Tuesday was, as usual, watering day, as we hope hard for an end to the drought soon.

Wednesday, with the plants nice and plump and me away at my lupus group meeting, turned into steal-the-zucchinis day. And not just that: the squirrels tore open the stems of several leaves to get at any fluids they could. It’s been three days above 100 degrees in a row and I guess they’re desperate but I won’t have a plant if they keep that up. They did miss one last zucchini, and I would have given it one more day but I knew they wouldn’t so it’s safely in the fridge now.

I wasn’t letting them walk near my caged tomatoes after that. Which meant chasing them away a few times rather than letting them test my setup.

Probably because I hadn’t used the squirt gun, one large gray running down the fencetop highway this evening got to the edge of the property, turned around, walked quite deliberately back to its favorite spot up there and yelled at me.

Wait. That’s a squirrel sound? That’s way too low pitched. Can squirrels get hoarse? Seriously, can they?

The door was open and Richard was home and he opined that it had been a bird he’d heard. Too low for a squirrel.

Well, the sound was with it looking at me and stopped when I chased it away a second time and started up again when it came back to that same claimed spot and tried to give me what-all once again for interfering with its meal. Squirrel. Curious.

Oh and on a completely different note? I found myself driving behind a Tesla X today: DeLorean-type Gull wing doors, seven-seater SUV, and it seemed to actually have headroom enough for tall people. (Yo! Elon Musk! We need 6’8″ and 6’9″ers to be able to fit into your cars.) I didn’t even know these existed yet! Total fantasyland for us but that is one cool car. We got one of the first Priuses but we’ll have to pass on early-adopter status on this one.

Okay, do the click-and-drag on those doors. Do you see what I see? Wallace and Gromit? I’m dog-earing that page.

(Update 9/30: Turns out the X was actually released yesterday. What I saw must have been a company-owned car in pre-release.)

Michelle stopped by a bit, reporting that there had been a baby squirrel pawing at the window next to the door trying to figure out why it couldn’t just walk through that solid nothingness and go on in. She said it was very cute and it wasn’t afraid of her.

Right, you have to teach a city squirrel to be afraid.

She was telling me this just as a mama black squirrel and her slightly grayer baby were walking carefully, slowly down the fence line next to the kitchen, looking like it was its first exploration out into the world. I went from feeling like, you can’t humor those things! to, oh, that little one was just so cute. Even if I wish the squirrels didn’t produce a second crop of babies in August, I have enough of them to thwart. Adorable!

Two days ago I was telling Richard the squirrels had taken a deep bite out of a zucchini and left the rest–apparently they didn’t like it either. He chuckled. Today that zucchini was bigger and they actually somehow picked the thing and tried to haul it up the fence.

Good luck with that.

As far as I can tell they touched just the one and left the rest alone rather than taking a single bite out of everything and ruining the others to sit and rot. Given that they used to strip my underripe Fujis in a day–pick, bite, toss, repeat till gone–this was kind of amazing.

I think it means they’re hungry out there.

So far my now-clamshelled apples are still safe. Little fruity windows. No you can’t come in.

I got to see Mel and Kris! At Kings Mountain Art Fair today.

I totally lucked out: I found a parking space right across the street from where the shuttle picks up and drops off for the outer-darkness cars. Couldn’t ask for better.

Got there and they offered me a seat, come sit awhile. We tried to remember just how far back we go; our kids were a lot younger and so were we. We swapped stories and laughed while I tried to stay out of the way of interactions with other customers. I related having recently had dinner guests where each had two of Mel and Kris’s little rice bowls: sour cream in this one, brown sugar in the other one, a big bowl full of strawberries each: dip, dip, eat.

I needed more of those little bowls, then, and while I’m at it I broke one of the bigger ones this past year and it was a favorite. Fortunately they had just fired a run that looked very much like it–I bought two.

At last it was time to note the height of the sun and be on my way.

Mel insisted on carrying my bag not only to the waiting area for the bus that is a former trolley car, he boarded it with me and took my new pottery all the way to my car. Thankfully he got back on in time to ride it right back to Kris, it being one of the busier times of day for them.

I went home and halved Ghirardelli chocolate raspberry squares to make spikes on a cake dragon…

At the block party, we got the great surprise that a mom and her daughters were there (but not her son) who had grown up friends with our kids. I hadn’t seen any of them since their middle-school days and now the parents live right around the corner.  We had about sixteen years’–how did that happen!–worth of catching up to do between us all.

The daughter remembered that I was always knitting while waiting to pick up my kids back at the elementary school; did I still do that? The mom asked if I still did the, did the, (and she motioned a spinning wheel turning).

Oh yes!

They said that with all the unpacking going on they almost hadn’t made it and they were so glad they’d just dropped everything and come. Me too, oh, me too.

And on a lighter note, I decided to try out my new cake pan.

A bundt type and a dragon guarding its three eggs. Block party, enough people to eat such a thing, little kids around, when would be a better time, I figure.

I know, I bring a chocolate torte every year and someone’s going to be disappointed and if I totally mess this one up there just might be one of those after all. If I have time. Which I won’t. Tomorrow’s Kings Mountain, too, and I’ve been waiting all year to see Mel and Kris.

I could pour a ganache over the pound cake but I’m picturing more a caramel sauce. I don’t have the skill set yet to frost something so detailed and fragile.

About one more hour before I get to see if it comes out looking remotely right. I did thump the pan down hard several times on the counter to shift batter bubbles away from the pan surface before I put it in the oven.

If this comes out well, then I need a big enough crowd to do a castle cake and a dragon cake together. Suddenly thinking, y’know, candy corn would make great teeth and spikes on that thing…

Update: I used Martha Stewart’s Classic Pound Cake (it had more eggs and less flour and sugar than other recipes I found but the salt is a bit high, thus begging for that homemade caramel sauce) and baked it at 325 for 66 minutes. Could have taken it out a minute or two earlier. When it’s cool I’ll dare to turn it over and see how the design came out.

Second update: Nope, the center needed another ten minutes.

It shouldn’t bother me that much. I told myself that for fifteen years. I should just let it go. I’ve tried to talk to her, she’s blown me off every time, how much does it really matter, I should just let it go. Let it go.

I was almost good at that, too. For a long time. If only the problem weren’t quite so big and bright in my face every single day.

I tried to think through how it would feel if I got what I wanted–would it have been worth it? The answer was a clear, if I do it in any degree of anger whatsoever on my part or, and this is the hard part, theirs, the answer was definitely no, and so I stalemated myself.

We have an annual block party every Labor Day and it’s a wonderful tradition where everybody gets to know each other. When there was a city issue needing discussion, we widened it to several blocks and found the more really was the merrier.

At last year’s, though, when I tried again, wanting to discuss at least a possible change of placement with M, she cut me off with, “I don’t want to be a bad neighbor” and walked briskly away as if that fixed that.

I recently tried running tape–shipping tape so it would hold–from my side of the fence to the belly of her tall Snoopy perched on the fence shading my peach so the tree could get a little more sunlight. The thing had long since ceased being a fixed object; here, point this way.

Someone yanked my tape off my side of the fence and set it back the way they wanted. Full shade.

After all the… But I knew they didn’t know just where my fruit trees were. Still, I was afraid the whole thing would at long last trip me up on Monday. I needed to finally deal with this, and better I do in time for both sides to think and come to an agreement before we see each other.

Another neighbor had their email. Score. If you loved the Anne of Green Gables books as a kid like I did, one of Anne’s lines stuck with me for life: “Paper is patient.” You can take the time to say what you want to say the way you want to say it without having emotional triggers trip you up. You can more easily be kind even when you’re bugged when nobody’s interrupting and it’s just you writing away.

You can delete, too.

And so I spent several days composing a letter to the Ms. I had to notify them anyway that they had several things sprouting up behind their hedge right against the fence where I could see them and they couldn’t and that they needed to do something about quickly before there was damage.

There was the fig tree on my side a few years earlier that, no matter how much I’d wanted one, I took it out as soon as she requested it; it was only right. It was their fence too. I had a new one now planted in a pot where it couldn’t intrude on anyone, and I thanked her for her common sense and said she had been right.

I rehearsed the story of the Snoopy and Woodstock figurines: how they’d suddenly appeared on top of the then-new fence right outside my living room windows and that for all the years since I had had an ongoing visual reminder that had made me sad for her that she’d felt more afraid of being told no than of the appearance of being rude: she’d asked no permission and allowed no input, even when I’d wanted to ask her to just move them down the fence a bit so as to be out of my direct sight.

One arm of the Snoopy snapped jaggedly years ago, ending its weathervane function.

And then someone on their side lifted it out, turned the broken side to face my windows and not theirs, and shortly after added the bright yellow Woodstock.

We were not strangers; I had been in their home back when we’d discussed the best way to replace our mutual fence and I’d invited them to mine, I knew she knew how to reach me. It was the ongoing struggle not to feel insulted that was the hardest. (I didn’t mention that.)

Over fifteen years those wooden figures continued to disintegrate.

That peach shading went on for as much as an hour and a half in the early afternoon in June–there has been no flowering under that direct shade line. I told them I certainly have no say regarding their trees in their yard and wouldn’t expect to, but on items on a fence that I own too? That, I do. I commit my water towards future fruit and I had a problem.

Now, while I was struggling to figure out how to say any of this in a way that might be kind and that might be heard, in a way that I hoped both they and I could be comfortable with after the fact, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, bless her, wrote a blog post that totally saved me: she wrote about how when she and Joe are upset with each other they work on being extra kind to each other to help work themselves through that, fake it till you make it when you have to, she said.

Sheer genius. And boy had I needed that right then, thank you, Stephanie, and Joe, too. What I had been needing to do, both for the Ms and for me, was something nice, something positive, anything. (Well, duh! Sometimes I can be SO slow.)

The squirrels would have stolen any tomato before I’d even closed the door going back in–and so it was one of my cupcake zucchinis that got plunked up between Snoopy and his sidekick before I ever sent off a word. From my garden; have some!

Then, and only then, did I feel ready to start writing; I had the right attitude I’d been searching for and it was a relief.

I found myself checking again and again in happy anticipation: had they taken it yet? No? Now? After several days, at last they did. Bon appetit!

I wanted them to enjoy their figurines, I said, and I imagine there must be some happy story, some strong connection that’s kept them there all this time and that if I only knew what it was it would have been easier to deal with them; I’d like them to enjoy them on their side now.

Add no no no okay you got that out of your system but that’s way too self-righteous delete that try again okay getting better.

Paper is patient.

Finally tonight I had the right mixture of this is why this has bothered me. This is why it’s more of an issue now. You are someone I can count on to do the right thing, I am glad you’re my neighbors, and if you liked the zucchini please let me know because there are a ton more where that came from and I’d love the help using it up. Etc.

I prayed long and hard before sending it off–and felt no, not quite. I studied it, caught a phrase that wasn’t quite…, prayed again. Very close. What more could I…? Oh, I see it plain as day there, okay, thank you.

After repeating that process several times it finally felt right, really right, and taking a deep breath, hoping hard for the best neighborliness forever, I hit–there’s no going back, ready? You sure? Yes. Send.

I opened the sliding doors and walked outside after dinner to see if my baby fig in its pot needed any water and in the time it took me to check out the growth on the warned-about saplings at the far end of the yard and then over to the fig and back across towards the door, Snoopy and Woodstock vanished.

Only the long metal nails remained.

Y E S !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And I came back in and wrote them a very grateful, Thank you, that was VERY kind of you!

Got a note this morning from my next-door neighbor: she was taking some water saved from washing vegetables outside to pour on some of her plants and found the chewed-up bubble wrap in the farthest corner of her yard from our house. She had a good laugh and took care of it for me.

Good to know it’s not waving to the world from the top of the redwood tree.

Today: saw a Downy woodpecker, for the first time ever here, and it came again and again and again to the birdfeeder. Testing, testing, one, two, three, and no, you don’t peck through the tube, you have to go to the feeding portals. It figured it out quickly and was quite happy hanging upside down and reaching in. They’re not usually seedeaters, but this one was interested. Curious.

And last night.

What was THAT? we looked at each other. Man, that was loud! I could picture claws ripping up the foam roof as the animals scrambled around each other up there.

I grabbed the squirt gun, stepped outside past the patio in the dark and aimed the weak but hopeful stream in the general direction. I figured they don’t jump, so no worries there. Going back inside, the raccoon fight or whatever it was had ended, probably at the sound of the door opening as much as anything.

It wasn’t till today that it occurred to me that actually, given that we’ve had a few within a mile or so of our house, if it had been a mountain lion, yes, it could have.

Naaah….

The bubble wrap has disappeared, whether upward or downward in those trees I do not know. Squirrelwork!

Silly stuff aside, I want to learn how she does this. I want to understand the chemistry of all of it. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a BBC article here about an Italian woman who is the last person keeping alive a tradition going back to, in her family’s tradition, the days of the Biblical King Herod’s great-granddaughter: she harvests byssus, the dried saliva of a clam, and adds a mix of spices that not only dye the clam silk but make it luminous.

The clam is a protected species but so is she–the Italian coastguard overseas her dives.

She is the Antonio Stradivari of fiber artistry. No one else can quite yet create what she does. She sells nothing and gives away everything according to the needs of those around her.

The reporter did not know enough to ask her how she changed the fibers into what she does, whether she works it still wet straight out of the sea or dried like her sample, whether she pulls it wide like a cocoon of terrestrial silk–is it all one long thread?–and spins it from there, or just how her yarn comes to be from its raw material. How is it done. I want to pull up a chair and learn (I’ll take my brother Bryan, he speaks Italian).

And I can only hope all the attention doesn’t cause poaching of her beloved clams.

Someone on the neighborhood listserv mentioned that SunGold kiwis were available at a certain Asian grocery store. Sun whats? Yellow kiwis? What–? I was intrigued, and I wasn’t the only one and so the thing happened.

They’re yellow on the inside, ready to eat when you get them, juicy, softer than the green types and a lot less acidic, have an essence of mango to them and they are really, really good. This specific variety was apparently new as of 2012 so there’s not a lot out there yet–if you can find some grab them. A lot get sent from New Zealand to Japan, so I guess that’s why the Asian grocer knew about them.

Dave Wilson Nursery sells a red variety. Who knew. One guess as to what I went looking there for, but, nope, not yet.

The other thing today, though, I did not get a photo of; the iPhone was right at hand but the moment had a great big Do Not Disturb sign all over it.

This past spring when I watched the ravens threatening and mobbing my Cooper’s hawks, stealing their prey and stealing their nest? I kept an eye out for a new big nest up high out there somewhere but it just never happened as far as I could tell.

A finch ricocheted off the window this afternoon, appearing unhurt but still I heard it as I looked up.

A few minutes later–clearly not in chase, then–a juvenile Cooper’s hawk flew in past the bird feeder following that same trajectory to that same spot. Only, he u-turned gracefully at the glass, brushing it ever so gently with the very tips of his wings as if to confirm for himself that it was indeed a solid surface: useful and a danger both, then. Alright.

He landed on the edge of the wooden box, right at his father’s favorite spot for people watching, and chose to observe me sitting quietly observing him.

In awe.

What a gorgeous bird. Deep chestnut marled with the brilliant white in the chest lit up in the sun, the back that would later be blue-gray a matching brown. This was not the baby hawk bouncing around in the amaryllises that I got to see a few years ago, this was a raptor who was well into learning how to command the skies on his own. Who knew his own power. And yet he came down to me.

We took each other in and I silently welcomed him to my home. Y’all come back now, y’hear?

Wings lifted high, tail widening–and rounded, confirming Cooper’s, not Sharp-shinned, as if there were any doubt, and he was off.

He swooped back the other way a few minutes later towards the redwood. I laughed in delight.

And so a new generation finds its path.

The shawl: blocked. Done. I totally love it.

Remember the bubblewrap around the awning pole to keep the squirrels from jumping onto my bird feeder? It worked for months.

Yesterday, however, the lower two-thirds of it disappeared. What was left was still around the pole–but chewed on. What on earth eats bubble wrap?! I could not find the rest anywhere.

Till suddenly in the early evening there it was running down the fence line, a squirrel tripping over it each step as it glanced sideways at me with its mouth very full, looking at me like, I *know* you want this, it’s MINE now! It leaped into the tree in a sudden panic, struggled mightily to continue, snagged the thing and gave up and fled.

Oh now that looks lovely. (I apologized to my neighbors. They laughed and said they couldn’t even see it from their side.) That’s their tree growing straight over our property in front of the redwood, and under there is the 60-year-old corrugated roof to our shed gently blanketed in decades’ worth of redwood needles. There’s no climbing on that thing–it would collapse in a heartbeat. The limb lopper can’t reach. At least it’s not at the top of the redwood.

But I guess for the moment we’ll just have to let its freak flag fly.

Meantime, we got a card in the mail from the Census Bureau, which was doing a mid-decade test to see if they could move the whole process online. And so by force of law our household was to fill out their questionnaire at this URL by tomorrow, with a phone number to call if that weren’t possible, in which case they would send out an in-person census taker.

The thing checked out and yes they were actually them so I took care of it.

Richard walked in the door tonight to find me doing my best John Denver impersonation. Sing it with me: “I Filled Out Your Census!”

Just one long row at a time, I told myself.  Then rest the hands for the rest of each hour–I didn’t want to push them into a more lasting inflammation than the little bit going on. There is not a single painkiller I can safely take.

Other than icepacks. Done.

On the hour I picked those needles back up again. Then I put them back down.

Yeah that all worked just fine till about 8:00 p.m. when I just kept pushing on through till ten with one nagging break to go read a newspaper article, because I was so close to being finished and I so wanted my inner vision to become real and accomplished and right there in front of me at long last. This one had been a long time coming.

I started this shawl during my cousins reunion trip over the Fourth of July–where I forgot my instructions so I just had to make it up as I went along.

Ad-libbing may be freeing but it’s also a whole lot slower: you constantly have to stop, take stock of where you’ve been and where you’re going and how much yarn you have left and make sure it’ll be what you want it to come out looking like and that you’ve got the yardage to do it. Will it pinch in below the shoulders? Stop weigh count consider.

It made for slow progress. But it was becoming something new entirely and the closer it got the faster it was finally going and by the time I went to bed last night I knew exactly what every single remaining row was going to be and I was totally falling in love with it like never before.

It’s the lace weight that Melinda of Tess Designer Yarns surprised me with and it exactly matches a favorite shirt.

Tomorrow: cast off. Block.

Wear, with an inner thank you Melinda’s way every time.

I was missing being able to eat a just-picked ripe peach or plum but wishing for a trip to Mariani’s was as close as I was going to be able to get. Today was not a turn for the better and I’m thinking I’ll take the doctor up on her offer come Monday of making sure I don’t have pneumonia.

I did have the one single Indian Free peach from my new tree that I picked about a week ago, maybe as much as a month early, to give the tree a rest and to thwart the critters–after all this waiting I thought it better that we get it imperfect than that the squirrels get it all.

Today: hey look–it had softened up and was ready. And so after all these months of anticipation, knowing we weren’t going to get it at its best, we cut it in half.

One side was white, the other a deep rosy pink. It was sweet enough and there were already nuances of flavors you don’t get from a grocery-store peach–wow, just wait till we get these at full ripeness. What a marvelous tree. This was already good.

But one very small peach. One could only wish for more.

Someone loves me. And the folks at Andy Mariani’s sent a get-well message home with the box.

Pansy cookies. Seriously. I have to try these. Only, would you trust a flat of pansies from the garden center to be pesticide-free? We seem to be quite out of homegrown this year… (With a shout-out to Margo Lynn for the link.)

Still not free of fever at night, still sick, but today I could do stuff. (Yeah, I watered the trees Tuesday because I had no choice. It was a near thing, though.)

Today I saw a green pop-up ad selling olives and I wasn’t buying–I went out there this evening, clippers in hand.

When the tree guys stump-grindered the last of that dying olive tree, there was this wide, deep pile of sawdust afterwards. Not long after I planted my sour cherry in the middle of it and hoped.

It’s still this tiny little thing.

In the last month somehow clusters of quickly-hardening stalks have risen from the dust in a half-circle at the outer perimeter there. The first time surprised me; after that I kept an eye out and got to them earlier. I put large rocks where they’d been but wait a week and up they come again, sometimes in a new spot.

It’s not much of a contest, though, especially the ones trying to work their way out from those rocks. But it does make me wonder how much the English Morello has had to fight for root space–and it came with a broken-off major root. You don’t get first pick on bare-roots in March. But I did get my tree.

And so, wearing a flouncy silk skirt that I put on this morning to make myself feel better even if my body didn’t just then and knowing I was clothed ridiculously for working in the dirt (but eh, it handwashes), I got the tips of those clippers down below the soil line and just cut cut cut.

Because if I stopped and rested and changed I knew I might not get it done.

And then here’s the amazing thing: in March it was all yellow layered flat flakes of sawdust there. What was coming up in my hands was a well-crumbled rich, rich black soil any gardener would leap to have.

I think that sour cherry is going to end up just fine.

On air. As the reporters interviewed.

I am not by any means someone who feels there is no place for gun ownership. My husband and sons were taught at a rifle range at scout camp when they were younger. Grizzlies will happily eat you in Alaska. Etc.

But the blunderbuss and frontier of colonial days is not what we have now and our laws need to reflect current reality–and technology. If that requires a Constitutional amendment I’m all for it, although I will point out that before the current makeup of the Supreme Court the original version did the job quite well.

Parents cannot legally leave small children unattended but in Virginia a toddler by law can shoot a gun as soon as he is able to hold one up long enough to do so. Any size magazine. Cheers.

The thing about politicians is that by being voted into office they have a little more power than the rest of us do and we willingly give them that power.

And then some of them claim they have none because, y’know, peers. Or they sell it, or at the very least sell us out.

When someone invented a gun that could only be operated by its owner he got blasted by the NRA and sent death threats. Here was a champion of the Second Amendment who was threatening the income stream of the other gun manufacturers–because you wouldn’t want to have to, y’know, pay for any kind of licensing agreement on his invention.

Death threats. For trying to make guns safer.

There is now on average a multiple-victim shooting every day in America.

Every single politician who has voted for there to be zero restrictions whatsoever on guns is choosing to be complicit in those murders. Full stop.