will like it.

I am determined to make some progress on that afghan even if I’m doing everything three times to get it right; I’m getting closer to where it’s more obvious and less of the stage of what will it actually look like if I do this no wait I meant this. Two rows in 90 minutes with about 300 rows to go.

But at least I won’t be doing seed stitch in alternating doubled-stranded colors with a third worked across the back of them for much longer.

When did they say Christmas was?

Guess where we were today. (Youtube link)

Some of both the bride and groom’s families were caught in that mess while the truck was still on fire at Altamont Pass. We were a little later, and by then the fire was out but it took us a very very long time to creep past.

I thought no way someone survived that. They did, though, they’re apparently okay.

So we were late to the cousin’s son’s wedding in Modesto but we made it, they made it, everybody understood, and the angst let go to the joy as we walked in those doors. (Man, did we look that young back in the day? Wow.) Their friends were having the times of their lives. The couple was having the joy of theirs. So tender to each other.

The DJ made a point of celebrating Richard’s aunt and uncle’s fifty-third.

Coming back, we opened Waze first.

By now, the 580 freeway was a complete no-go. As it should have been earlier in the day, and we were directed to a very long way around with a windy mountain road with super-tight close-barrier lanes and drop-offs–we would never normally want to take that route but we were grateful for it, we made it, and we’re home safe and sound.

May they live long and happily ever after. Such a cute couple!

It never had a name.

It was packed high when her old friend volunteered to come on the long drive south and helped her unpack and then flew home, just so she wouldn’t have to do any of that alone in a town she didn’t know.

It was packed high when she moved north a few years later.

It was again when it took her to Washington State, and back down, and back up, and back down, several times a year as the lockdowns continued. But mostly it had out of state plates during that time.

It was taken through the carwash and made as pretty as its nine years could be before it was taken to the lot today. Carmax: after they’ve looked up its accident history you bring it in and they look it over and they give you a number. Yes or no. Door number one or door number two. Take it and walk.

It is not making the drive to Boston. Cars pay high rent too there.

And so some family looking for a super comfortable, well maintained, reliable, nice, very low mileage (most of it from those trips), nine year old car will have one they’ll enjoy, too.

I met up with her so that she could have a ride home, for the last 24 hours that this is home, in a surprisingly comfortable waiting area while they did all the paperwork for four sets of clients. I would have finished the hat I’d just started but for lack of a second circular needle–I’d considered, then had thought I wouldn’t need it. It wouldn’t be that long. It was.

But that’s okay; I can manage the decreases here.

Both kinds.

At home.

I am so going to miss her and I am so happy for her on her new adventure.

We were not planning on going to see any fireworks, but the fireworks came to us.

Our daughter got in one last visit with her sister before her move to a much longer plane ride away from the neiblings.

Her delayed flight home finally took off about the time it was supposed to land, which meant that we started driving on a crowded freeway at 9:30 p.m. on the Fourth of July for the airport.

Note to self for future reference: one might want to avoid that.

I have never seen so many fireworks in my life. Not only could we see the various cities’ official displays over the Bay (or I could, since I wasn’t driving), cool to have back after they’d been canceled in the worst of the drought and pandemic, but, a little less cool, people were shooting them off like crazy. Everywhere. Nonstop. Next to the freeway. Over the freeway. From behind the wall of the self-storage place over here, the auto body shop over there, in the middle of the trees (!!!) next to the something-star hotel built on what used to be the bad end of that town. We were heading into what looked like a semi-circle of them again and again, and the illegal ones didn’t go very high, either, with the sparks coming right down.

Did their mothers know they were doing this?

Someone’s house on the other side of the Bay caught embers and took fire in the shenanigans but the firemen were reportedly right on it.

One boom shook our car as white sparkles shot upwards right next to us.

Arizona? Nevada? You sure can’t buy them here. That’s a heck of a road trip for a little blow-up-go-sparkleboom.

Reports today were that two people had damaged their hands and dozens of fires had been set off by the more than usual illegal displays.

For us, it was also the distracted drivers swerving all over the place, mile after mile. One guy simply pulled over and watched the shows, which seemed quite reasonable, although, dude–get off the freeway first.

Which, eventually, we did, and hugged our kid home, and everything was fine.

Got up. Picked sour cherries. Put the bowl standing in a plate with a bit of water in it so that any bugs would freak out and come out but not be able to get out, as I do, and they did, and thus drowned a few I would never have known were in there. Left it there a few hours and never saw a single bug remaining inside the bowl.

We visited P in the hospital, and she looked a lot better than the last time–they have been throwing every anti-viral and anti-bacterial at her, and she needed both.

I did not know that shingles could invite bacteria along the inflammatory path. Not what you want in your brain.

I caught my breath when I saw her half-open her eye for a few seconds; she hasn’t been able to do that for weeks.

We talked about hospital food. “It’s actually pretty good.”

Yeah, we said, Jesse Cool took over the menu just after the last time I got out of here–matter of fact we went to her restaurant for our anniversary dinner a few nights ago. So good. She’s got a Michelin mention these days.

I asked if I could bring her some sour cherry pie next time and she perked right up at that idea. “Yes! Sure!”

I knew her friend from Ukraine passionately loves sour cherries, so I asked her if she would tell them they were welcome to come pick a couple of pounds, a good pie’s worth, and she grinned, picked up her phone and started typing. I told her I’d email the couple, too.

Which I did, and they’re coming over Monday–after the friend has had a day to recover from the vaccinations she just got, because, reasons.

I bet I’m not the only one who brings our friend pie.

He was running late, but at least that would get him past rush hour for the long commute home.

Friends of ours moved far enough away that they were able to buy a house, one with enough land to plant a goodly number of fruit trees, is the plan, after they clear out the neglected overgrowth.

They are really excited about it but didn’t know where to start.

He works nearby, and today was an in-office day and that was perfect: she’d been hoping for one of my apricot seedlings for awhile and it was waiting for her.

He picked my brain while we picked cherries together. You want the squirrels not to devour everything? Plant sour cherries, tart apples, and see the Indian Free peach there? The downside is it needs a pollinator. The good side is that not only are the peaches great, not only is it resistant to leaf curl disease, but the peaches are sour during the growing–right till the very last when at ripening they turn sweet and the squirrels take awhile to catch on that the rejects are the good ones now.

Also: that row of bushes? That’s California coffeeberry, and the tiny fruits are supposedly edible but bland (never tried it) but a big food source for the birds that like to nest in it where they’re protected from the hawks. The Bewick’s wrens take cover in there, and since they are mostly extinct now except in the Bay Area, I’m pretty protective of them.

And then we talked hawks: mine, and their red-tailed family they love to watch. Cool!

Clearly it’s been a good move for them and their young kids, even if I miss them.

I told him Morgan Hill is a hike for them, but if they want to sample the best stone fruit varieties before planting, Andy’s Orchard is absolutely the place to go.

They will be there.

Do me a favor. Please, please. If you can, and you haven’t yet, go get a Shingrix vaccination. The old shingles shot is so much less effective, and the Shingrix one so much more so and with so few complications, that the old one has been taken off the market.

The old one is what my friend had had, and she is back in the hospital today.

I’d never heard of shingles in the brain.

(Late update: they now say en route to, not in the brain. Yay.)

Yeah I should certainly know it by now and I’m sure I do but cellphones make it too easy to just look up someone’s number without thinking about it.

So I typed her name in the search bar and hit the familiar old string of digits.

Now, there are two old friends I wanted to offer cherries off my tree to, and I figured we’d do one tonight and the next in the next day or two as it works out for them and I had decided to call this one first because it’s been the longest since I’d seen her.

The other friend answered that call, to my unspoken astonishment.

I looked back down at my phone: at some point in the past I had thought of the one and typed out the number for the other and I have no idea how long it’s been like that. Huh.

Turns out friend #2 was very much in need of a visit: she is having heart surgery as fast as they can get her meds to the right levels for it. Tomorrow would be good. She had not known she was a heart patient.

We visited while she munched on cherries–“Mmm, those are good!” But not for too long; we didn’t want to wear her out. I had no doubt her husband could use the human time, too, because caretaking and worrying is hard stuff.

Their cat sniffed at and then tried a tentative, ginger step into my upturned wool felt hat on the floor, testing to see if it qualified as a box, and we laughed as she decided that it was actually just too small to curl up in and walked away.

But she had to come back later to try again just to be sure. It was just the right depth and slightly oval and she really wanted to own that new nest. But she was not a small cat. She was our comic relief.

We shared a heartfelt prayer and the sweetest feeling wrapped around us all. So much love.

“Divine intervention,” said Richard when I marveled over that misplaced phone number, and pronounced it again out of sheer gratitude: “Divine intervention.”

Can you hear me, Major Tom

…For here am I sitting in my tin can

Far below the world

Planet earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do…

–With a prayer for the families of the men lost in the Titan. And all those at sea in the Mediterranean.

Somehow, today my philodendron decided to bloom. This is not something it did the first twenty or maybe even thirty years we lived here.

It sent up a bud a week or two ago (see the shriveled yellowing stalk above and just to the left in the second picture) but that one never opened up. This one did, and its spadix (the peeled banana part) leaned out around noon, following the sun, straightening back up again after its rays moved on past.

The site in that link says the fruit is toxic but that the flower part actually does taste rather like a banana.

Cue the Hey Mikey! Life cereal commercial of my youth: I’m not going to try it, YOU try it! Where’s a Mikey when you need one.

And then I planted some seeds. I hadn’t been planning to, but the phrase, To life! just kept demanding it of me. To life. Know the loss, feel the grief, but honor their memory by never stop looking forward.

I grew up in a house and neighborhood with wood siding in an area dominated by brick homes reminiscent of the colonial era–after all, George Washington himself made use of the blacksmith shop a half mile away. Tradition.

So there’s been this odd interest that I wouldn’t have guessed I had at seeing what a brick house looks like if you could see how it’s built.

A war is not how I wanted to do that.

I sent a private note of admiration for her talent and of support.

In response, she sent me pictures: shredded drywall, pock marks in the bricks behind where that drywall had fallen from, a tennis ball blasted across the room, broken things, crumbled things, but overall, the walls were intact. Or enough so, anyway, and she vows to rebuild. This is her home. In Kherson.

Her mother’s, though, was closer to the dam that the invaders had blown up and it is ruined. But she’s alive. And they will come back from this.

This is the woman who created my cherry tree gerdan, the most intricate one I have. It took me a year to decide to spend that much–but I could just hear my art dealer father exclaiming over the skill and talent that went into it and how much of my own family’s history it reflects. All those summer trips to pick-your-own farms, all those hours and hours of jarring and jamming.

My own Stella cherry looks just like this right now.

I am so glad I got it.

She’s working on a new design right now as a way of coping (bead on with confidence through all crises, paraphrased the knitter to herself, nodding her head) and I am checking her shop every day because I want to see what it will be and because, having seen what she personally is facing, it feels even more imperative to help. There is the World Central Kitchen–and there are individuals. I can’t do everything, but I can do some things.

Getting to wear her artwork is just the cherry on top.

So I was heading out to go get that Brie for that cherry cheese sandwich…

…And the car wouldn’t open up.

Michelle knew where the fob batteries were, Richard handed me the mini screwdriver set, go for it.

The second tip from the right was the one.

Turns out that that screwdriver magnetized the screws, so when I went to put them back in they danced like the proverbial angels on the head of a pin and then managed to hold straight out from the tip–if, if, if I could hold my hands steady enough while trying to twist the screwdriver.

Several attempts.

How about-?

And that is how I found out you can hold the screwdriver in the right hand and twist not the screw but the fob itself with your left while the magnetization holds the screw just steady enough. Give the fob a twirl. Again. Again. Again.

It worked!

So tell me why the fob with its brand new battery still doesn’t unlock the car as you approach the driver’s door, I groaned as I started to walk back towards the house thinking I had just installed a dud.

Unwilling to concede quite yet, I pressed the unlock button even though it hadn’t worked for over ten years.

Popped that lock right open, to my complete astonishment.

I don’t get it, but I’ll take it.

They’re doing something of an experiment: it’s that time of year when the coming-up medical residents find themselves assigned to random new hospitals and towns, the universities are letting out for the semester, Silicon Valley layoffs suddenly erupted in waves again, vacations, people move in, people move out.

So they decided to have the two wards that meet in our building do so together rather than sequentially. Just for June and July and let’s see how it goes.

Generally, the Mormon Church keeps congregations small enough to be personal in the hopes of nobody feeling lost or ignored in the crowd.

And so suddenly there are a lot more small kids running around, more background chatter, and some working out of who does what when responsibilities overlap.

The Zoom that I use for captions got switched off after the first meeting because the other ward didn’t know of anyone who needed it. Oops. One of ours, halfway through the second meeting, suddenly realized I’d put my phone away and dashed over to the relevant laptop to set it up again. Thanks, Davi!

It also means there’s a whole slew of young parents who don’t know a thing about handknit finger puppets bought in bulk from Peru.

There was a wiggleworm of a toddler sitting behind us who was determined for awhile there not to sit still nor quietly today despite her daddy’s best efforts. He was single-parenting it and had several older kids, too.

She was adorable. She was a handful.

Once she was actually doing what he said, so that we wouldn’t be rewarding and reinforcing unwanted behavior, Richard, who could hear them, nodded to me: Now.

And so a vivid pink puppy dog with black eyes and nose got passed over the pew to her profound delight and her father’s relief.

She was clearly three, just old enough to be among the kids invited to come sing a song to their daddies for Father’s Day. She stood at the very front up there, pink puppy jammed hard onto not one but two fingers and clearly barking energetically along with her singing as far as she was concerned.

The song ended, the Primary chorister motioned to the children to exit stages left and right and back to their parents and they dutifully started filing down the (four? maybe five) rather shallow steps to either side.

Not her. That was boring and slow and she was not going to do that. She gleefully leaped over the edge of the pulpit fast before any adults could see what she was up to and jumped to the floor, puppy held proud and high in triumph.

We lost it. It’s a shame that that was just out of reach of the Zoom camera, I’d want to show that video at her wedding some day. You GO, girl!

I had a kid in middle school who has a kid in middle school, it’s been that long.

But the guy recognized me, mask and all, while I was still stuck back at, no, that couldn’t possibly be. But then he made me recognize his face. That face.

He looked just like he did–except this time he was inside the grocery store in the daylight, not outside of one with nobody else around in the dark so he kept his fists to himself this time. Not that he actually touched me that other time–he just threatened to, as he pounded them on the window of my car after I’d jumped inside and locked the door.

Because he had hit my car and I had taken out a camera and snapped a picture of it and his license plate.

What are you, some kind of *** **** private eye?!! he’d screamed.

There in the dairy aisle his face suddenly hardened so severely that I was half-afraid he was going to pull out a gun. Thank heavens for California restrictions.

Was this guy tall? the years-ago cop asked me–while telling me the guy had done time for assault.

Nooo, I said doubtfully, not reeeally…

Well, the license of that car owner says he’s 6’6″.

Oh. Yeah, he probably was. Officer, let me introduce you to my husband so you can see why I didn’t think that was tall.

This evening.

He got behind me in my checkout line just as we were finishing up.

I got out of there and into my car and out of that parking spot hoping he wouldn’t see what I’m driving these days nor my plate, got an improbable green light out of there and held it together and didn’t start shaking till I was home and in my husband’s arms.

Richard said all the right things.

And he’s right.

“Pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you…”

Lord, I’d ask you to bless him but I have no idea if he’d even let You nor how to make his life any better and if anyone along the way for him can help, please bless them. I can’t do anything. I’m leaving it up to You, because You do know and I don’t.

It’s amazing how that just lifted that whole weight clean off my shoulders.

It’s not my problem anymore.