A good day at church. And then after the UV rating sank to one out of sixteen on Wunderground.com near the end of the daylight, we drove out to the marshlands by the Bay and took a good walk in the park together: seagulls flying overhead, an egret posing just so for their cameras repeatedly, and I watched, too, how graciously my brother’s children interacted with each other and with us; I adore them. Great kids. Morgan’s a single dad and he’s doing a great job.

A lot of habitat restoration had happened since the last time I’d been on the trail we went down. No, sorry kids, you can’t see the Golden Gate Bridge from here, but we could keep going to that causeway over there and back around.

We all looked at each other and kinda laughed and went, uh, I think not.  A bit regretfully, though; it would take us far out and well over the water but long beyond sunset.

And then we came home to Michelle’s homemade rhubarb and strawberry pie.

It doesn’t get better than that.

Spent the day getting the yarn-and-projects room sorted and emptied and vacuumed and readied for houseguests, grateful for the energy to do so–I had several days of the Crohn’s threatening a comeback last week and it was such a relief to have a good day. I think we dodged that one.

Meantime, there is nothing like a baby’s smile–or a two-year-old’s giggle, or a teenager reasoning things out, for that matter; every stage is the best stage. And yet–there’s just nothing quite like Hudson’s smile.

Meantime, you saw the bears (and don’t miss Susan’s comment); now I have to show you the shark like none I’d ever heard of. Wondering if the Monterey Bay Aquarium might ever have one…

I guess we’ll find out. We’ll be there Saturday with my brother and his family. Can’t wait!

Hudson and his new cousin Hayes! (I finally got the photo to work–took me awhile.) Hayes looks a lot older to me than not quite two weeks. Those two little boys are going to have great fun growing up together–and I am so grateful they get to.

———

I flipped through Sibley to identify the type of owl my friend Mickey had seen. A barred owl? Can it do Shakespeare quotes, then? Who, “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”

“A friend is one that knows you as you are.” That sense of–something, and I looked up from the book and there was my own raptor in the deepening dusk.

The word rouse? As in rouse yourself out of bed? It comes from what a bird, specifically a hawk does after it fluffs out its feathers when it relaxes: it then gives itself a good shake to bring them all back into place just so, ready for flight.

He was perched silently on the fence, watching us watching him, taking in the evening. A finch flew to the twigs hanging by the feeder–then froze, as if that would make its presence less obvious. When the hawk’s feathers seemed to fluff out just a bit more, the little one made a break for it, knowing that that gave it as good a split-second advantage as it was going to get.

A goldfinch a few minutes later. Same thing.

Coopernicus had already eaten; he was just enjoying his people time.

He roused himself at last. “The fated sky gives us free scope.” Tarried a little longer, and having made our day better, was off.

I suddenly had a horde of squirrels a few minutes ago. The birds had eaten all the safflower, and the bit of sunflower at the bottom of the feeder for the goldfinches was not only exposed, it was all that was left and the bushytails called all their buddies to celebrate their find.

Well heck I could use the exercise anyway. To teach them not to be the swaggering city rodents they were acting like, I opened the door (yeah lady? You and what dog? You can’t fool us, they’re gone now) and I chased the two that went in the same direction back to a tree.

They yelled squirrelly expletives at me all the way up once they hit the safety of higher-than-me, still running (but they didn’t come back).

That moment was worth every bit of the silliness that brought me to it:

Wait. Chittering squirrels.

Over all the years and all the previous hearing aids, I haven’t heard that sound since I was a kid. I instantly knew what it was, it seemed a perfectly ordinary thing, and then it hit me.

WOW.

It took a flying leap.

I actually watched, in real time, a brown bear cub standing in a river, scanning constantly back and forth and finally catching a salmon at the base of a small waterfall. And then his mother, keeping a bit of a distance from him, snatched one out of the water too.  I’m not sure why it should surprise me that there was a wildlife cam set up there, especially given that I used to help run one for the San Jose peregrine falcon nest, but it’s wonderful.

Once they have that fish in their jaws they seem to consistently move to shore to eat, I imagine so that if their prey somehow slips or escapes, they can’t lose it.

As soon as one was caught the number of gulls in the vicinity seemed to go up, maybe waiting to steal a bite from the picnic basket?

And since it’s summer and they’re in Alaska, the daylight for watching them all by just goes on and on and on.

Kathleen stopped by again today for some one-on-one time before they head further south tomorrow. We shared memories, explored each other’s takes on things political and found ourselves nodding in agreement over and over (always a nice thing), laughed loud enough to be heard into the next block. We moved into the kitchen for lunch and kept going for hours more.

The birdfeeder was getting low before that point. It was quite empty and probably had been for awhile when we came out of there when Richard came home, and not to deprive her of any birdwatching time, I gave it a quick refill.

We went from nothing in sight to here comes the flock–we weren’t the only ones ready for dinner. I’d scattered some suet, too, and pointed out the Bewick’s wren.

But you know the one thing I’d really wished was to be able to show off my hawk. (“My hawk, *a* chickadee, but *my* hawk” she teased me.)

At the very moment I found the Cooper’s page in my Sibley book to show her, with the two of us standing there and Richard sitting next to us, suddenly there were two bangs at the window and Coopernicus himself did a swoop around the amaryllises in chase. I missed the first part of it, my nose in that book, and then the windows reflecting off each other from my angle got in my way a moment more, but they said he strolled under the picnic table, looking for his prey.

And there one was. And we got to see those wings wide going past the amaryllises again, only this time he had something to show for it. (The other finch that had hit eventually recovered itself and played the one that got away.)

We held still, watching him and his struggling-then-still finch, and after a moment she reached for her camera. He gathered it close and took off; as I explained, he’s fine with being watched unless he has a meal in his talons and then he gets antsy.

We might be trying to steal his prey, she affirmed.

While I thought, She got to see him!! She got to see my hawk!!

He’s a big bird, isn’t he? I asked.

He IS!

——

The other wonderful thing about today is that baby Hayes came home. The traces of chemical trauma were such that they said there was no indication nor expectation of longterm brain damage.

And he’s a beautiful, wide-eyed baby boy, looking at the insides of a car and carseat for the first time in the picture they sent us.

It had been awhile since a good Trader Joe’s run, and it was time to stock up on the honey mints that I reward myself for treadmill time with, bags of frozen fruit for making crisps with, organic sugar too, dark chocolate salted caramel peanut butter truffles. And ginger cookies, one of the few worth buying store-boughts over, don’t forget the ginger cookies.

No we won’t eat them all at once. I promise.

I got in the checkout line of a middle-aged clerk whose cheerful face I have enjoyed for a number of years.  She was being given a hug by a quite young fellow employee about to leave–the job, the area, her friends,  on to her new life, and I waited, not wanting to interrupt nor put any pressure on them.

Ah my. Back to work now. And the older woman turned to me, emotions close to the surface, and asked, It’s been awhile. How are you?

I’m fine, I smiled, and you?

Good, thanks–but no really: how’s your health? You doing okay?

I so was not expecting that. But instead of feeling intrusive, it felt like a tap on the shoulder reminding me how good I have it now, and I really meant it when I said thank you. To reassure her, I gestured towards the two bags she’d just filled and told her, “When life is good, you buy the fun foods,” and she laughed in relief–and at the truth in the thought.

———

And while I was typing that, a small finch hit the window and was laying on its back a few feet away from me–I thought at first dead, but no: its tail quivered.

A towhee, a gentle, bigger bird, reminded me in that moment of that clerk as it eyed me quickly to be on the safe side and then hopped down straightway from the box and it went directly to the finch’s side and sang–encouragement, to my surprise. It was not a bird that posed any danger to the injured one, but I did not expect it to matter to it that the little one was hurt. Clearly it did. Get up, get up, the hawk might see you.

Then the towhee flew away.

The finch pulled herself to upright and watched me for awhile. When I blinked, she blinked back. I kept my eyes shut longer to try to encourage her to rest. She did.

Good. Not blinded by the impact, then–that’s the biggest worry.

And when she was ready, sooner than I expected, she too flew (I saw that wing tucked partly across her earlier, I’d have thought it was broken, but no) and was off and away and okay.

It’s been really bugging me for a week now that two-and-a-half-year-old Parker didn’t have his blankie back right away. I wanted it right out the door the next day and it just didn’t happen–I kept wrestling endlessly with how to find the most perfect way  to bring it back to its former glory. Overthinking. Using the shawl-knitting time to chill out about it, hoping that would get me back to it.

Rip it and knit it again, was one friend’s take.

I considered. It’s near the cast on.

So to take the easy out with that I would need to cut it off at the end of the tear and carefully undo two rows’ worth: if you’re frogging knitting from backwards, you have to pull the entire undone length carefully through the last loop of each row, it doesn’t just keep coming freely at those points like it does going the other way. Then I would use that two rows’ worth to cast off above the break, the blanket much shortened. Then I’d undo the original cast off at the other end and continue knitting on with the cut-off yarn.

That way I’d be ripping out a third+ rather than nearly the whole thing.

I kept picturing myself driving easily a hundred miles to get to all the local Bay Area stores that carry Malabrigo in hopes of finding a close-enough match to replace whatever might be too broken to work with.

And maybe I should have. But I decided to at least see first how it would look if I went for a simple repair. I spread the much-loved blankie out on the floor with the former loops now crossing the gap side-t0-side pulled a bit to straighten them out, and with a crochet hook caught each one on up, loop by careful loop in stockinette mode: plain, no dragonskin pattern.

Got all done, turned it over to the back to check–and there was a whole group of strands that had been caught sideways and upwards about ten rows’ worth. How on earth did THAT happen?

So I partially undid and tried again.

Well, it’s better…

Tomorrow, with a little more light again and a little more energy again, I hope to close the gaps, fix the last errant loops, and get it off to the post office.

Or maybe I just needed a break from it for a little while before trying to finish it tonight. So I came over to the computer and typed this.

Oh and. My Cooper’s hawk flew in while I was fussing over the whole thing and there it was!  A U-turn just past the birdfeeder, wings and tail spread wide, maybe a dozen feet away. Wow!

Just can’t growl at wool when the feathers fly by like that.

The doorbell rang. Cliff! And Don, sitting over in the car pulled in front of the house. Hi!

Cliff handed me a bag full of clamshells they’d been carefully saving for me, for which I am very grateful. It was so good to see them.

The raccoons, meantime, had been clambering for more last night, partying and carrying on.

Occu-pie! In spite of their best efforts as they wall streaked, we made light of their raids on the sus-pension system and held a clambake in the sun all day to celebrate; Apple’s shares tanked on the news, being all caught up in white tape, while Fuji’s stalkholders held out hopes of  a crisp increase in dividends.

Apple felt boxed in by the French regulators on their case, protesting proudly, Mais je m’apple…

Fuji raked in the green, adding last week’s fallout to this in hopes of their own sweet success.

I think I’ll clam up now.

Happy Fourth!

And my apologies for forgetting to say that in last night’s post. Yesterday shouted reminders that I do, in fact, have lupus, brainstem no less, and it was a distraction.

Today was better.

Learned something new today. To quote Wikipedia (slightly shortened):

“The most important sense for the raccoon is its sense of touch.^[52]  Almost two-thirds of the area responsible for sensory perception in the raccoon’s cerebral cortex is specialized for the interpretation of tactile impulses, more than in any other studied animal.^[56] They are able to identify objects before touching them with vibrissae located above their sharp, nonretractable claws.^[57] The raccoon’s paws lack an opposable thumb and thus it does not have the agility of the hands of primates.”

Whiskers on their paws? Curious. And they show a picture of one up in an apple tree. Bingo.

The paws on ours seem pretty agile to me; the little Tarzan both charmed and aggravated by figuring out how to pull the clamshells apart at the center to raid the apples. There were two clamshells that were still on the tree, still closed shut–empty. And bent open at the middle just enough for me to picture the thing going Yow! as it snapped to on its paws–but it did it again.

The others were left alone so far.

And so last night I experimented: I taped the clamshells shut at the center with clear shipping tape.

So far so good.

After checking on them tonight, I ate my very first homegrown blueberry ever, and although it was supposed to be a small wild blueberry and I expected tart, it was sweet and it was good; our heat wave probably added to the sugar content.

The critters haven’t discovered those yet.

(Edited to show off and add a link to my nephew, one of my sister Anne’s boys, playing a composition of his.)

Skunks don’t climb, I’ve been told (true or not I don’t know). Raccoons certainly do and possums too, I’ve seen them.

If only I’d had a motion-activated camera. I would have loved to have seen the expression on the face of whatever it was as it joyrode the limb down to the ground with a snapping sound behind it.

And still it was thwarted: the clamshells stayed shut. I opened one of the little boxes, the ripe fruit having been knocked off its stem, and we had homegrown plum/Comice pear/peach crisp tonight, very pretty–and oh, after all these years of the critters claiming it all, the sweet taste of success.

One more tree to go, with months to ripeness. A Fuji clamshell got knocked to the ground last night–but it too refused to reward such behavior.

Maybe I should hide them under paper bags over the clamshells. How do you like them apples.

Two clamshells on the ground, the one under the plum tree popped open probably at impact, empty, but the one under the mystery-variety apple tree intact.

But on opening the little box and looking a little closer, I saw the damage. Oh. And thought, it’s a toss-up whether that was the mockingbird that found one of the airholes in the plastic and went at it or a jay. The hole in the fruit isn’t too deep, but that beak had to get past the airspace between the tops of the apple and of the shell.

A crow couldn’t have fit in there. A mockingbird’s beak is too short. Scrub jay it is, then.  Busted.

I cut up an unpecked apple and tried it with a sense of reverence that at long last, our first apple. Twenty-six years in this house and we finally get to find out what the rootstock-gr0wn-back one was all about. Drum roll!

And the verdict was: yeah, yeah, I know it’s underripe but that’s a really mealy lousy apple for eating. Isn’t the mealyness supposed to happen when they’re overripe?

But I put it in the microwave with a bit of water, zapped it about 75 seconds (it wasn’t very big), scraped the flesh out of the peel–and had me some really fine applesauce. Seriously good applesauce, given the nothingness I was expecting. A bit of zing to it, good texture, just right.

The mystery tree stays.

Man, that was a first. And not one but two. Sir Charles’ last name-turned-verb as an award doesn’t quite capture it: the term should be Dar-lose.

Coopernicus flew in. Quite to my surprise, he landed on the wooden box on the other side of the sliding door, right there, and people-watched awhile. Cool!

(And I’m suddenly thinking, as I’m proofreading the draft of this post: oh of course. It’s solstice time. He always claims his territory loud and clear at solstice, that’s why he was chatting with me as he watched. Okay, then.)

The real surprise was what happened next, though: a chickadee flew in to the suet cake three feet straight above his head. He looked up then leaped up but the angle made it difficult to put speed into it and as the suet bounced off his chest, the chickadee was getting a clue, fast.

The hawk ambled to the near part of the fence. He has seemed slower to my eyes since his collision with the screen, but clearly he hasn’t gone too hungry. There seem to have been more attempts at driving his prey into the windows–a good adaptation to the circumstances, if there’s any lingering injury.

A titmouse came in from the side at the same time Coopernicus was reaching the fence and it landed on the box. Started to peck at the bits of suet fallen from above. Freaked! and dove for cover. Dar- for the -WIN. Close!

I had on a rust-colored blouse I don’t often wear–it’s a little old now–and a dark brown skirt, thinking I looked a bit autumny for the day of summer solstice, but hey.

No, really. June 21 is summer solstice mostly, but here on the western end of the western time zone I’m told it officially happened today. San Diego’s sun actually set 45 minutes earlier than ours did when we were there–it’s that much farther east. I’m not quite sure how all that means we get solstice a day early, but whatever.

So.

I was finally knitting for the first time since Monday’s rough tumble, finding it comfortable to do now and a relief that it was, when I felt eyes upon me.

I looked up.

There was a little Oregon junco, a fledgling, just a baby, really, watching me as stitches grew from my hands: nesting season isn’t over for you?

It dawned on me that I was wearing much of the coloring of the little one’s parents. I was charmed. I blinked; it blinked back. I watched a little while and tried again. It turned its head slightly to get a better view, and again blinked back.

And so we enjoyed each other’s company eye to eye a minute or two. I have done this before with the bigger birds out there, but the flighty little ones? This was a new thing.

Then it roused itself, went back to eating, and flew, done. And I finally got past the very beginning of the shawl I had promised myself I would make my suddenly-widowed middle-aged friend.

It feels so good to get on with it.

Love your dear ones.

I have a Bewick’s wren again, and guessing by its long gangly look and its uncertainty as to where the best hiding places are as it scouts out the patio, a fledgling.

My mated pair, nesting at ground level, disappeared around March. I’m been afraid they most likely were taken out by the neighbor’s cat. The species’ survival is on very shaky grounds and I’ve always felt protective of mine; the one that flew around my head singing for joy as I put out food once, loud enough for me to hear even with the old hearing aids, claimed my heart forever.

I keenly missed my Bewick’s.

I put a lot of chili-oil suet out at ground level a few days ago and the new little one showed up. Encouraged, I’ve been putting out more than the usual to try to entice it to claim the place. Encouraged back, s/he’s been coming back several times a day the last few days. If I hear it singing, it will mean it’s a male.

Suet do you think of that? Me, I think we’ve got us a territory.

Went out this evening to check on the plum tree at the side yard and the mockingbird flew immediately over and landed right overhead, quite close. This is the first time it had been willing to be seen. I looked up, it looked down, not a challenge but a pleased-to-meet-you and curiosity satisfied, then with a flick of the tail it danced upwards through the apple tree.

Juicy, ripe peach-and-raspberry crisp warm out of the oven. A few more years’ growth and I’ll be picking the peaches myself. And sharing some, no doubt, with the birds.