One of those days when I ran All The Errands.

And got to see a Red-tailed hawk soaring overhead. My day was complete.

Oh wait, not quite. Almost forgot the YouTube link: we have three female falcons this year at San Jose City Hall and fledge watch is coming up soon.

Michelle flies out for a wedding tomorrow.

I finished the project for the bride at 9:30 tonight. We just met up with her–and she sent us home with the blueberry crisp she doesn’t have time to finish off. Twist our arms.

The second time it happened, I knew exactly what it was.

But that first time a few days ago I could not for the life of me figure out that large bright white blob in the air (definitely not part of the tree in the background) hovering, hovering, now wobbling up and down just above the far end of the fence over on the neighbor’s side. It was almost round but for that one part–I willed it to come closer so I could see what that was.

Yonder squirrel stumblingly, awkwardly obliged.

It was a masterpiece of a huge white rose, just a showstopper that some gardener had clearly been proud of, with the sun dazzling it full on against the backdrop of the small black animal whose small face it utterly dwarfed. He finally stood still a moment halfway down my property line up there and tried to eat that thing. Like a teenage boy with a pizza–no, make that a Chez Panisse banquet, look at that presentation–all to himself.

One upper petal was askew from the otherwise still-perfect formation as he chomped on the center. He had plucked the entire rose from the bush quite nicely. He looked for all the world like he was holding a whipped cream pie against his face.

I have roses, and I’ve never seen a squirrel do such a thing before–they simply don’t eat them. Trying to figure out if it could be the drought? But then why…? Maybe all that rain in December led to a bumper crop of young that can’t find anything to eat now.

The second time, he went for a flower half the size. Don’t bite off more than that with which you can leap.

The Black Jack fig tree has suddenly, in the last week, turned a noticeably deeper shade of green and the leaves have finally started getting bigger as we’ve gotten closer to summer sun. It had been in kind of a suspended animation for awhile, I imagine waiting for its roots to heal and grow after I had had to cut them with pruning shears to free them from each other. Having bought it when bare root season was over and it was still stuck in that sheath, it had come severely root bound, the ends curled back up somewhere inside that box. (Hey, ten bucks. The right variety. We could work with it.)

It’s looking a lot happier now.

The silk oak next door (hey, Wikipedia, what the heck is a “dry rainforest environment”?) that the hawks have raised their young in year after year but that flowers during nesting season, inviting raven aggression: two of the flowers fell into my yard today and out of curiosity I picked them up and sniffed. I expected perfume. Not so much. But the colors clearly are enough to get the attention of many types of birds, and when the big ones are away the finches play.

The Indian Free peach tree two weeks ago and today: clearly, we won’t have to wait a very long time for it to reach out to Adele. I am so looking forward to that and I love how this grows.

And… We lost our one single tiny green mango today. I think it snagged on the frost cover as I was taking it off this morning. The tree isn’t done flowering yet, so maybe we’ll get a second chance.

Definitely next year we will.

“You’ve always liked to garden,” he said today.

“Yes, but I didn’t for years,” I answered, saying that I think it was because having grown up an outdoorsy type and being so sun-confined with my lupus, I think I was afraid that if I broke out of that at all I’d get more and more reckless with it and so I’d kept that side of myself tamped down hard. For years. It was just easier not to have to look too up close at that sense of loss. Years ago, when getting to see my children grow up was a long way off and by no means a sure thing and I was doing everything I could, I suddenly realized one day that I’d just spent six months without even once walking all the way around my own back yard.

Now I feel like I’m reclaiming not just it but me. I deeply need to dig in the dirt and to see life coming forth from it. I picture Parker planting the seeds of all his apples and it just makes my day every time: from my botany-loving Grandfather Jeppson who died before I knew him and yet whom my Dad says I take after to my grandson, a straight line down the ages through every circumstance.

I reminded myself of that conversation with my husband as I went out to put my tomatoes in the ground at 6:00 pm. It was a little early in the evening for May but I had a lot to do. I kept my back to the sun and hey, look! The first actual tomato!

Oops. My critter cover didn’t fit over that tall tomato cage. I need to figure out how to set that wiring around them all, it’s been wrapped too long and wants to sproing inward on itself a little too hard. Might take two sets of hands and Richard was off at a ham radio meeting.

All these tomato plants were planted at the same time in the same seed starter kit. Two were moved into a bigger pot early on and put outside in direct sun; a third awhile after; and the rest, well, they were left in front of what wasn’t a great window for sun exposure to begin with. Look at that difference, and the roots far more so: a gallon of soil held tight vs, for the smallest, no discernible side roots, only the white squiggle it started out of the seed with. Same age.

Problem was that I’d needed more soil and buying more soil meant being out in the sun at the nursery during business and non-rush-hour hours and finally I simply did it.

The little ones will catch up soon enough.

And yes, I blogged several weeks ago about planting new seedlings. They were from the same batch as these and they all died in the first 24 hours. I transitioned the rest more gently from scraggles in the window to being in bigger pots outside to in the ground and I waited till I had most of them too far along for the snails to go after.

And then I went looking for baby apples and snapped clamshell covers over all the sweet Fujis I could find and as many of the more sour, less vulnerable Yellow Transparents as I could. Some of last year’s clamshells had given up the ghost; I clearly need more. A good problem to have this year.

There’s a clamshell, it’s intact, it’s right where I put it…

…And all the cherries that were growing inside it have vanished. Just from that one. But the uncovered single cherry below that box is still there–go figure. The branches haven’t broken, so I figure a squirrel may have learned how to pry it apart just enough (while snapping on its paw) but I haven’t seen them so much as touch that tree. Clearly that fruit would have to be really ripe before they’d get over their dislike of the cinnamon I sprinkled around it.

Maybe the raccoon simply sat on the fence and pulled it to him? It’s at the top of the tree and right at that height. Time to tape the clamshells shut.

Anyway, so, the outside faucet has been failing gradually for some time and had gotten to the point that it just spins without catching on its stem while dripping crazily from around the stem and out the top. So not cool in a drought. You could only turn it on by pushing down hard on the screw as you twist–and then where the hose connected, it was stripped enough there too that we put plumber’s tape but still, that part dripped, too.

The big guys didn’t have a replacement. The little guy, at Barron Park Plumbing Supply, who really knows his stuff and would rather help you than oversell to you, said to me, “Wow–that’s a tiny one.” He thought a moment and said not only did he not have it, he couldn’t think of anyone that would. Here though is what I could buy and do and, as he continued to muse thoughtfully, here’s why I wouldn’t want to do it–I would have five, maybe six uses before it would do damage, completing the stripping. It was my choice, if I really needed it working right now.

I needed a better idea. He wrote out four names and numbers of people he personally recommended, and I knew if he said so I couldn’t go wrong. It would probably run me in the ballpark of $100, $150, he said. (Better than wasting all that water!)

And we will need to call one of them. But for now Richard kluged it with a piece he thought would help. To my great relief the faucet still drips but only a very little and not where the hose connects because that’s at the new piece. I propped a small dyepot underneath and while watering the cherries, the apples, the pear, the peaches, and the mango, I didn’t catch enough to water the potted fig tree with–that’s a huge change.

So tonight, after two weeks of not being able to turn that thing on (and of being really really glad it rained a week ago), and after it was 91 withering degrees today, I finally watered my trees.

Next step. Buy mulch.

“Can I write about it on my blog?”

She told me sure, anything that raises awareness. Get checked.

My oldest was 27 when her melanoma was diagnosed. It was a highly aggressive type. She had had to go to the doctor twice in two weeks for something utterly unrelated when he surprised her by saying he thought that that mole had changed since her earlier appointment and he wanted to check it.

Mole? Who was talking about the mole?

He had actually biopsied it several years earlier but he didn’t let that stop him from doing so again–it just felt to him that something was wrong there.

They took out four inches to quite some depth from her arm. She didn’t have to do chemo and she didn’t have to do radiation because he’d caught it so very early, possibly in its first two weeks. She did have to have frequent checks thereafter; melanoma can recur anywhere.

Her experience got me to stop ignoring the spot my husband had been saying he saw on the top of my head. Mine was basal cell and at least eight months old by that point, and I’d just shrugged and written it off as another manifestation of lupus. Which it was not. By that point they had to take out over an inch of hair permanently from the center of my scalp, leaving a thumbprint indentation in my head and a cowlick that are there still. I was lucky.

She is past the five year mark and heading towards six. No return of her cancer. It just dawned on me, writing this, that wait–so so am I. Although, basal-cell, paid attention to, is not a big deal. Melanoma is very much a big deal.

A doctor had a bad feeling about it, trusted his instincts, and insisted on checking again.

And so my daughter is alive.

The mango with a dab of unsweetened grape Koolaid solution to keep the birds away. The ants were starting to be a problem on the flowers; I sprinkled cinnamon around the base of the trunk and over one flower cluster where one was being obstinate about not letting go and they all disappeared and have not come back.

We learned about honeybees when I was a kid, complete with a field trip to a building that had an active hive going and a bee tunnel to outside at the back of the place so as to keep kids who have no sense and might have allergies and any possibility of stingers as far from each other as possible.

I learned that insects, of all things, dance to talk. Honeybees, anyway.

And so here I was Sunday night, flashlight in hand, looking for the center of the frost cover to get it up and positioned over the Alphonso mango tree just so when movement below caught my eye.

I got down on my knees to see.

There was a honeybee on the ground, looking, frankly, dead. Or maybe it was just too cold. But there was another one walking in rapid ovals or figure eights, I’m not sure, and wiggling just so at intervals while another honeybee circled in the air a little above. I remembered that the longer from one end of the dance to the other, the farther away from the hive the coveted flowers that had been found.

I watched. It was a very short back and forth, back and forth. Here be food (or maybe a good place to swarm to, I’m not sure). Come.

And I noticed that it was doing its dance right next to a clear white Christmas light resting against the ground looking brighter than I had noticed before. But then how often do I stare at the filament part in the dark. It offered concentrated warmth as the temperature dropped around it.

I shined my flashlight at the dancer and seemed to distract it a split second but it went back to its important work. I wondered if my tree lights flicking on automatically had confused the bees as to when the sun was supposed to set.

That morning I’d found I think four honeybees in a tight faces-in-together cluster on that cover with another coming in to join them and another over thataway. Whether I interrupted the early stages of a swarm or not I don’t know, but they didn’t mind my sending them away by, as always, patting the back of the fabric as gently as I could to help free their legs from it.

I continued covering the mango for the night and at the commotion of the movements above the ones that had missed nighttime roll call at the hive moved along to places unseen.

They say that honeybees are placid and not inclined to sting. Finally, having seen it again and again right in front of me (not to mention my hand hitting where those stingers are), I believe it. And I feel privileged to have been the wallflower watching the dance in the night.

I’m reading the news from Baltimore, where my daughter lived two years ago, recognizing some of the local spots and dealing with the small stuff here as a way to cope.

Phone spammers. I know, this was supposed to stop with the Do Not Call registry but there seem to be more and more of these of late.

If they say, “Press 1 to be taken off our list,” do NOT press 1. If you do, you’ve engaged with them and they then claim they have a business relationship with you, ergo, they have permission to call. I usually simply leave the phone off the hook till they’re gone.

But when I actually heard a human rather than a recording a few days ago, I broke in to tell the guy flat out, “Why would I hire you when the only thing I know about you is you’re willing to break the law? Y’know, the Do Not Call…”

But he had hung up before I could finish that second sentence. Wait, wait, I wasn’t done with my spiel!

I cornered the person in charge of the sign-up for taking soup and cookies to the Ronald McDonald House at church this morning and asked when the next time around was going to be.

I didn’t say that the last time I took a pot of soup there I’d made it in my stewpot, which spilled all over the car. I did say what I now had to cook the stuff in. It makes it a lot easier.

Heather (yesterday’s post) was delighted when I told her what I immediately planned to do with her old crockpot. And it was so much better than my old one…

…Which, when I described it to her, the bright orange and brown and flaking teflon interior, she grinned in recognition, Oh! My mom has one like that!

I had to laugh at my inner surprise–of course she did. From the ’70’s. Hadn’t I noticed I was getting older?

We’re selling everything, she said, we’re not taking anything with us. We’ll start over after we get there.

When she told me their travel plans, that made more sense. Her husband’s about to start his medical residency in Boston. They aren’t going straight there, though; they’re going to Massachusetts from California by way of Alaska, driving, so as to let the grandparents see their little ones. Road trip!

She sent out a note last night of a few things that hadn’t sold at their garage sale, saying, please, come, take, free now, it’s all going to charity in the morning, if you want it it’s yours.

I told her I’d bought my crockpot at eighteen–nineteen, though, come to think of it, it was after I’d moved out of the dorms. Crockpots were a new thing and a huge fad and not cheap and given that I was paying my college tuition for the year out of my summer job money, it was quite the splurge.

It has, though, one can definitely say at this point, seen better days. It had a teflon surface and if you ever want to see what those look like this many years later, well, as Richard finalized it this morning, “We’re not cooking in that” (this would not be a change) and I said it needs to no longer be taking up space in our house. An easy agreement.

Sentimental value object upstaged by actually useful sentimental value object: I am badly going to miss Heather and Jared when they’re gone and I will think of them when I slow-cook apple butter. Or take a pot of soup to the Ronald McDonald House at Children’s Hospital (and not have to borrow a safe crockpot for it. They then have you transfer the food from yours to theirs when you get there.)

Heather’s little cooker will help take care of patients and their families here while Jared’s taking care of patients there. I like that.

She almost didn’t tell me what the price tag had been at the yard sale and she almost didn’t let me pay it but she relented.

And so I finally have a big crockpot again that I would actually be willing to put food into. My late ’70’s sunflower-orange-and-brown one (I kid you not) is hereby utterly evicted.

I love most that I now have a memento of a young couple I adore and whose kids I hope someday will go to Stanford so I can get to see who they grow up to be. Because I know they’ll be adults to look forward to.

Meantime, got any favorite recipes?

He banked left, then quickly right, twirling around at the last like an Olympic ice skater’s grand finale just outside the window. Seeing that he’d gotten our attention, (me: Did you see that? Husband: Yeah I saw that) he nodded, hesitated a moment, and then went back out in the manner he’d come in.

Oh. Right. The birdfeeder’s gone empty–I’ll get right to it, thanks.

So yes, the Cooper’s hawk is fine after being attacked by that raven yesterday. One can only marvel at his timing with the thought, as if it were a wild creature’s intention, that it was nice of Coopernicus to let us know.

We were just sitting down to dinner when the phone rang with a spammer and we heard the thwack against the window in the other room. Interrupted anyway, I got up to check.

No sign of a downed bird but there was our male Cooper’s hawk perched on the netted cage that covers the blueberries. He was very nonchalant about my approaching across the room from my side of the glass: just an old familiar sight.

No sign of a dove in his talons, though; it must have gotten away. A few times a finch has managed to tuck wings in tight and zoom into that cage and need rescuing (must have hit just the right, most stretched-out portion of the netting) so as he looked down and around under there I wondered if that’s where some little escapee had gotten off to. (Nope.)

A large winged shadow passed by from somewhere I couldn’t see overhead. The ravens know that if they land in my backyard I will go after them with a squirt gun, and so they don’t. He looked up but seemed to ignore it.

And then he didn’t. And suddenly there was our Cooper’s hawk flying off and bam! There was a raven attacking him from behind!

Get OFF me you doofus there’s NO prey to steal! as they zoomed together towards the neighbor’s trees and out of sight all too fast for me to see if there was any harm done. Flying strongly, at least, and he’s a good deal more muscular and equipped for hunting than they.

I think he’ll be just fine.

I had what I hoped was just the yarn.

I asked my knitting friend Kevin at Purlescence for advice on how long to make it, having never been a teenage boy (and having never actually met that particular teenage boy). Short beanie? Brim? He laughed and said make it as long as that skein will let you take it. (I only had the one.)

And, I thought, he lives in California now but the whole of your life is ahead of you where he is. Look at my oldest now. Alaska! He might need it. And so I think it came out long enough for a good brim. (I cast off with–here let me go look at this strand a moment–a single yard left over.)

I sent off the hat: Malabrigo, because only the best would do.

There are pages and pages of story here and most of it I don’t know and never will but this I do know: that it was one of the most important things I’d ever knit.

His father later exclaimed to my husband, And it’s so soft!

And it all started because I forgot my phone…

The Yellow Transparent is supposed to go from this stage–in April–to apples ready to pick in June. That’s as fast as cherries. It’s a kind of an odd duck of a shape because the upper left is where it used to be shaded by weed trees. That other tree behind and to its right years ago sent a long, successful runner sideways, which has now been ground out along with its six or seven offspring. The parent was my kids’ climbing tree for years but nostalgia will only keep it away from the chainsaws for so long. (One single new sucker and you are so out of here.) They ran the good race but only won runner-up and then were overturned by the judges.

And this actual, for-real mango (you see that green dot? You should have seen me when I saw that green dot!) is supposed to be ready to eat some time in June or July–and the tree just sprouted a whole new bottlescrubber of buds over the past week.

I’ve been trying not to knock flowers off as I put the nightly frost cover on and, with some difficulty, off again in the mornings (they grab at it like velcro) and I guess I’m doing alright after all.

Edited to add–A week ago, the hopeful but later revised forecast was that it would rain today. It looked this morning like it definitely wanted to, and as we headed out the door together one large, single drop landed smack dab in the middle of my head. And that was our entire rain storm as far as we could tell.

I had to have Richard inspect my scalp to make sure it wasn’t bird poop. You never know.