And so there was a birthday party, three days early because weekends rock.

Grampa Richard read the Pirate book, the current big favorite in the household as it turns out. I turned to another parent and marveled, “The Pied Piper,” as he got swarmed by small children all trying to climb in to get a better look at the pages.

There is nothing in this world as funny as a twelve-month-old with that early-walker stagger growling, “YAWRRRRR!” I’d been told about it but I got to actually hear it in person. Twice.

Richard and Kim both exclaimed in delight at the sight of Hudson’s new sweater to go with his big brother’s, totally making my day, and they loved the hat, too, far more than I did. Next thing you know there was a proud Parker parading with great glee towards us down the hallway in his digger sweater, Hudson was then dressed in his (I was very pleased with how it fit–a thank you to the Bev’s Country Cottage site for the measurements), and cameras were being whipped out all around for some play outside on the grass where the light was good. (Pardon the sleep-deprived thumb.)

I did at one point put the hat on Hudson and he looked up at me with this suddenly sad little face as if to ask, Gramma? Why are you doing this to me? I laughed and hugged and took it off him and promised him I was all done now.

There was a bounce house set up during the party. I had never actually been inside a bounce house before, but after the party was over and the neighborhood little kids and the cousins had gone home, Parker and I ran races inside it, going along the blue outer-perimeter lines.

Parker stayed within those lines. I could not and keep up and keep my balance at the same time; seems that being somewhat bigger means you sink somewhat more and kind of evens out the little one’s chances of beating you. We did the “we all fall DOWN” ring around the rosie part, too, and the sudden oooof was a surprise–I am not three anymore and that was not as soft as I expected. I bounced down twice more with him just the same but am quietly fine with not doing that again soon. I’m still glad I did it.

I don’t usually have multiple projects going, and yet the night before the trip I was just not satisfied with what I had going somehow and I grabbed the  Stitches West, Jimmy Beans-bought Technicolor Dreamcoat MadTosh yarn and some needles and cast on a random stitch number and threw it in my purse. The tag said it was worsted, I’d call it more chunky–it was a cowl and it went fast.

I started knitting at the airport, on the plane, to keep my calm when Richard almost missed the flight (more on that tomorrow), during random quiet moments (Hudson napping, Parker playing in the sunshine when I couldn’t go, company gone home and Kim out for a moment’s errand.)  Kim exclaimed over how pretty it was. I asked her her favorite colors, and she said browns and navy blues and brights, like that.

I said to her just before we left for home, right after casting off, that knitting serves to me as a kind of mental marker of various events in life, as in, I was making this when that happened. And so, I said, this was for remembering Hudson’s first birthday, and I surprised her with it and would have been surprised myself the night before–but not very. The chance impulse had become the perfect one.

Parker drove with us to the airport, his favorite digger toy in his hand the whole way. He teased us and pretended at first not to say goodbye because maybe that way we wouldn’t really go.

And my brain woke me up at 5:00 this morning so I wouldn’t miss the alarm and the flight and I thought nice try, and went back to sleep.

4:50 am alarm. 6:40 flight.

9:15 flight. 11:17 walked back in the door after a grand glorious wonderful day celebrating Hudson’s first birthday (which is actually in a few days, but hey.)

G’night.

So I wanted a hat to go with Hudson’s birthday sweater (not that he really needs one in San Diego).  And I wanted it to have a car on it, but cars take lots of stitches and there were only so many to go around a small head.

So I plunked one on the top of the thing instead, and unstretched, darn if the thing doesn’t look like I turned a heel on his head, poor kid–it’s pretty funny looking. Stretched, though, it’s okay (I guess).

Looking at the thing it’s immediately easy to see what I could do to make it a lot better next time, but not in the amount of time left at this point. Can’t wait to see them.

She admitted that she was really hoping for an angel food cake.

“It’s in the oven, honey.”

“Oh good!”

My husband has taught all our kids that the One True Birthday Cake is always that 12-beaten-eggwhites type, and when I made myself a chocolate plain old ordinary one once since hey, it was my birthday and hey, I was the one making it and cake isn’t even my favorite dessert so I was going to make what I was going to make, he was quite surprised at the blasphemy, uttering the memorable “That’s not a birthday cake!”

It is to me. Chocolate it was.

But this is April, which around here means stocking up on a whole lot of eggs. Happy birthday, sweetie!

Have you ever read something so good, so powerful, and so important that you immediately wanted everybody else to read it? And it’s not just for children–it’s for all of us.

Meantime, on a totally different note, lesson learned: a big heavy empty glass jar of peanut butter put outside for the squirrels to clean up for recycling is a hoot to watch, but the small plastic one? Not so much. One good taste and the thing knew he had to hide this treasure immediately and it was small enough that he could. Amazingly fast with it up the tree, across the shed roof, and maybe leaping to the redwood from there? Blink and he was gone. I really didn’t want him stowing plastic.

He’s just lucky he let go when the raven spotted it. I found it half-floating in the rainwater at the curb in front of the house, one long viciously-stabby black beak deep inside, a scavenger hunt won and not a bushytail in sight daring to challenge.

So that’s why it swooped across my yard…. They never come here.

We don’t feed ravens. They harass my hawk. And now that that one knows what the stuff in there tastes like, no more squirrels sneaking up on each other’s exposed backsides and wild leaps away. No more peanut butter jars.

(To the neighbors: I’m sorry I put it out there. It was wrong to have my trash show up in the street we share. In the future I will stick to birdseed. And hopefully you didn’t see that.)

Okay, I’m being growly surely for the fact that I just did a faceplant at my own front door (oh hello new neighbors across the street coming out just then! Hi!) and I had to ice my wrist for the second time today. I am a klutz. (And the grapes I just bought right before Costco closed turned out to be rotten below the top layer in the large box.  Such a hard life.)

But. The brake warning light came on in the car last night in the dark in the rain and there was only one place that thing was going and that was straight to the mechanic.

And since we’d just had the big 45k mile checkup two thousand miles ago, we took it to the Toyota dealer where that had been done.

Apparently if they’d found something it would have been covered under warranty. Apparently if they had found something our rental car for the day would have been covered too. And I do believe in paying someone for labor done.

But I’m trying to wrap my brain around shelling out $200 to be told they didn’t find anything so they simply reset the warning light and bring it back if it comes on again, ‘k, ‘bye.

And if it comes on again in several months rather than sooner, do I shell that out again?

Does your mechanic charge you if they don’t find anything to fix? My old one didn’t–and I used to argue with him that I owed him for his time.

Well what does that tell me.

Wintertime cold (47 in the afternoon? Really?), wintertime rain, spring flowers at the door. Our utility bill that just came was surprisingly low so having already been a good girl and put on a second sweater I cranked up that heat completely guilt-free, quite glad for the new furnace. I ran the misdelivered mail next door and seriously wished for my coat as I chatted with the neighbor a moment.

I ripped out my buffalo yarn project completely and started over and am much happier with it.

And–a friend dropped by this evening. I’d told him my clamshell plan last year and he’d tried it on his Comice pears and actually gotten fruit off his tree at long last, just like me. He was thrilled. And even more so when we told him that we had a Comice too, now, that that was all I’d wanted for Valentine’s Day and that Richard had helped me plant it.

I did? asked Richard. Oh, that’s right, I did.

The guy was quite interested to hear me say that the squirrels had raided my Fujis in years past at fingernail size. Huh. Maybe his Fuji apple had set fruit after all. That early? He was going to go to Smart N Final and buy more clamshells and watch his now-blossoming apple tree like a hawk.

You can buy them? Smart N Final?

I was really glad he’d stopped by. So was he.

Fatigue with a twinge of lupus so you’re getting the easy post tonight: a bit of spring.

Got the peach tree photo by holding the camera high over my head and snapping a lot. Bigger and redder by the day. The neighbors are hoping we encourage the tree to, y’know, kinda lean thataway and over the fence and if we got this much growth in just one year it seems like it would take no time at all to. They were seriously considering planting their own as well, maybe a later variety.

Some friends were collecting clamshells, unbeknownst to us, and asked me at church today: did I want them this year too?

Ohyesplease?!

Michelle has already put in her request for peach pie.

All in good time, hon.

We were eating dinner when we heard it– “That was a bird hitting the window,” he said after a moment’s pause in response to my questioning look, and knowing the speed at which Cooper’s hawks fly that there was no chance, still, I got up and walked into the family room just in case.

And there he was, standing on my amaryllis pots just outside the window.

He doesn’t usually mind me, but reasonably enough he doesn’t like human movement towards him when he’s hunting (oh oops didn’t see him as fast as he saw me) and he took off for his favorite spot on the fence.

Japanese-style fans that accordioned together into a narrow sliver of possibility were one of the toys of my childhood, all those colors and designs hiding in there waiting to be opened and discovered. It’s like that every time Coopernicus flares his tail in flight: drab gray becomes vividly striped in white, straight becomes curved.

But even though he definitely had other things on his mind, he stopped a moment to look eye to eye with me. Even if from a little further away.

Remembering the twice now that he’s followed me to a downed bird, I turned to see if there was one below the corner window, but he already knew there wasn’t and that it had gotten away and with that he was off.

I have a ton of ends to weave in and some blocking to do to make it look a bit more polished. It’s a good problem to (finally!) have. Car pattern by Lucinda Guy from her Handknits for Kids book.

Note that I am missing one green stitch on the back of the car from her pattern and it made it more VW Buggy-ish. I crocheted a steering wheel and the first tire wheel in orange so it would better match Parker’s sweater but found I didn’t care for the effect and I put them aside and let it stay simple.

More apple blossoms open today and more rain tomorrow–work fast, little honeybees. (Not complaining! More rain in this drought!)

I frogged five times on that first armhole, trying to get the number of white and blue stitches picked up to match, trying to get the look just right–y’know, there’s a *reason* designers deserve to get paid; other than the car, I was winging it.

I took a break from it after finally nailing the first one just so just in time to see the Cooper’s hawk catch a dove and fly to the fence with it and stop there a minute, the tail of its meal towards me rather than the face (thank you). He watched me a moment as I took in the relative sizes of the two birds and then he flew to where he would be less in view of the thieving crows (who steer clear of my yard thanks to him, but one does not risk food in the wild.) If he has nestlings this early in the season they were well fed today.

As were we. Richard and I went out for ice cream at Smitten.

A toddler, old enough to run but not quite old enough to talk yet, was dashing back and forth between his daddy and the person behind there making their ice cream, giggling adorably over and over at the occasional puffs of dry ice from behind the counter that he could just barely tiptoe up to see. One, two…happy anticipation…There it comes again! and he would run back to his daddy’s legs and giggle some more.

I quietly eyeballed the kid, having finished the last of that ribbing right before we’d gone out the door: yeah–I think this’ll fit Hudson okay. A little big but not too. I think. Thank you, little one.

Remember when AOL used to send everybody’s mailboxes Subscribe-Now! CDs? Snailmail spam?

That was about when someone told me that hanging those in my apple tree would keep the birds and squirrels away.  What I found, though, was that they ate the ones furthest from the CDs, then gradually worked their way over closer until there was just an apple or two but the process didn’t take long at all. Scary they were not. Then the last would be gone, too.

As often as not the strings the CDs had been hanging on would be quickly tangled in the limbs anyway, and I gave up on the idea and cut them all down and out of there.

I was snapping a few pictures this evening, trying not to make them look like all the others I’ve already shown you, but this stopped me right there, staring. It couldn’t be.

It was. One of those strings from long ago, with the tree grown around it–it’s embedded clear through the center of a major limb now and out the other side. It’s not very big, so it’s not likely to weaken anything, it’s just there.

And all these years I never saw it before. (!) All these times these past two years where I’ve been observing the growth and changes as close to every day’s sundown as I can manage it, and it had simply taken on the color of the branch it had become part of, had grown a bit stiff in the great outdoors, and was indistinguishable and I didn’t see it till it moved slightly in the breeze in a way a small limb would not.

It had become one with the tree it was stationed to protect.

More apple and peach photos… And I saw the hawk! After the downpour was over, swooping by almost unseen for his speed, then in full view, then five more almost-missed-that swoops, again and again. Protecting his nest?

A friend who’s an avid birder dropped by, and we pulled up chairs side-by-side and watched the show at the feeder as we chatted. She mentioned that her hawk never shows her anything gory, just feathers gently wafting in the breeze.  Ours too. “Oh, there’s your wren,” she added. But she just missed meeting Coopernicus.

And. After writing last night’s post about appreciating those who make it so our food comes to us and not wasting their work, I went in the kitchen, where I had a bunch of bananas that were right at that perfect point–and where they would be just past it in the morning and I knew it. Time to practice a little more of what I’d just preached.

I squeezed a Meyer lemon, threw the bananas in the Cuisinart, decided it needed a second lemon and certainly didn’t need any sugar and I whirred the thing for several minutes.

It came out with a texture like angel food cake batter. Curious. Warm, though, of course, after applying all that friction to it, so I put it in the freezer, remembering that my mom would do that and then take it out and whip it again briefly in the frozen state to break down any large ice crystals and call it done.

And then of course I entirely forgot my new sorbet all day so we still have something to look forward to.

I looked all over that little cherry tree yesterday for any sign of future blooming and found nothing but leaves anywhere.

And yet today, after a little bit of rain…well there you go now.

Meantime, I pulled the big Costco clamshell of red seedless grapes out of the fridge to make pink orange juice with: rinse a big handful and throw them in the blender with the fresh-squeezed. Bananas and mango juice add-ins optional.

The grapes, imported from Chile, had faint waves of the very slightest dust across their curves, as if they had been rinsed in the field but not quite enough. There is never any question that I’ll wash them too and definitely say a prayer over my food, but, somehow the unexpected sight instantly connected me to people far, far away from me.

Walking down the rows in a vineyard. Cutting the clusters off, putting them in wooden crates perhaps, again and again, hard work in the sun, never getting to meet the people they would be feeding by their labors. Do they ever wonder about us?

I suddenly felt duty-bound to them not to waste a one. Here, have a smoothie with me, I’ve got another two pounds to use up this week and I don’t want to let a single grape go bad. Oh wait–I could freeze them like ice cubes–there you go.

And rather than just asking a quick half-thought blessing on my lunch, I found myself thanking Above for those individuals and asking Him to take good care of them, whoever and wherever they were out there. I don’t know them, but He does.

And I found myself profoundly grateful that they do what they do.

The cherry tree has woken up over the last week or so.

The older-than-us Meyer lemon keeps on offering more.

The olive tree is feeding the squirrels and jays, and judging by the wildly-flailing tails and paws and leaps to safety, the tastiest parts are at the outermost tips of the very flimsiest branches. *headdust*

The plum tree set a fair amount of fruit despite being rained on during most of its blooming, while the apples are holding off just, just a little bit for the late rains expected this week. Starting tomorrow! (Oh thank goodness.)

The pear tree is slowly stirring and coming to.

The peaches continue one after another after another in the expected sequence of future ripening.

The three blueberries are in their dogcrate of a cage. Sit! Stay!

The Fuji has four flowers open  and the other apple almost has its first….

A little rain, and we’ll take all we can get. A little sunshine.

I look forward to being able to tell the grandkids to go pick whatever they want when it’s ripe. And still there there will be room to run around and play in as they get bigger and the trees do too. And to climb on.

A circle of trees estimated to be 400 years old, growing from a shared original base close to the ground: a fairy ring that the little ones squeezed into and climbed around and through in wonder. Redwoods close behind, a trampoline hanging by chains from far, far overhead in the bay laurel (here’s a picture of one), made into a swing in the shade big enough to lie down on and look up at the branches.

Flowers for butterflies. Monarchs in summer. A little wooden bridge over a now-dry creekbed.

A friend our parents’ age was widowed not long ago and, knowing that we too are from the East Coast, invited us over tonight to see her southern dogwood tree while it is in full bloom. I wish I had thought to take its picture. I did take hers but sent it only to her.

We had dogwoods growing wild in the yard where I grew up, small slow-growing shade-loving trees under taller canopies, and I miss them. There are vanishingly few of them to be found here.

Her tree was the most magnificent specimen I think I’ve ever seen. It has grown in her yard a long time.

She planted it.

She is a weaver.

A young family had been invited too, a chance for her to get to know some new people, and their little children loved exploring her woodsy back yard with her as their guide.

When the three year old got too close to the rails on that little bridge I put my cane out straight to hem him in a bit, and his four year old brother just in front of him grabbed it gladly as his guide forward and for steadying comfort in the deepening dusk. Sticks and little boys just naturally go together anyway. I walked very carefully to make sure it didn’t fail them in any way.

It was the family I’d brought the blueberry cake to and the baby, having figured out I was okay, played peekaboo with me with great glee.

She shared cookies and lemonade with those blossoms just outside the window as the sun called it a day. When the little ones finished theirs, she showed them the path around the kitchen, the living room, and back again to the dining room so that they could run in giggling circles as we talked.  We picked up the baby a few times when his feet didn’t quite go as fast as his eyes did while trying to keep up; he stayed happy. He has just started to babble. We were charmed. We had such a lovely, lovely evening of it.

Sometimes all we need to do is simply get together.