It was not pretty when I got done. (The pictures embiggen.) I was pretty sure I wasn’t done, but the bin was full.

The forecast was off that day in February and it froze that night.

They say in mango forums to leave the tree alone, give it a chance to make a comeback wherever it will after the weather warms up, especially if it’s past those first few tender years.

So I waited. And wished. The top half of the tree looked utterly dead and what was below didn’t look happy at all.

Saturday it had been warm enough long enough. I went out there with the clippers: no sense in letting the injured parts kill off the rest, and besides, all those dead leaves were shadowing whatever might be underneath, and oh look there’s fungal disease on that one and that one and that one. Out!

Mangos meander. You don’t get a single trunk growing upwards, you get a kid twisting their hair in their fingers endlessly.

I found just a few places where there was blackened branch but still some green above it and those I left alone. Then I watered the tree and hoped. All those years I’d taken such good care of it, one week of warning weather that I didn’t pay much attention to because it wasn’t going to freeze and then it did and I could have avoided all that damage if I’d taken it seriously…

I had needed for some time to take out the old line of incandescent Christmas bulbs draped on it for heat and put in a new set where they all worked but I hadn’t been able to follow the line and see nor reach what I was doing in that thick growth.

I can now.

With Constance headed for home after a great visit, I went back out there this evening. There were some larger branches that everything coming off of them had been brittle and very much dead and were now gone but I’d left the main part just because, because…it all was so much and so hard to do after babying this tree for ten years.

That big V-shaped line in the foreground of the first photo had, it turned out, the tiniest new bits of green at quite a few nodes. Those were not there yesterday. There may well be more tomorrow.

This is one of the smaller branches that still had leaves despite the freezer-burning. The fact that it’s growing from a circle of leaves rather than a single one means that it will be a cluster of new branches from there.

Look and look and look! There are more sprouts all over the sun-facing side of the tree!

All it had needed was the deadened parts cleared out of its way so it could grow again.

Speaking of which, there’s another pro-democracy protest this Saturday across the nation.

We’ve been badly burned but our ideals live on. We can honor the sacrifices of our fathers. We can demand our leaders protect democracy, free speech, equal protection under the law, the right to be heard in a court of law, the rule of law itself that makes all that is America great or at least potentially great. Those are ours and we claim them for the good of all. Go team go!

So since I couldn’t join the Hands Off! protest for the sun exposure, I watched the Saturday sessions of the LDS Church’s semi-annual conference in real time rather than later. (Link is to Sunday’s.)

I was struck by how again and again the talks were pleas for compassion and humility, reminding us at this Easter season how the enormity of the Atonement was in Jesus’s compassion for every single one of us, more than we can ever know. “Love one another as I have loved you.” One speaker even said to ‘never let your party or’ (as he quickly added I forget what else, I was too busy being surprised) ‘be greater than your love of God’–given that they never, ever talk politics from the pulpit. I’m quite sorry it needed to be said and very glad he said it.

Afterward, I checked the reports: well done, everybody! Look at all those crowds–yay!!! Look at DC. Wow. Of course WaPo reported it: they had to. Wow. You did it. You spoke up for the least of these and for all of us–and for me, on a personal scale in my disability. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

They say the last person who was qualified for the position Trump hired them for was Stormy Daniels. (Credit to an anonymous Washington Post commenter, a little long for a placard.) How about, Overthrow the money changers in the temple of our government! (Still long. Taking suggestions.)

Saturday is the day: April 5 and the Hands Off! protests across the country. Or as I think of it, the Restore Hope Again declaration of We the People to demand a reinstatement of that which functions well in our government, to reclaim our democracy, to reclaim the Rule of Law as the ideal our country has been striving towards since its founding, to reclaim all that is good about democracy, which our fathers put their lives on the line to fight for. We refuse to be ruled by fascists. We refuse to allow our government to kidnap people off the streets by people who offer no names nor warrants, and any law enforcement officer of any kind who has participated in that should be held accountable before a court himself. All those who have been so disappeared must be allowed to appear before an American court and the innocent set free. And yes foreign grad students are allowed to write op-eds in their school paper that some might disagree with. But Americans are not afraid of free speech.

We can do all these things if we speak up.

The Post just lost Eugene Robinson to Bezos’ clampdown on any editorial writing that he and his Rupert Murdoch henchman don’t like. The Post claims that news reporters are not interfered with.

Well, then show it. Let’s see if the protests are covered at WaPo. But Politico, the Contrarian, BBC news, the Guardian, and I know our scrappy little small town paper here will all be snapping pictures and interviewing and hoping people know how important supporting reporters is because they’re the ones holding government figures accountable to us and their work is not easy right now.

Re Trump throwing tariffs at a penguin-only island: bullies hate being made fun of. How about a placard of an indignant penguin holding a placard.

Go team go!

My grandmother was a very proper woman whom I never heard speak ill of anyone.

Except once.

Her husband was a Republican Senator who kept for posterity his thank you letter from Martin Luther King Jr. for voting for the Civil Rights Act.

Strom Thurmond, on the other hand… One of my older cousins asked her how he’d done his historic 24 hour filibuster and Gram did a sharp sniff, took a deep breath, and told us kids, “Well! He had a catheter installed under his pants.” The disdain in her voice was something so unexpected coming from her that I’ve never forgotten it.

(I debated saying contempt, but Merriam-Webster says disdain means considering someone as being beneath one’s notice or dignity and that captures it perfectly. Like I say, she was a proper woman.)

Today I watched now and then and then all of the last 45 minutes of Cory Booker’s speech before Congress. Senator Booker, with enough African heritage to know what it is to be a Black man in America today, was determined  to best the record of a man who had agitated for segregation and the snatching away of rights of people who looked like him. Booker was speaking up for the rule of law, the sanctity of the courts, and the rights of all of us. For us to reclaim all that is good in us as Americans and in our government.

And he did it. He did it. And he kept going, just for good measure, long enough to get past that 24 hour 18 mark to a solid 25-plus so that his number and Thurmond’s would never be the same. Beat the old bastard once and for all. It was a declaration that the old racist fascist in the White House is going to lose out to the judgments of history, too.

Gram’s reaction was never about the catheter. It was just the closest she could come to saying how p***-poor  Thurmond’s ideas had been and what kind of a person would go to so much effort towards damaging the lives of so many others.

Cory Booker stood there, for 25 hours on his feet straight he stood up for every single one of us and I am so proud and so grateful.

And thank you, Wisconsin! 

Someone had a lot of fun putting a dragon eye in that tree. The fact that the iris looks like a black beetle is the perfect extra Halloweeny touch to it.

Wrote to my city council members today. Wrote my congressman. Weighed the morality of being part of the April 5 peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations vs doing right by my family and not risking a flare by being out in the sun to hold up one of those placards. The physical reality of lupus always wins and I always stay inside and it’s so deeply frustrating–but it’s also how I made it to thirty-five years since diagnosis.

But by golly I can drive past slowly honking my horn and waving and cheering in solidarity.

Dunno if you saw the guy who tried pulling a stun gun on an older woman at a demonstration in front of the Berkeley Tesla dealership last week. It is fair to say that that UC Berkeley medical school professor was not having it. Peaceful, peaceful, guys! but yeah, she was not going to let him do that to anybody else.

Deep breath. And a thank you to the cops who came to serve and protect peacefully and they did.

Conflict creates drama. At the very end, Trump reveled out loud at what great television this was going to make.

He’s a star, and some voters let him do it.

And so in the Oval Office, JD Vance accused Zelenskyy of campaigning for “the other side” last year, incensing 47 and egging him on to even greater bullying. Even knowing what I was about to see, it was astonishing.

This was supposed to be the President and Vice President of the United States of America, representing the hopes and aspirations of the American people before the world from inside the most important room in one of the most important buildings in our country, a temple to democracy, a place of diplomacy and peacemaking for all of our history.

I had read about it and thought, was it really that bad? I didn’t want to judge by what anyone else said about them, I had to go watch it myself.

Zelenskyy, put in an impossible spot, handled the betrayal with a great grace that was completely unseen by his attackers.

Trump played angry Mad King George to the hilt. Vance was worse because he was fully aware what they were doing and who would suffer and what the potential fallout could be across not just Ukraine but all of Europe–and that was fine with him.

Do the people who voted for these guys even know that they’re blaming Ukraine for starting an invasion of Ukraine by Russia and how twisted that is?

Vote for a rapist….

What is Putin holding over these men that they’re trying so hard to hurt people seeking to keep their precious freedom?

One whole side of the pomegranate tree popped out in small reddish new leaves overnight, officially declaring winter over. It had looked utterly dormant yesterday. Yay!

Things are starting to wake up.

In case anyone hasn’t heard: there is a move afoot to show the power of the people to those bent on ascribing it all to themselves.

Note that Jeff Bezos today announced that there will be no dissenting editorializing at his Washington Post from here on out: only those that support his vision of what ‘freedom’ means as he supports the current administration.

He asked the Opinions editor if he could agree to what he was being told to do, and Shipley said no. He is out.

Politico marveled, for a man supposedly bright about business, having already lost a quarter million subscribers in reaction to his exerting control over the editorial section before last Fall’s election, Bezos didn’t even try to hide it.

We have recourse. Friday, there’s a call for all to stop being consumers for one day: no buying (in some quarters, an exception is made for paying in cash to local small businesses, ie helping the little guy and not sending off a percentage of their earnings to the big banks via credit cards). No Amazon, no opening ads in your inbox, no shopping, no big corporations. Show our power of the purse to those whom that’s all they care about, to those who are cutting funds to the poorest (Medicaid, starving people, my stars) to give more to the richest.

Go on financial strike. Show them who’s really boss.

Just for a day.

There may need to be more.

Let’s see if Bezos lets it be reported on.

Note that Jennifer Rubin, lawyer and as of about a month ago a now-former editorial writer at the Post (her column was named Right Turn for her Republican take on politics, until Trump 1.0), co-founded “The Contrarian: not owned by anybody” a few weeks ago with one of the lawyers from the first impeachment hearing and it is already up to half a million subscribers. Nice.

There’s a saying in Europe, he said over dinner–France and Spain, at least. It is: We have the songs but they have the guns.

New one to me. I reminded him of the Pete Seeger story, where to his surprise the protest singer was invited to sing in Barcelona during the Franco dictatorship. His car was tailed (and afterwards so much so that he wasn’t sure they would let him live.)

The large stadium was packed and the show carried live nationwide on the radio. Just before Seeger went on he was handed a list by some men clearly intending to look threatening of the songs he was not allowed to sing: most of his set.

So he walked out there, held up the piece of paper to one and all, told his audience what had just happened (knowing exactly how much that would tick off certain people) and said, I’ll tell you what: they said I couldn’t sing them. They didn’t say I couldn’t PLAY them. I bet you know all the words. Tell you what, I’ll play them and you sing them.

And sing they most certainly did, loud and clear. And the whole country heard it and knew they were not alone in resisting the dictatorship.

Franco’s regime crumbled after the concert.

When the people knew they weren’t the only people who had the songs, who were willing to sing the songs out loud and in defiance, the guns became powerless and irrelevant.

I thought of this after the story broke of a doctored video (NBC story link) playing on screens throughout the HUD building after all work-from-homes were required to work-from-work no matter where they actually lived that showed just how humiliatingly subservient 47 is to the (f)Elon. The regime’s men couldn’t figure out how to make it stop other than running from floor to floor and room to room unplugging the screens, knowing that unless they figured out more than that, that video would still be waiting to repeat on endless loops.

And knowing that so many people were laughing over it and that they had not succeeded in keeping it from getting out of the building must have burned.

There’s more than one way for a free people to sing.

Flood the zone, the felon-in-chief’s favored fellow felon advised. Put more out there than the media can deal with at once.

And so 17 Inspectors General, those tasked with rooting out abuse or waste in government, were fired in an illegal manner yesterday, today all Federal grants were suspended in an illegal manner (meaning as part of it not just school lunches but that all Medicaid disbursements were stopped, till a Federal judge stopped the stopping but only for now) while ICE agents raided elementary schools for anybody suspected of being an illegal immigrant even if they were too young to know what that was or that they were born here and are citizens. And even if they weren’t.

Traumatizing the children. Y’know, when you let any disturbed individual buy a thousand rounds of ammunition for their many guns once they’re 18 but not yet fully myelinated, you just might want them to have the happier childhoods their loving parents were planning on instead. Think ahead.

Two million Federal employees were told in an email that they had the choice of emailing back “resign” and getting paid through September or to assume they’ll be fired or at best demoted.

Don’t do it. All of that was in violation of the law, too, including the sums any severance could entail per person. They want you to be the guilty party on losing your job. Air traffic controllers? Who needs them, right?

An old friend reposted his friend’s experience of having multiple ICE agents pull him over and wave guns in his face and yell and threaten him and lie that he had done things just now that he absolutely had not while he called the local police, who came to his aid and told the agents to get the hell out of there and leave the guy alone. And that was in a red state.

And if they’re already doing that to a citizen based on his name or looks…

Are there Republicans who are as outraged as the rest of the world looking on in horror? Are they hearing from their constituents?

We must speak up–like an individual stitch in a sweater, every voice matters.

I know they want us to throw up our hands and not look. I’m making myself look because I owe that to my dad’s memory for his service in WWII. The rule of law. Integrity. Compassion. Democracy. Those are ours and we will not let them be taken from us.

And then I knit four rows of afghan and started some bright new fish. Because that felt wonderful and hopeful, picturing a grandchild’s future delighted face.

Judging, wrote Carolyn Hax recently, is carbs for the ego: so satisfying at first but so easy to overdo.

And yet.

It is unfathomable that the day we remember and celebrate all that was good and noble and idealistic about Martin Luther King and his appeal to the best in our natures was the day we let the felon-in-chief back into the White House.

I do not want to see that face again. I do not ever want to hear that voice again. And yet, he’s managed to guarantee himself endless hourly media attention–again.

Any time he says something outlandish, the latest being wanting to steal the Panama Canal or invading Greenland–pay attention to what he doesn’t want you to see that he’s actually doing. It’s a tell, and it always was.

So to avoid all that I put in hours on the afghan. Six rows is the most I’ve done in a day, given that it’s such slow going. But in between I had to rest my hands, and would find email notifications; some, I just had to go look.

The richest oligarchs across the front row and the average joe left outside in the cold weather, no surprise there. Elon Musk, South African son of apartheid who came here illegally on a student visa because he never showed up at Stanford but stayed anyway, raising a Nazi salute–twice–not only in public but on camera in celebration of our newly sworn in racist-in-chief: that is staggering to the daughter of a man who put his life on the line to save the world from Hitler.

And it is so deeply sad to see those two in particular who have forsaken not just all those wives but the sense that we must all matter to each other in their zeal for power and money. If they had been in that Pacific Palisades fire like my sister, would they have cared what color the firemen who rescued them were? What *their* immigration status was?

In the end, which will come for them, too, everything they’re grasping at will become utterly nothing, and what on earth will they have then?

Like several hundred thousand others, I canceled my Washington Post subscription when Bezos interfered as he had promised the Graham family on buying it that he would never do, and killed its editorial endorsing Kamala Harris.

And then he flew to that place that had had the stolen–they were, they belonged to the National Archives, ie us–top-secret documents in strewed boxes in a gaudy chandeliered bathroom. To go kowtow to autocracy in person to show that he meant it.

But Jennifer Rubin, a fine legal mind, still wrote there. So did Dana Milbank and Alexandra Petri and Eugene Robinson. Robin Givhan, I want to read anything she writes. Monica Hesse, too. Oh wait they just eliminated her position.

Milbank wrote a passionate piece in defense of continuing to support the Post in spite of its owner (who let them publish that.) With very mixed feelings, I resubscribed.

It’s my hometown paper. It’s the one that reported NIH’s weekly press conference on the latest discoveries in the world of medicine when I was a kid and I looked forward to that every Wednesday. Watergate. Meg Greenfield. Didn’t find out till after she died of cancer that the reason she’d always had the inside story on what Washington insiders were thinking was because she regularly threw grand parties at her Georgetown house in DC and mixed all kinds of people in politics together at the table. Katherine Graham’s autobiography. Woodward and Bernstein. This was and had always been MY paper.

But now it’s the place that fired Wesley Lowery for writing too well about a white cop killing an unarmed black man.

So I was thrilled today to find out–not from the Post, which still hasn’t announced that Ann Telnaes angrily resigned after they refused to run her editorial cartoon blasting the obsequiousness of the various billionaires seeking the felon-elect’s approval–that now Jennifer Rubin is out.

And not just resigned! A new (online) paper! Norm Eisen, her co-founder of The Contrarian, was legal counsel to the first impeachment hearing. Look at this list! (scroll down to see it) of people who’ve signed on to write with them!

Completely subscriber-funded.

I know a quarter million like-minded people who would be interested, just for starters…

It’s like Katherine Graham, who embarrassed her atheist parents as a kid by asking one of her friends who this Jesus guy was and why was he a big deal because she’d heard his name but had no idea, just figured out how to do this resurrection thing. Of something she’d made her life’s work.

I am really hopeful about this. I hadn’t quite realized how much I’d needed that. Man, it feels good. Power will be met by truth after all.

(Photo from two years ago. I had no idea this one was going to be so huge when I ordered my first gerdan, I had no frame of reference yet.)

I wore all-black to church today. I’d asked after one of my friends in Ukraine and had gotten an anguished message back wondering where would they go, whether they would even live, how would they get through this.

I knew in my bones that only the color of mourning would do. And my very large, bright yellow sunflower gerdan: there have been Ukrainian refugees living next door to that church and I wanted them to feel seen. I wanted to bear witness to the importance of supporting the innocents whom American voters just sold down the river. It was my I Protest outfit. But anyway.

There are two people in that congregation who–well, one once showed me her official socks with that name on them.

The monthly senior potluck was this evening and I looked around and thought, hey, look–we’re not the youngest ones anymore!

People were chatting, the hostess was trying to get people to get started; Richard motioned me over to where he had a seat at a table ready for me.

Ms. Socks was to the other side.

Note that she and I do not discuss politics because it would do no good–but I have noted that as her guy’s behavior got worse and worse over these past few years she avoided me more and more, which is a shame, because other than that one (very big) thing I consider us old friends. More and more though with a sense of wistfulness and loss.

Why should I let him of all people call the shots in our personal lives. So I turned to her and asked her about her house and how the remodeling was going.

She seemed surprised that I would want to talk to her, which struck me as terribly sad, but answered my question and we went on to have a normal conversation like it should always be and she enjoyed a bit of my blueberry cobbler, too.

I think Bill of Penzey’s Spices has a point: Cook. Feed people. Love them.

It helped.

Making myself knit so many baby afghan rows before each time I go re-check the election returns, watching these early ones in horror. Do people even remember what a President is? How could anyone, anyone vote for a felon convicted of dozens of counts of financial fraud, a man found by the court to be a rapist? The guy who crowed over overturning Roe and then casually mentioned in the past week that he tried to get his second wife to abort? The resulting daughter was out campaigning for him.

The lies, the cruelty. The violent insurrection, fer cryin’ out loud??

Why, why, why?

So that did it. I figured if my head is daymaring old car accident scenes it’s past time to take on the source of that stress and answer my own admonition. I’d already put in most of the work but there were a few things on that ballot I needed to learn more about first and decide on.

(Really? A guy in LA made tens of millions off a loophole for charities and made himself a slumlord and fought building better and something about a stadium and paid for repeating defeated ballot propositions as a hobby so there’s ‘the revenge proposition’ about his AIDS foundation regarding rent control? We need Tim Walz over here. Say it with me, Tim: Weird!)

Arizona’s ballot made the front page for being two pages long, front and back–it was going to hold up the lines!

Beginners. Ours was three like that. That’s normal. What it does is tell the voters to do their homework ahead of time so as not to waste anyone else’s. (Pretty much a moot point now that our ballots are mailed to everyone.)

It felt contagiously good to go through all that and declare it ready, so Richard sat down with his.

Prop 34 was the weird one. It should have been fixed by the legislature–you know, where different ideas get hashed out, justifications get shot down, motivations get holes poked in them, compromises made, and tax- and ratepayers’ money gets looked after. Supposedly.

We checked fronts and backs multiple times making sure we’d filled out every single thing correctly. The envelope, too. Card A, I went back and looked at one more time.

Kamala Harris. My filled-out oval beside her name. I held that in my hands and eyes and just let it wash over me.

There was a woman my age reading all the print all over the ballot boxes trying to make sure she was doing this right, a little flustered as I approached at being caught in her uncertainty, afraid of potentially doing anything wrong but quickly letting go of that as she saw my face and laughing for joy with me as we saw our ballots, our precious precious at-long-last votes, our declarations of democracy and hopes for all we hold dear to continue as they slowly slid down inside those slots out of sight.

A neighbor. I have no idea who she is, all I know is if we ever see each other again we will most likely throw our arms around each other in recognition of all that that moment had meant.

And then I went home, found this, and watched Kamala Harris’s speech at the Ellipse, starting at one hour twelve.

That. That was a speech of unity for the ages. That is my future President. That is what I did my part to help come to be. I can’t wait.

The joy!

It’s one of my very earliest memories. I was in the far back of the station wagon (there were no seatbelts there in those days) and I was being thrown around the inside of the car–the roof and I were not supposed to come at each other like that–along with the other kids and I didn’t LIKE it and my daddy was in control of the whole world and I didn’t understand why was he doing this and I was mad. Stop it right now!

A brake cable had snapped and wrapped around an axle (did I get that right, Mom?) and suddenly we were doing a 360 at full speed on the freeway and going over an embankment. Mom remembers the gasoline tanker we missed by inches. My oldest sister remembers the petting zoo we fell into at the bottom where we kids were entertained by the animals as we waited for help. The trucker went on to the nearest phone he could find to call the police to tell them a family had just died back there.

But we hadn’t; somehow we went on with our cross-country trip after that. I wonder what the car looked like. I have no idea.

I wondered tonight why those very old images had come to mind and had to stop a moment to puzzle it out.

I had just read Jeff Bezos’ new editorial: the one wherein he claims himself as a fellow journalist to the Post and proceeds to gaslight both his readers and quite possibly himself, but with obvious discrepancies between his story and Lewis’s. Lies from the both of them, but Bezos might even half-believe them. Right after Trump held an actual Nazi-wannabe rally.

It’s like Bezos had just cut that brake cord himself while we the voters and the honorable reporters are trying to control that wheel and guide where our car lands as it careens out of control.

We can still steer this to safety, though. They can’t take that away from us–yet.

Not now, not ever. We can do this. VOTE.