Just because they can doesn’t mean they should keep at it. Their only reward is seeing the boxes tumbling down.

But clearly the sport appeals to them. At this point we have a lot of green Fujis in the fridge and not a lot left on the tree and what you don’t see there is the ends of the branches that were broken in the act.

On the other hand, stepping a few feet to the right, the squirrels have not yet realized that figs are food–or rather, there was one bite in one very green ditched one on the ground awhile ago and that was that. I left it there so its buddies could all taste it and go eww, too.

And so Richard and I split our first-ever homegrown summer fig today and that, my friends, was exactly what a fig aspires to be. The depth of flavor, the sweetness, the intensity that gives one last did-you-catch-that? at the end. Two more are becoming reddish brown and starting to droop and I’m really liking this idea of my forty-nine more taking turns ripening one by one.

Oh, and, the afghan? Debby’s friend’s ‘what if I wake up stupid?’ comment is exactly why I have to rip immediately when I have to rip.

It’s so good to be able to say I got way beyond those rows today. The yarn held up well to the abuse, too.

Suddenly wondering what knitting needles made out of applewood might be like… I know, I know, don’t encourage them.

I had to know. I had to know what to do with them, leave them growing or harvest them small, so I finally cut a little one off and opened it up.

My squash seedlings got eaten as they came up a few months ago so I set out some much-anticipated Sharlyn melon plants in the same spot. Three times.  And the squirrels devoured them all–except that last one.

Clearly it was a new squash plant coming up late from the earlier seeds, because this is no melon.

Butternuts grow like this and turn washed-out-yellow later, right? Or is this yet another squirrelled volunteer? Because I know my neighbor on the other side of that fence grew gourds at least one year and I have no desire to commit my water to growing those.

It tasted sort-of zucchini-ish but was already a bit hard in the handle end. Any experienced gardeners reading this who’ve grown butternut?

A hawk, possibly a Sharp-shinned or maybe even a Cooper’s, circled close overhead as we sat in the rental car in front of my father-in-law’s a moment this morning and set the GPS for the airport. And again as if tracing the cul-de-sac in the sky. As we pulled out, it went ahead of us a bit and circled one last time in good-bye and then away, and I exclaimed to Richard that it was the perfect ending to our visit with his dad. It had been *so* good to see him this past week and the hawk coming so close was like a connection between Texas and home, a sense of till-the-next-time.

There was more to come.

On the flight leaving Dallas before ours, there was a family–a dad, a mom, two little girls about four and five and a baby–who got to the gate just in time to preboard but it was clear it had been a hustle and a hassle making it at all in time and they were stressed. Their flight was late, which had helped a lot. The dad was trying not to be cross. But his face gave him away.

It was a risk… I didn’t want to be putting him on the spot and I didn’t know how he would react when all I knew about him was that he was not feeling overly charmed by his cute little girls in just that one little moment. But who would want to be judged forever by those public moments when you’re not the perfect parent. I wavered.

But by then I’d already found two cute ones in the depths of that purse and they spoke for themselves: these were, first and foremost, for the parents. A pink flamingo with black beak and eyes and a black condor, the tips of its wings and tail edged in white.

Meanwhile, the guy looking at their boarding passes was finding something not immediately right and making them stand there and stand there and stand there while everybody else was waiting to go on that plane (no pressure!) and what that did was create a sense of anticipation while giving me enough time to get me over my fear of reaching out. So there you go.

A small tap (it was the dad, I couldn’t reach the mom without falling over a trash can or a kid), his turning around, and suddenly his face lit up and then at me in wonder and then the mom’s too and they were surprised and thrilled and the wife said, “These are so cute! Thank you! Did you make them?”

“I wish, but no, I buy them from Peru but they are hand knit. We’ve had little ones,” I smiled, nodding at their children, who hadn’t caught on yet that these were for them.

They thanked me again and it was like that was what the no-nonsense airport guy needed to be done with them and he sent them on their way past the gate.

As they headed away I was relieved and glad to have seen the best in both parents having immediately come to life. That was the gift they gave to me.

I saw a flyby in the morning, which was cool, and this evening, Richard looked up at hearing a finch hit the window–just in time to see the pursuing hawk hit it, too.

But…but…! As I remembered the time I washed the windows and Coopernicus arrived right there a couple of feet away and examined closely: yes, there’s still something there, still in this particular space as always, okay, got it.

He would circle within an inch, absolutely amazing to watch, clearly knowing exactly where that plate of glass was.

The fact that today’s Cooper’s hawk flew back out of here was a relief. But also a reminder that that particular species is often found by biologists to have evidence of healed broken bones.

It dawned on me this afternoon.

The dolly had been in the garage. The male Cooper’s hawk has always liked to perch on it on the patio, but it hasn’t been there the last few months and I hadn’t even thought about it.

We used it a few days ago to wrestle a very large hand-me-down ceramic planter given to us by a friend who was moving back East, and as long as we had that thing out I’d left it in its old spot for now, a little wistful at the memories of seeing my favorite raptor on it.

And there you go. The hawk came back. So there it stays.

Meantime, when my folks had their hands full with small children, they were living in a very small house and four daughters in one bedroom was getting tight. They bought a lot in a new neighborhood starting to go up, and two of their old neighbors liked it enough that they came, too and so the three families settled into their bigger places still just a few houses away from each other.

One was Wendy’s family, and so she and I have known each other since we were born.

She lives in New Jersey these days, and she and her husband were briefly in town. They met up with us at the airport before their flight tonight and we were very glad for there being a Starbucks outside the security line where we could sit and catch up a bit. Tomorrow they’ll be in Philadelphia where her folks live now–at the same time two of my sisters will be in that town from out of state, and so they’ll get to see each other, too, and I’m so happy for them. I’d love to be able to thank Mr. and Mrs. B in person for being my backup parents all my growing up.

(Childhood memory: Wendy: You want to come over for dinner? Me, running across the street: Hey, Mom, what are we having for dinner? Okay, can I have dinner at the B’s? …I can’t tell you how many times I did that, even though my mom is a great cook.)

There’s nobody who knows you like the ones who have always known you.

I did a quick glance for the camera but it was across the room.

It had been awhile since I’d seen the Cooper’s hawks, not even during summer solstice when they’ve always shown up in years past, but one of them more than made up for it today. Those wide wings swooped right around the birdfeeder and near the window as the doves made a frantic run for it. I didn’t realize he’d caught one and as I stood to look over the philodendron to see if he was still in the yard I startled him into flying away with it.

Part of me wondered if it was Coopernicus’s offspring and doesn’t yet know that we like to people- and bird-watch each other? Still, I should have moved a little more slowly.

All I had to do was wonder if this were still Cooper’s territory to have them announce that yes, thank you, of course it is.

Fuji apples and Black Jack figs (which are a lot harder to get clamshells around.) The end of summer is going to be wonderful.

One stick in the dirt, one year, fifty figs. Sweet.

And the first of my tomatoes started turning color today. A raccoon apparently tried to get at it last night but stopped after starting to move one of those thorny stalks (see yesterday) that was in its way–and that was that.

I cut more of them down and added extra around the tomatoes and the fig tree both, liking that the lesson seems to have been learned and wanting to reinforce it.

The leaves are nearly gone for the season and most of those 5-7′ flower stalks have dried. The hummingbirds love the blossoms, which is a large part of why I haven’t gotten rid of them, but those stalks (just the stalks) have these vicious jags of thorns everywhere and every summer I start thinking I should just rip out the lot of them entirely.

So how many years did it take me to figure out that the critters that raid my stuff wouldn’t like to touch those any more than I do? All those times that I carefully cut the stalks with clippers and tried to keep holding onto them in the jaws of the things as I carried them to the bin, ends swaying awkwardly, trying not to let them smack into me as I opened the lid and tried both to get them in and to cut them in half so they would fit in there–they always got me. Often in the face.

Hey…

So I challenged the squirrels and raccoons to a duel: En Gourd, villains!

(I’m still not sure those really are Sharlyn melons no matter what that seed packet said. So far the leaves and fruit look deeply suspiciously zucchini-y. But they’re not growing into baseballs overnight, so, that’s a good sign.)

The tomatoes have the spiky things too. And they are untouched. So far.

(Edited to add: Acanthus. Found the name.)

Five days later… I can actually see the difference across the yard from day to day. That set of three branches growing from one in Sunday’s picture? This is just the one that was at the back.

The older new leaves are greening up fast.

The long branch at lower right: it’s got a whorl of leaves about 2/3 up (even if they somehow vanish to the camera), which makes it the perfect place to prune it early next year to trigger another flush of growth in time for fruit to happen. (Having learned…) Lots of leaves means lots of new branches from the spot. Ten is my record so far.

Had a male California quail (video) wandering around the patio for the first time this year. A squirrel was incurably curious but pointed its tail hard at the intruder while straining its body away just as hard, nose stretched nevertheless towards this strange big bird in spite of the fear it was signaling: what WAS this thing?!

While the quail likewise was afraid of it but eventually, following a seed trail, got too close in spite of itself–at which point the squirrel flipped over half-backwards while the quail jumped hard the other way.

That didn’t go so badly. The squirrel wanted one good sniff from closer up now: Will it bite? Does it peck? Is it a bird? Can I eat it?

At that the quail took its deely-bopper headbanger ornament (*why* did evolution do that to it?) and announced with its feet we were done now.

Having woken up to the news of an utterly innocent and well-loved man in Minnesota shot dead by the cops as he reached for his driver’s license, bookended by the snipers in Dallas tonight shooting eleven cops, killing four (update: five), who were there to make sure a protest rally stayed peaceful…

Both feel like the Kent State days of my childhood. We have GOT to stop doing this, thinking like this, acting on this. I want the Peace sign to make a huge comeback in our society: offer love to one another, not warring.

On a different note.

It was almost exactly a year ago, and I remember because it was right after the Fourth of July but while most of the traffic around my husband’s office was very low because people were on vacation, when I came around a blind curve in a steep hill and saw it.

There had been a pair of red-tailed hawks soaring above the nearby buildings for as long as anyone could remember, kiting on the thermals.

One of them had been hit by a car just at the end of that blind curve where neither could have seen the other coming. It was on the shoulder, an enormous wing angled upright, being blown softly by the wind.

A day or two later, I saw a bicyclist stop and pick up its body carefully, as if to honor this huge beautiful bird for having graced our lives, and he moved it to a small depression in the hillside where a tiny stream of water sometimes runs in winter, as if in burial. Away from the hard road and back to the nature it belonged to.

I mourned, too, for the hawk that had lost its mate. I saw it from time to time, alone now, as I waited to pick Richard up in the evenings.

Yesterday morning at 8:30 I had just turned up that hill a little farther down when I saw it: those wings, that size, the brilliant white against the new light of the day. A bit of gray in its tail and shoulders and its feet tucked in. It was rising, soaring on the wind.

Rushing home to my Sibley’s guide, it was a light morph of either a ferruginous hawk.

Or of a red-tailed. So there was a hawk nest up there this year after all.

Flying free, last year’s pain a distant memory of its elders.

May we learn from the hawks.

So many things to learn there.

Friday 6/10. The mountain goats as seen from the boat. Barely. But when they lifted their heads you could tell they really were what the captain said they were.

And Monday 6/13…

Reindeer’s antlers, while they’re growing in, are full of not only the blood that nourishes that growth but nerve endings, and we were told it would be painful to the animals if we were to touch those. So we didn’t. Instead, they passed around a single antler that had been shed at this same velvet stage to satisfy our curiosity, and it was very much as soft as it looked.

(I did not ask if a bear had gotten the little guy for that to have happened. There were children around. And a sleigh for them to climb on and think that Santa knew this place well.)

They told us that elk, unlike reindeer who use their flat upper jaws for hammering against, do have upper teeth and they can bite you. Watch that little guy with the dandelions, those are their favorite. (His mom was right behind him.)

Saturday 6/ 11. A river, whose name escapes me, and one of the trees on our son-in-law’s mom’s property. That water was melting glacier, cold and moving fast. I splashed my hand a bit at the edge in its honor, like I traditionally do at the Potomac River any time I go home: to make this one a part of me, too, now–and I think to claim all his family as our own in the gesture. We met some of them Sunday and I got to thank his mom for raising such a fine man.

Devin pointed out the cowslip and the devil’s club, two plants whose leaves looked very much alike and yet one was welcome but the other was infested with poisoned spikes. You do not want to walk through that one.

We stayed on the trail.

Here, this one over here is cowslip. See that stalk that looks like it has an upside-down fig at the top? There are no spikes on its leaves. It’s safe to go near. But see, this is devil’s club right next to it. It will stab you right through a pair of jeans.

I discovered this evening that, actually, it’s being studied as a treatment for TB.

Wishing good thick gloves to the ones doing the studying.

One last photo, sent to us tonight: Maddy is eighteen months old this week. Already. Somehow.

Someday she and her brothers will go visit their aunt and uncle and learn to look carefully at big pretty leaves.

And then go feed the reindeer.

(Surprise Glacier, a closeup during its calving, and the ice floes in front of it after we pulled up to them.)

The two and a half mile WWII-era tunnel under the mountain is one narrow but tall lane. It is also an active railroad line. Each side each way each type, train or car, has designated hours when they are allowed to proceed, with strict warnings that there are cameras and that the 30 foot distance between cars will be enforced.

Yeah, you don’t want an accident under there. Nor for a straggler car to find a train coming at it. Yow. So yes, that tunnel is carefully monitored at both ends.

But when you get to the other side!

We took the five-hour Klondike Express tour of the Chugach National Forest via Prince William Sound. I kept looking at all that vast, vast space and being agog at the idea of cleaning all of that up post-Exxon Valdez. How on earth had they done it? The Chugach, they said, was bigger than the state of New Jersey. The captain pointed out one part of the shore a goodly ways off and mentioned that it was 30 miles away at that spot.

And here’s the surprise: Chugach is also a rainforest. Yes, a lot of it falls as snow, but 80-100″ worth of precipitation a year, and it being summertime, there was a dense, lush green between the water line and the tree line towering above.

Icebergs, glaciers, sea otters, harbor seals on the dense field of ice chunks where the orcas did not want to go, a humpback whale breaching, a much larger black whale tail (Minke? Orca?) slapping the water in front of us, blowholes blowing, mountain goats, the tiny white dots on the rocks pointed out to us by the captain. Surprise Glacier in the very act of calving. The captain pulled up close to it and a member of the crew dipped a fishing net into the water. Not for salmon: he wanted us to be able to touch a piece of glacier.

Then one large one was broken up onboard and a glass of glacier was offered to all, a little water on top.

It took a long, long time to melt.

We drank the glacier.

One tall mountainside, hemmed in by all that white ice, was itself a sheer gray rock face top to bottom. In 2003, we were told, that was all glacier, too–but it is no more. Trees would start growing out of the crevices soon.

(Pointing around the bay) See those sharply pointed peaks? they asked us. Now, see the ones that are smoothed over at the top? The smoothed ones had glaciers grinding them down.

The brochure for our catamaran said we would go past rookeries, and we did see a seagull one at a distance, but overall they seemed sparse just then and the captain opted to spend enough time trying to give us a good view of the whales that he knew he had to get us back in time to make our tunnel time.

(Iceberg photo because hey, you have to have an iceberg photo after they made sure we knew that was one.)

As we finally disembarked after a little over five hours I was quietly just a little disappointed that I hadn’t been one of the ones who’d seen a bald eagle overhead. Wrong side of the boat at the wrong time.

Just then an adult bald eagle in full striking black and white flew low over our heads right there.

And was promptly dive-bombed from behind by the only crow I saw in all of Alaska. The eagle utterly dwarfed it but was willing to mosey on out in nice, slow motion, letting us tourists get that good view first.

We would later see more eagles soaring overhead, twice, on other days. But that was the one that welcomed us to Alaska on our first full day there.

(And to Sam, who drove through that tunnel, occasionally having to flip her windshield wipers on as the mountain spilled its drink on us: I am in awe. Nerves of steel. Thank you for opening this whole world to us.)

Dani, the instigator of my mango tree, came over with his love Svetlana with a special gift from his mother in India: actual fresh Alphonsos, sent from the tree he’d grown up with so that we could know what we had growing out there.

He took them out of the jar of rice he’d carried them here in, showing us the traditional storing method. “Here, smell this!”

A deep, wondering (will it smell like last year’s blossoms?) satisfying whiff… I am in awe that he was willing to part with them.

He told us his mom was as enthused as he and I both are that my tree is growing here and doing well. Even if the weather’s been too cool and the tree too young this year for it to produce yet, it did bloom last year. So next year. Now that I know that warmth makes a difference in inducing flowering from the buds, not just in protecting them from harm, I may buy a plastic greenhouse cover for it. There’s one with a zip-down window to keep it from overheating.

We took them outside and showed them the tree and Dani took video, I think to introduce us to his mom, although in the few seconds he had it going I didn’t figure that out fast enough to tell her thank you. To Dani’s mom, if you see this: Thank you so much! And to Dani and Svetlana, Thank you to you, too!

I reiterated my promise that they will get one of our very first mangoes. I can’t wait to share back.

A little more on Alaska: I’d been disappointed I hadn’t seen the twelve-foot grizzly we’d been told was on display at the airport; the kids had said it’s to warn the tourists not to be stupid.

While we were waiting for departure, our last chance, there it was after all. Look closely: past its glass display case there’s a row of seats and at the end closest there’s a man sitting hunched over his cellphone, not knowing he’s being used for scale.

Other than that we did not, to our knowledge, go near a bear. We did, however, see one single crow: at the edge of a bay, fearlessly divebombing the backside of a retreating bald eagle that had flown low over the boat we were disembarking from.

Nope, not a fishing boat, guys, sorry.

More on that tomorrow.

Sam, a knitter herself these days, asked us if we wanted to see the musk ox while we were there? She’d never been.

Hey, couldn’t keep her from having that experience, right? And so Saturday we went to the Musk Ox Farm in Palmer and took their walking tour of the grounds.

Domesticating a species takes 250 years, they told us, and we’ve had 50 so we’re on our way but we’re not there yet–so please don’t put your hands past the fences.

(A few days later at a different farm we would be told, as reindeer walked freely among us and looked us in the eye while licking alfalfa from our hands, that the difference between caribou and reindeer was that the reindeer had been domesticated for about 250 years. Alright, I see where that number maybe came from.)

Parents were asked to keep small children close so as not to spook the animals into thinking small creature=wolf. On the flip side, when the man who set up the farm with its first set of animals 50 years ago was approached by a small dog, the musk ox had taken their human’s small size relative to their own as meaning he was defenseless and they closed ranks in a circle around him as they do to protect their young, horns pointing outwards and ready to charge the threat on his behalf.

Cool.

The white along the tops of the spines of many of them: the guide said they weren’t sure but they think that’s to reflect the sun away during the summers so they don’t overheat.

The curves in their horns? Those tell you about how old the animal is. Short and stubby, you’ve got a young’un; the next year they start to turn forward, and at I think she said four you get those iconic half loops in front. Most of theirs have their horns trimmed to protect the humans but she pointed out this one old guy over there that had the full set.

Back in the museum/gift shop, my sweet husband was the one who picked up the musk ox-topped knitting needles and asked me if I didn’t need these? Then the grampa in him wanted me to take a soft little stuffed one home. And we couldn’t come all this way without some qiviut. We just couldn’t.

We’d just been told about the musk ox playing with a fifty-pound ball given to the farm after the oil pipeline had been built, y’know, something for the animals to play with or rub their backs on or something.

They’d managed to get it rolling down the hill, and bam! Right through the fence! Oops.

So for now, mine is playing with a ball. It’s a deep red. It’s a mere ounce, because I just could not bring myself to spend that much more money on yarn when a single ounce would make me just as ecstatic.

The book? While we were out in the fields (yay sunblock and hats and I’ve been holding my breath but no major flare yet) I’d asked them if they had it and explained that Donna Druchunas, the author, had been the text editor for my own knitted lace book.

They were delighted at the connection and told me enthusiastically, Oh yes! It flies off our shelves!

I had previously wondered what on earth was holding me up that I hadn’t already bought it. Now I know. It was waiting for me to support the husbandry of the very animals Donna had written about as well as Donna herself with that purchase. It was worth the wait.

1. That Black Jack fig tree planted March a year ago has a tiny fig for fall growing at almost every leaf junction and one single big spring fig left that the squirrels didn’t quite get to before I clamshelled it away from them.

I’ve never picked a fig before. I assume I wait till it’s darkened (given the variety) and softened, right? Still hard as a rock.

2. Somebody went to the AT&T baseball park in San Francisco a few days ago and put their drink down in the cupholder attached to their seat.

And–sorry, couldn’t get the link to the photo to work, it’s inside a Yahoo group–a fledgling peregrine falcon landed and perched on the edge of that clear plastic cup, its talons huge and in each other’s way. A small red straw poked out between its big yellow toes, its big eyes taking in where it had suddenly found itself.

Well hello!

3. And most important to me. My friend Carol is a knitter whom I get to catch up with every year at Stitches and, when I’m lucky, by random chance at Purlescence during the year. She worked on the recovery post-earthquake and tsunami of the nuclear power plant in Japan (side note to my local friends: that Carol.)

Ever since I met her years ago I’ve been trying to put my finger on just who she reminds me of. And now I know.

Yesterday I was off to see my much-loved Dr. R, the doctor who saved my life in ’03, to wish him well in his imminent retirement. I left early because there was no way I was going to be late for that one.

Which means I had time.

I stepped off the elevator to a very surprised face as someone did a double take at seeing mine. A lupus event damaged my visual memory years ago: I was stuck on, Carol? Wait. That’s not Carol. So, so close, but no. I know I know…!

As the woman in great excitement started catching up with me almost instantly the question was settled. Heather! I hadn’t seen her in 24 years! She’d been a lifeguard at the therapy pool where I met Don Meyer and his wife Amalie the year my lupus was diagnosed.

“Your face is the same! It hasn’t changed!” Heather exclaimed.

Everybody who had attended that now-closed pool had to have a prescription to get in and everybody knew it: for the most part the people there were the types who looked out for each other. It was a good place.

I told her I’d run into Don a month after Amalie had passed and that because of that, he’d had some support in his last five years. (I didn’t add that his son had moved in at the end to take care of him nor about his setting up a blog with our encouragement here and all the interaction he got from that–sometimes the details are too many and need to wait for later, so I’m putting these in here and hoping Heather sees it.)

Amalie was gone. Don was gone. She took that in, sorry to hear it.

I got to see happy photos of her sweetheart and her son.

And I’m just now realizing I can’t believe I forgot to tell her that Conway? Remember my tall, large, stooped, slow-moving, cheerful friend Conway who used to chat with me every day after his exercises? They’d thought he had ALS. Turns out he’d had bone spurs growing into his neck and spine, which they operated on and he started to regain mobility before he died. From a heart attack at that pool. I was across the country at my 20th high school reunion, but I’m told the lifeguards, joined soon after by the paramedics, did CPR for 16 long minutes trying to save him. She might well have been one of them.

If you read this, Heather, his widow moved to San Diego to be near her grandkids. Then she passed. Then her granddaughter there went off to college–and met my son: and they are the parents of my three sweet little grandkids, ages 1, 3, and 5.

Small world.

I got to see Heather today.

Small world.

Who told me who her favorite doctor was, so much so that she drives in from across the Bay to be seen by her.

I asked Dr. R. whom I should go to should my Crohn’s come back; he demurred a bit and asked which others had I seen–at the hospital, the clinic, whom had I liked best?

It had been seven years since my surgeries but Heather had reminded me of that one that had done my throat endoscopy and I said her name.

He was pleased. He told me she was very good and that I would be quite happy with her.

And between my experiences and Heather’s, I knew he was right.

And I probably would not have thought of her first had I not run into my old friend, been recognized by her, and had the time to talk.