The amaryllis bulbs that my dad gave me for his last Christmas have begun to come into bloom again, bringing cheer to our lockdown.

And it is not possible–I thought–but that last apricot seed in that last paper cup, the one that wasn’t doing anything but I couldn’t bear to toss because it hadn’t decayed away like seven of them had those times when watering them had left them exposed enough to see…had a tiny root showing today. After trying for what, two months? I thought I was just putting off the certainty of disappointment by not letting the cup dry out, but there it is. It lives.

I covered its brief uncoveredness quickly with just a bit of chicken-manure-enhanced soil and hoped. It would be so cool.

My dad adored Andy’s apricots.

Today is Mathias’s third birthday and we were supposed to be there to help celebrate. I admit it took me a couple of weeks to concede to reality and cancel the plane tickets.

His mom knew there wasn’t going to be a birthday party, not this year–but she had an idea while in an Indian grocer during Holi, the Festival of Colors.

The dog got rainbowed, too.

Two days into this, and after the one guy working that part of the yard made it quietly clear that there would be no conversations (French is not the most useful language for California), I made a point of watering my still-tiny columnar apple tree at the corner so they would know for sure that it was mine. That ivy creeping towards it amongst the weeds? It’s all gone now. Nothing but dirt.

They cut my Chinese elm tree that the squirrels like to dangle upside down from in season.

Well, not all the way, but a lot, because a lot of it was growing on the other side of the fence and that house is being readied for market just as fast as the masked, spaced-apart workers can do it. Construction is (or was?) on hold but apparently getting a house ready for market is not.

The three men are careful at keeping the requisite 6′ distance.

They were measuring new flooring in the street before cutting it to match room dimensions. They did measure twice. (The mailman either drove over it or the sidewalk.) They cut down every weed and bush in the front yard and the now-denuded pine tree stump by the door will surely be next. Everything. Gone. They cut, they raked, they flattened. The weeds are gone, the ground is even now, and I expect rolls of grass will be unfurled shortly.

Just as we’re heading into another drought year, it looks like, but sellers gotta sell. But I’ll find out for sure in a few.

They did not cut down the oaks the squirrels planted badly that I had to pay to cut back from my side under threat of losing my homeowners for the fire risk. It’s nesting season; they probably can’t. But those are going to take out the fence in a few years, the roots are going to damage my foundation (same story, different trees) and someone’s going to have to deal with them. Trees are wonderful, but raining copious amounts of acorns on my roof all day long definitely gets old–got to admit, the insurer had a point.

We had a dense, forest-y view of graceful Chinese elm leaves outside the breakfast nook, with a keen appreciation for how few people ever get to even seen an elm. And now, well, they’re pretty sparse.

She had the biggest toyon tree I know of off her back patio, the berries celebrated by many a robin and cedar waxwing.

It’s gone.

There are two very tall trees that are half dead because she never watered anything; one already dropped a major limb that punctured our roof some years ago. I don’t know how you could take those out safely for the workers while keeping to the coronavirus distancing guidelines, and so far they’ve stayed.

It is amazing how, at a time when we’re staying home day after day after day with everything the same, the world immediately outside our windows is dramatically different after their three days of hard, hard work.

That sourdough starter needed to be used, right? (Hey look, a personal XKCD cartoon!)

The pumpkin in that last loaf didn’t strongly flavor it but it did help keep it moist from Thursday to Monday–not bad for a no-fat bread. The birthday boy requested cinnamon bread; I used a stronger cinnamon (Penzey’s, not Costco this time) and doubled the amount but kept the pumpkin for the moment, since I need to use that up. It definitely passed inspection. This could get to be a habit.

The seahorse looks much better with eyes now.

The former President of Stanford University died of COVID-19 today.

Suddenly my patience with staying home went right back up again to where it needed to be.

I’m going to go knit another row.

I bought a drug store box of 50 paper face masks in January just because it was flu season and I try to have some around.

We’ve run through most of them by now.

I have two homemade ones now: one by Carol Larsen of River’s Edge Fiber Arts after she posted on FB that she would give one to a senior center for every one she sold.

And now one from a woman who, it turned out, lives in my town.

I got a message from her just now: it was on my front porch.

Wait, what? I would have turned the light on for her!

I can just picture the smile on her face as she anticipated my happy surprise–and the chance to get out of the house, do good by not waiting for the mail to deliver it and thus protecting others for a few extra days while still maintaining social distancing by not telling me and not risking having me open the door. She did not ring the doorbell. She simply told me afterwards.

So, that means the Ring recording of her approach would give us the masking tape?

Thank you, Giovana, it’s beautiful! And very soft.

And she’s a knitter. Oh cool!

He used to run a theater. He’s now a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which gives you an idea of what his voice is really like. But you take my goofball cousin, throw in a pandemic and weeks of sheltering-in-place and isolation and all the talk on Facebook about people baking their own bread (or making their own sourdough starter–a friend just dropped some of hers off tonight for us to play with), and you get this.

And yes, after seeing this, we did. The starter isn’t ready for it yet but we had toasted cheese sandwiches for dinner–I mean, after a serenade like that how could we resist?

A little bigger, a little greener, and then stepping outside, the columnar apple has started putting on a show. Yesterday these blossoms opened up at the bottom branch, tomorrow there will be more at the top. 

And then there was this.

You could see the curve of the haunch up against the trunk, the dark tip of the ear, the angle of the jaw with its head turned a bit towards the neighbors behind.

No way.

I stared and stared and then stepped just inside the door to get Richard’s attention and camera and second set of eyeballs: Was that? No, right? Tell me it’s not? That *is* where it would want to be this time of day, that is the shape it would be, that is how it would want to melt into the branches mostly out of sight. (Where squirrels give new meaning to fast food.)

He came out and looked and saw what I saw and went huh…but maybe not. Nah. Couldn’t be. He went back in, grabbed a monocular (how does he always have just the right equipment for the moment? He said no it wasn’t, it wasn’t binoculars) and gave it a better look and then handed it to me.

Okay, then. Man.

Just half an hour later the shapes were the same but the interplay of light and shadow had melted the ear back into monotone brown, the line curving along the haunch had disappeared, and our mountain lion had melted back into simply being the Chinese elm with the weird angles and turns the tree trimmers had cut it into two summers ago when the insurance company required it not to go over the house anymore.

Plus the way it had grown since then.

You had to step outside at just the right time and maybe just the right time of year for it to briefly come alive as something entirely different. Brigadooning?

As for how it acted the part, though, it gave a pretty wooden performance.

Actually, it was last week, but this happened:

Two parents trying to work from home and four kids to keep busy.

In a genius moment that was an act of civil engagement, neighborhood service, math assignment, and keeping the kids actively engaged, our grandkids found themselves getting out the chalk and drawing a hopscotch. Around their entire block in San Diego. Five hundred brightly colored squares for any kid who wants to to jump them for as long as they want to–enough squares apart from others, of course.

There was a downpour over the weekend, which means they’ll have to do it again.

I didn’t quite ask if they were waiting for a new shipment of chalk but I bet it took a lot.

Those Anya apricots. I saved ten pits last summer.

I knocked over one of the paper cups the middle of last week and when I went to gently put everything back in…there seemed at first to be no sign I’d ever planted anything in there.

Did I somehow miss that one?!

No.

Oh.

At least I had that one big, healthy one about to sprout. And then seven days ago, an actual sprout in a second cup.

But I checked a few others and they’d rotted away, too, so I quit looking and just kept watering (not too much now!) and figuring I’d give it another week–again, and likely another one after that; maybe all they need is warmer weather?

I transplanted the big one split wide open and its healthy, strong root into a bigger pot with better drainage.

I do not know how that killed it, but it died.

At least by then I had the tiny second one throwing out leaf after glorious little leaf.

I went to bed last night grieving Brad’s death hard. So not the ending to the story we’d expected. Thank you for all your comments, it helps more than you know.

And–as long as I was wishing things had turned out different–I wished I’d gotten more than one healthy actual apricot seedling after all that hope and expectation and effort. Not that it mattered; I just wanted it. Like a two year old who’s going to go pout in the corner over not getting a marshmallow.

I woke up this morning and somehow the first thing I did was walk across the house over to those pots.

Where there was very new and completely unexpected life. A sprout! It had no color to it, the future leaves were just tiny bumps on a tiny stem and it could have just been a fragment in the potting soil, but no, it was real and it was not there last night and I grabbed the paper cup out of the windowsill and put it outside in the new sunlight of the day. (Under a bird netting cage. Its little homemade ICU.)

Not ten minutes later I thought, wait, I need a picture.

Already it had taken on a tinge of green. Can you see it? Already it was starting to respond to the sun and creating sugar for its roots below. That fast.

And I bet I can tell you what it’s going to look like a week from now.

We’ll see how it goes, but right now it feels like a gift from Brad. It helps.

After ten years of trying to have a family, their daughter was three and their twin boys were two weeks old when this happened. I’ve told the story here before but it’s been a goodly while and today’s a day that needs the telling of it.

They are just the nicest people ever. They had moved into a house about a mile from us and when the movers pulled away, a neighbor came by to introduce himself and welcome them to the neighborhood. He happened to mention that back in 1955, there’d been a very high tide with a monster storm and the houses on their street had taken quite a flooding. Just something to know about the place.

A few years later, the babies had just come home from the hospital and the rain was not like anything you usually see here and it had been a hard downpour all day long.

I remember that day vividly: I was on the freeway going to Berkeley to replace my kid’s lost sheet music at the only place that sold copies, with a school concert the next night (the music teacher later told me, All you had to do was ask me, I could have given you guys one!) when one windshield wiper suddenly broke and jammed the other one and I couldn’t even see the truck in front of me much less the cars to either side.

Yeah. It was like that. With his family turned in for as much of a night as you get with newborn twins, Brad was watching the local news, waiting for the weather report.

King tide tonight, they warned as they reported on where the major flooding was.

He opened the front door to see if the water was coming up in their street like that guy had warned them about.

His koi from the pond in their back yard suddenly swam past his feet on their way to the Bay. Freedom! Explorations ahead!

He told that story with a laugh for years. (He also evacuated his family to friends whose house was on higher ground and spent the night lifting everything onto cinderblocks. It was months before the house was livable again but at least he could save their stuff, and he did. I forever after imagined how tired he must have been as he just kept on going anyway.)

My Richard was their home teacher from church.

One time, Brad’s wife put some oreos on a plate and told the now-two-year-old boys to go offer them to him. They did–but in between the kitchen and the living room, given that you had to scoot around a wall that made it so Mommy couldn’t quite see them doing it and the ones in the living room might not, the frosting part of those cookies somehow…vanished. Richard was offered a plate of somewhat soggy dark plain rounds. Well, mostly still round.

Hey, when two sweet little toddlers offer you a goodie you know they want, you eat one to teach them to see how your eyes light up and how grateful you are for their generosity so they’ll want to do that for other people again. (One cookie was enough.)

Such sweet memories. They moved away to a better job and lower cost of living but we kept in touch over Facebook and I marveled that somehow their kids turned into young adults in spite of their not being here where I could see them do it in person.

Brad put up a post there yesterday, acknowledging that he rarely does but he wanted to reach out and say hi to everybody in all of our sheltering-in-place. (I’m sure he wanted us to know how much we really, really should.) He wanted his family, his friends, the whole world, to know how much he loved them.

He was wearing a big mask and his face was so thin–I had to look twice to make sure it was him.

He wrote that his was the first case of COVID-19 diagnosed in his county. And the first success. He’d been ill these past three weeks, in the ICU on a ventilator for two, but he had just moved out of there into a regular bed. He was off the ventilator. He was so weak, but he was getting better and he was so very very happy that he would get to see more of his kids’ lives from here on out.

I just now opened Facebook again.

The post was from Brad’s brother so his wife and children wouldn’t have to.

Brad is gone.

I am gutted.

Jeffrey R. Holland had a son working on his PhD at Stanford and so for several years we got to know the son and his wife and little boy and every now and then his folks would fly into town to visit, so we got to know them a little bit, too.

That toddler would be a young adult now, but at age two he had the biggest cutest jowls and a surprisingly deep voice–he was his grampa’s mini-me, and absolutely adorable.

All that aside, here’s what his grandfather, one of the twelve apostles serving in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, said at General Conference:

“When we have conquered COVID-19—and we will—may we be equally committed to freeing the world from the virus of hunger and freeing neighborhoods and nations from the virus of poverty.

It’s the weekend of watching General Conference. Potato-chip knitting time, simple, mindless–definitely not for the distractions of the ocean afghan, and so a cashmere cowl is now most of the way done.

The Tabernacle Choir’s songs are from sessions recorded back when it was safe for them to all be together, and the leaders are meeting in a small theater with no audience and sitting six feet apart. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is currently being led by a former heart surgeon and he acted earlier than most religious leaders in shutting down the meetinghouses and taking the local services online, too.

Two more sessions tomorrow, so I need to choose another skein from the stash.

How do you pick just one?

(My Page orange tree.)

I’ve heard others marveling over the same thing I’d noticed: the sudden, stunning absence of spammers that had been calling relentlessly all day long for years.

Their greed apparently finally veered too close to political wounds. Their latest scam had been trying to monetize the coronavirus: the new pitches were for fake testing, fake cures, fake insurance, anything people would be desperate to have in the pandemic that they could make a quick buck over and run.

Which could make the administration look bad, and we can’t have that, so the FCC–you know, the same FCC that under Trump thought that it was peachy fine to let companies both sell and throttle our data, that killed net neutrality–told those guys’ providers that if all overseas robocalls weren’t stopped within two days those American companies that were enabling them would lose all access to American telecom systems. Period.

And in our social distancing isolation, when the phone rings now, it’s actually a call you want to take, and you answer.

It had been that easy all along; the FCC just had had to want to do it.

May we never go back.

Someone, somewhere out there had to have beaten me to it. Hey Google?

She did! Someone took John Denver’s song and changed it to You Fill Out My Census.

(We got the long form ten years ago; we got the short form this time and I couldn’t believe how quickly it was over and done.)

We started the afternoon with a hailstorm but it let up.

Four o’clock is still working hours, from home or no, plus the driving time to get there. Only two other people had publicly responded to the idea. I had this small terrible fear that the whole thing was going to be a bust.

Park on the east side of the street right before where you turn onto ours, Catherine had said: no parking is allowed there, so there won’t be any other cars in your way.

I saw three other cars when I got there. And then another. And then another. Okay, good. So there we all were, just out of sight of their house but blatantly out of place to the older guy crossing the intersection in front of our line. Of which I was inadvertently at the head because I’d started to overshoot–I’d thought their street was a little further down.

So. No point in having his day be anything but better, I figured.

I had used a piece of cardboard as a backing, taped a piece of plain white paper on top, and Sharpied on it, Happy Birthsday J and J! Just the right size to hold up at a driver’s side window.

I held that sign up for the perplexed pedestrian and he broke into a big grin and gave me a thumbs-up. Alright then!

I don’t think he’d seen what was on the other cars. He’d just been looking at mine.

One, they’d spray-painted–on a sheet maybe?–and had affixed it somehow to the side of their car to make a really big banner. Another friend had used grocery bags to make paper-cut-out words. Someone else back there had–I dunno, I didn’t get a good look other than bright pink and sticking out. None of us had been able to go in to a store for anything you could buy, none of us had had quite 24 hours’ notice, we’d all kluged it from whatever we’d had, which made it all the sweeter. Or we’d simply come. Which is what mattered most.

The twins’ dad just happened to go for a little walk. It was 4:00. He waited a moment, checking his phone, and then waved us over.

And so our parade began.

There were easily a dozen cars by then.

Now, I’d never done any such thing before and I was kind of winging it there but I drove at pretty much walking speed and held up my sign and Happy Birthdayed from inside my car.

They’re thirteen. They did what new teens do: they smiled back, they got all embarrassed, and they headed for the front door to escape with their mom calling after them.

Parked cars on both sides keep it a tight line driving down that street so, eyes back to straight ahead for me.

It’s a cul-de-sac, and as I got to the bulb at the bottom of it another elderly man stepped forward–right into the middle of it, quite deliberately in front of me. He didn’t know who I was or all those other cars way up there but none of them looked familiar, this was not our neighborhood, and he wasn’t having this intrusion. Didn’t we see the No Thru Street sign? Hello? The lockdown? Whether he was saving space for his grandkids to come out and play dodgeball or what, who knows–but I again held up that Happy Birthsday! sign.

Ah, okay. He gave a little smile back, waved like the other guy had, and stepped out of the way.

Coming back the other way, making space for the ones still coming meant I was really going slow this time.

Catherine was just joyful as she recorded video of our going by. Her girls were closer to the street now, by the twin flowering trees that had been planted out front when they were born; they were looking out at all the cars and people with a look now of, Wow. Cool. Thank you.

They’ll be telling the story of their 13th birthday to their grandkids someday. It was great fun.