Another Milk Pail pick-up day, and the blueberries got turned into the compote for these custard cups. Almost no guilt and quite good.

Meantime, my cousin Heidi stumbled across this article about a real-life Lord of the Flies situation in 1966, except that that book was written by a violent alcoholic.

Six young boys from Tonga got shipwrecked together for fifteen months onto what was literally a deserted isle: it had previously been populated–till a slave dealer had kidnapped everybody, leaving behind the crops and the chickens whose descendants later helped sustain the kids till the day a boat captain just felt like going a bit out of the usual route that day.

The kids had prayed together; they had given themselves timeouts when they found themselves starting to fight rather than letting it continue. They behaved the way their mothers had clearly taught them.

They totally rocked that intense shelter-in-place.

A few hot days, and quite to my surprise we had a third apricot seedling yesterday. I thought that thing was surely long dead in there, I’d been watering it since February and the other two had come up about a month ago a week apart but somehow I kept going. How cool is that! A new baby tree! I was not expecting that at all and it just worked out anyway.

Someday I’m going to be that neighbor who’s bugging everybody, trying to find kittens a good home, only they’ll be apricot trees. Really good ones.

It seems to be a vigorous grower like seedling #1; #2 is much slower, which I’m hoping means it will be naturally dwarfing, but I guess I’ll find out. If they need pollenizers (most don’t) then having visible differences early on is probably a good sign–given that they have one parent in common if not two. I may end up learning to graft so I can combine them on one.

So I was feeling pretty good about that tiny bit of green joy and I walked outside to get the mail and as I came around the corner of the sidewalk, standing in the front yard next door was a woman with an older woman just beyond her, daughter and mother, I assumed. Turns out they’d been looking at the house. Turns out our assumption that our neighbor’s buyer was simply in it to flip it was correct, and it was put on the MLS for the first time today after three weeks’ intense work that the place had badly needed.

Friday is the day realtors look over the new listings. There were two Tesla X SUVs between our houses.

I imagine they have to disclose that the place was originally red-tagged for mold and plumbing issues, because for all the markup it’s still below market. It needs serious and expensive tree work that can’t happen till after nesting season is over, but still. The place is gorgeous now.  It’ll sell fast.

So we chatted a little while and enjoyed each other’s company and now she knows that if she buys the place she’s got a friendly face next door. Looks like we’d have three generations there and young children to play with the ones across the street, and that would be so cool for everybody.

Never did see the guy on the roof again. Clearly, they were done.

Why was that one strand so thin…

Oh. Oh rats. It was Arroyo, ie about 300 yards per skein vs the 200 yards per 100g skein of the Rios, and it looked it, and I stopped, found a similarly-dyed skein online in the right weight–judging by the picture, wish me luck–ordered it from across the Bay, nice and close by, put the afghan away and hoped.

I really wanted to work on it.

And went out and checked on the mango tree because I needed that.

So the plan is: I’m going to get the new yarn, weave a strand around over and through kitchener style over all the existing stitches in that grouping–ten, I think–and then work the original strand back out of there with the replacement already in place.

Or maybe it would be simpler just to undo the entire three rows but I don’t want to. 

They are ubiquitous where I grew up, but here, you have to be willing to buy new bulbs every fall or dig the old ones up and store them in your fridge all winter and not mistakenly use them for dinner. They’re poisonous, so you really don’t want to make that mistake.

But not to the local squirrels, who go straight for them as soon as they’re in the ground. I tried to plant some years ago and found it a lost cause.

But today brought a surprise.

One of my kids sent me a picture of two beautiful flowers in loud, random-brushstroke stripes, a petal on each curling and twisting while the others grew straighter, with the question, did I know what these were?

Tulips!

I said that historically, tulipmania in Holland four hundred years ago was set off by the search for specimens like these. They were gorgeous.

I went back to my afghan–I finished a fish, yay! I just need to tighten up the strands running behind so they don’t show–and thought about all the new random variants in a short time that made ordinary flowers into something never seen before, more beautiful, each as individual as the next, costly and highly sought after.

Caused by a virus.

Glancing next door from my kitchen this afternoon, there was a fire extinguisher.

On the roof next door. Just sitting there, nobody in sight.

Okay.

A little while later I went to get the mail and heard a man arguing loudly but saw no one. Came back inside and looked out the window again.

The extinguisher was gone. His back was to me, his phone tight to his ear. I decided that given that he was not having a good day it might be best *not* to stand on a chair nor to open the door in order to get a better photo as the heated conversation clearly continued on, I mean, c’mon, leave the poor guy alone.

He was sitting on a very large canister.

Of gas.

On the roof.

To his left, that mostly-dead very tall tree.

These things do not play well together.

But it has a very large nest in it so you can’t cut it down right now.

Maybe.

Anne couldn’t find my address so she had to rat herself out and ask. I’d ordered some Holz and Stein needles and a Mel and Kris deep-dish pie plate for picking up at Stitches back in February, which I missed due to a if not the virus.

So Anne had picked them up for me and waited for me to get better. But before we could plan it–we do not live close and the whole thing was heroic on her part as far as I’m concerned–the early lockdown was announced.

Today we became officially slightly less locked down.

The doorbell rang.

She had on a mask, I put on a mask, but these past few months have taught me that I lipread more than I think I do. So Anne stepped even further back and hung hers askew so I could see and we chatted a few minutes, which felt like heaven.

She brought me my needles, she brought me my pie plate…and she brought me a Mel and Kris yarn bowl as a surprise!

She had no way of knowing how much I’d wished for weeks that I had one while working on the ocean afghan–well, and forever before that, too. I finally gave up a few days ago and started doing the intarsia Kaffe Fassett style, where instead of trying to untangle whole balls of yarn as you switch sides at the ends of the rows you simply break off as long a length as you think you can manage and pull it and the next through again and again and again and just deal with weaving in all the extra ends. It’s faster and so much easier.

This is the yarn bowl I would have picked out if I’d been the one picking it out. It’s gorgeous. (So is the pie plate.)

Anne also brought the news that since so many of the festivals and art fairs they make a living at have been canceled this year, Mel and Kris are now selling online. Shipping is what it is because pottery is heavy.

Those pictures of the 8″ pan I make my fruit cobblers in? It’s labeled as their mini pasta.

The roasted radishes were definitely the way to go. Sweet, soft, no heat–and pretty.

This peach tree nearly died of leaf curl disease last year, but look at it now.

Milk Pail is back! Sort of.

Their old store is being bulldozed by the developer but it turns out they had a warehouse that they’d held onto, and they still had 45 years’ worth of connections to all kinds of suppliers.

In this ongoing shutdown, a lot of farmers are hurting badly and a lot of grocers are having a hard time stocking their shelves.

The newly retired Steve missed his customers. His daughter, back in college with the burden of stocking the shelves gone, was up for part-timing it now.

You could create a lot of market for individual small farmers if you were packing take-what-you-get bags of produce and olive oil, etc etc for several thousand customers via a drive-through.

And so, in a riff on the Community Supported Agriculture movement, they have started Brigadooning it on weekends. Order on Tuesday, pick up during your chosen hour on Saturday or Sunday, put your name and order number in Sharpie on a piece of paper and hold it up to the window with the back window rolled down or the trunk popped and they’ll just swing your order right in there with a smile, a no-touch contact but definitely a human one.

Last week for their first run it was mostly an assortment of marvelous cheeses with a few accompaniments.

Some of it went in the freezer, because there are only the two of us.

But the response was so enthusiastic that it was definite proof of concept, so now you can order bags of produce, too.

Man, it felt strange to get behind the wheel of the car, and did you ever notice how intense the leaves of all those trees that aren’t in my yard are? And almost no traffic.

Up one side of the parking lot, stop, roll the window and share a moment of oh it is SO good to see you all that went both ways, and back around the divider to the other side of the lot and away.

My first take on the radishes was, what on earth could an ileostomy patient possibly do with those?

There had to be something. Which is how I found this page. Roast them like potatoes and it comes out like that? Now I can’t wait to try.

Keenly aware that every vegetable in my fridge is one someone else didn’t get to find on the shelves, I made a big pot of soup and cleared out what was left of the older as I fit in the new, and it came out really good. Vegetables are food and flavor, not aspirations and intentions. We are definitely eating better.

Has anybody else been cooking a lot more since this shutdown started?

My elderly next door neighbor went from being rescued by the paramedics after days on the floor to the hospital to a recovery center–to being picked up by her son and taken home with him to an assisted living place close to his house a thousand miles from here. She absolutely could not risk living alone anymore.

And then the facility went into lockdown due to the pandemic. It’s got to be rough. I miss her.

Plumbing, mold, landscaping–her house needed a ton of work, and assisted living is expensive.

Houses a good bit below market are unicorns here–it probably sold the first day and it surely made at least that part of her life easier.

I took a few pictures this past week as the entire front yard was stripped bare and then planted anew and sent them to her children, with the question, Should I share these with your mom, too?

It would probably be better if, for now, I did not, was the response–but please, send more, they’d love to see.

New driveway. New walkway. And oh thank you, they didn’t put in the pestilent non-native monkey grass that was a fad against the drought for awhile there.

Today, a truck backed up onto the sidewalk, given that the new driveway was still taped off.

And what did they bring down the gangplank of that truck in front of that 1950s modernist-style Eichler house?

Two perfect Eames rocking chairs, in style if not in actual fact.

I grew up in an Eichler style house and my parents had an actual Eames rocker. I saw one years ago at the Modern Art Museum in San Francisco and kind of laughed that something that had been so utterly ordinary to me was considered art–and yet of course it is. My mom rocked her spitting-up babies in theirs, but then, plastic is easy to clean up.

I feel a connection with the new neighbors already and I haven’t even laid eyes on them yet.

 They were in this area, but this is not how they were. He must have quietly dug them up and replanted them. I thought he’d just cleared off the dead cover plants.

They were here when we bought the house, and over time they crowded themselves badly and then did a mass die-off in the drought–and have been steadily, slowly working their way back ever since.  They ended up kind of split down the middle into two bunches of randomness.

I thought it was so weird when we moved to California that everybody had a hired gardener. Doesn’t anybody work in their own yard around here?

Then I got lupus with extreme sun sensitivity, my husband threw his back out, and we ended up asking the neighbor’s how much he charged. (Fred’s cardiologist had made him retire.) It’s been good to have the help, and Elio’s a great guy.

I paid him extra last winter for something I didn’t feel was in his usual job description. He disagreed and tried to stop me. Dude: Take. The. Money. You spent the time, you did the work, you earned it.

Which is probably why the purple irises are now arranged in a perfect circle of green leaves and purple blossoms, with enough distancing to be social and healthy for a goodly while to come, placed just so between the apples and the fig tree. They are in their fullest glory and they have never looked better than they do right now.

Elio quietly offered up a gift in the barren winter dirt and waited for the day when I’d get to notice.

Blame it on the mailman.

He left the next-door neighbors’ magazine in our mailbox. Well, that wouldn’t do.

And so I put on a face mask, washed my hands, cut an amaryllis that was opening up today, plunked it in a vase, and walked it and the magazine over next door.

After stopping in my driveway so the woman pushing her stroller could continue on past, but she saw me, chuckled, nodded, and rolled those wheels over into the car-less street.

The little dances we do.

What would you call claymation when the medium used is felted wool? We need a word for how this animated history of handspinning was created, because it definitely deserves one.

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.

Bubblewrap. Crinkly, poppable, interesting, new, light-reflecting bubblewrap, and (briefly) on the floor, too.

And so one very determined little Lillian mastered crawling today.