I have a gardener and his helper twice a month to do the outside stuff I can’t, and today happened to be the day.  They came after the stump grinders were gone and marveled at the changes in the place and loved it when I asked for opinions and advice on what I should do next here and here and here.

I told them about the tanangelo (the computer still doesn’t like that spelling but it’s correct) tree and where I was going to want it to go in–they thought it a good spot–and would it be okay to ask for help digging the hole?

Sure!

I had no idea…. I glanced out the window and thought oh, they don’t have to prepare the hole that much, the tree’s not here yet, although maybe adding water makes it easier to dig? Not aiming it very well, you don’t want it spraying the fence like that. ! Wait, where’s the hose?! How are they doing that?

Just then one of them started coming my way.

A whole lot of years ago Richard, with help from the kids, dug up and put in a watering line with a master control switch in the garage. Which got damaged and was never replaced and a gopher had bitten through the line over on the left anyway and the whole thing had essentially been forgotten about.

That water line on the right side was still live–who knew? There’d been no sign of it. So we had a few minutes there where we were trying to cut it off as it sprayed out of the hole and against the fence. The line to the house? Didn’t do it, it just meant I had no water inside. Huh.

In the no-coincidences department, my husband wasn’t feeling great yesterday and told his boss he would probably work from home today. And did.

He knew there were two water lines whereas I had no idea. He knew where the plumbing supplies were in the garage to cap that thing off, too, and soon all was well.

Wasting water is a $500 fine in California these days and that fence got doused nicely while that thing was going wild, which thanks to his being there, wasn’t more than ten minutes.  On the other hand, one of the tests for whether you’ve picked a good site to plant a fruit tree is to fill the hole with water and see how long it takes it to drain out–if the water just sits there, forget it.

We seem to have just the right spot. Um, except for that pipe crossing the edge. Clearly, it won’t be hard to get water to that one. I think I’ll just spade out a bit at that far edge there….

My next-door neighbor was walking past my house as I was coming out and we both stopped and chatted a moment.

They always plant quite the garden, but it had not been very productive this year; maybe, he said, it was that they watered it less in the drought. He marveled though at how much brighter and sunnier it is there now that my tree folk have done their work.

“Maybe it was my trees that were the problem,” said I, with a new reason to be glad the problem ones are gone now.

“But they were there before.” He was ever the diplomat.

“But they were taller this year than ever before.”

He conceded the possibility.

Then I told him the story of the Page oranges and that a three-year-old Page tree was on its way here and it was fun to watch his face break out in a huge grin like that. I knew they’d planted their own orange and nurtured it and watched it come to fruiting and he knew how much I was going to enjoy that process.

I forgot to tell him, though, that this was going to be one tree that wouldn’t shade his garden like the ones that are gone: there will be no twenty towering feet high and twenty across but rather half that at most. But then, he probably already figured that part out. And that our trees will help each other be more productive, self-fertile or no.

And here I am writing about Pages again because I can’t do anything else to make that new tanangelo come any faster–hurry, tree! I’m waiting!

We have a houseguest for the next few days, an old friend who moved away near the beginning of the year who’s back in town on business. She’ll be working long hours while she’s here and we won’t see a lot of her, but we’ll get some time, at least.

Right now she’s off catching up with someone else for a little bit so I have a moment to just go do whatever.

I think I’ll go get a little knitting done.

We started off this morning with an excursion to the new venture Timothy Adams Chocolates, meeting up with Michelle there.

As soon as they’d opened she’d gone to see if it would be a place where she could eat anything, and the answer was an emphatic and happy yes.  And so as we walked in, the owner saw her coming and started a batch of dairy-free truffles on the spot.

A good man looking out for and including our daughter just because he could. No wonder she’d gone back.

They were exquisite. It is a rare thing to cater to a milk allergy and have the rest of us not miss the dairy at all. We bought a half dozen of varying types and they were served up with a small knife so we could taste test together. (Or just Richard and me, on a few of them.)

We’re always looking for ingredient substitutes that work. Hazelnut milk? I had never heard of such a thing. You could buy hot chocolate made of hazelnut milk? This could only be good.

Let me tell you, it was, although it was brilliance on the part of the shop to have a gorgeous water dispenser and pretty cups ready as needed to sip between sips–that hot chocolate was a near thing to melted ganache and I found I needed to alternate. It was very rich. And very much worth the trip.

I’m with Michelle: we will be back.

Chomp. “Looks like they got that one.”

Understatement alert, hon, but yeah.

And yet. I haven’t stopped planting more fruit.

When I was a teenager they were building a Mormon chapel closer to home and the locals were asked to pitch in and do fundraisers to help speed things along. (These days, it’s all handled from Salt Lake City to even out the resources between communities.)

Dad had heard of a friend of a friend who really knew his citrus and who was driving truckloads of a type of mandarin none of us had ever heard of from Florida to the DC area for fundraisers for various groups–they get their fundraiser, lots of people discover what was/still is said to be the best-tasting citrus there is, he gets paid for driving his truck, everybody wins. So Dad asked for the guy’s phone number.

And that is how he and Joe Ney became good friends with a shared enthusiasm and purpose. After that building in Potomac, Maryland was finished, Dad continued to commission a truckload every Christmas.

Because everybody who’d bought a case of those juicy Page oranges (technically, tanangelos, a Minneola cross crossed with a mandarin) came back for more whenever they could; there was nothing like them and they were too small to go big commercially and I don’t think they kept particularly well so you couldn’t get them unless you had some kind of a connection to them down South. Dad wasn’t about to let go of enjoying and sharing the best of the best every December, so, if it was a truckload he had to order, a truckload it would be–sign the sheet and state your number and give everyone on your gift list a box and know that they’ll never forget it and they’ll forever be grateful.

Then a major freeze hit Florida. For all the misting and wind-machining and whatever all else they could do, most of the Pages didn’t survive, and since it was such a niche market to begin with and young trees were the most susceptible to the next frost, most growers simply didn’t replant them.

Then Joe Ney dropped dead of a heart attack. (And I hope his family somehow sees this post and knows what a great gift he shared with so very many people and how grateful we all are.)

And I have not had one of these beautiful, deeply colored, juicy, paper-thin, easily peelable almost always seedless little balls of exquisiteness since. The Cuties they sell every Christmas? That’s like an old Hersheys vs. Scharffenberger, or even more now that those two have the same owner, vs. the fantastic upstart Tcho’s.

I wrote here Tuesday about whether anyone had any fruit varieties to recommend for my newly-cleared fenceline. I got a private note asking me if tangerines could grow where I am?

Ding ding ding. That was it!! THAT was what some corner of my brain had been struggling to dredge out of the depths! Richard! We could grow our own PAGES!!!

Oh I cannot tell you how excited I was.

Which quickly got tempered by not being able to find a single source outside of Florida that night, much less one anywhere that would ship to me. There’s a quarantine on citrus trees around southern California, no help there either.

I tried again the next day. Help me out here, Google.

Google came through. Google is my friend.

And so it was that there is a grower in northern California who sells three-year-old Page tanangelo trees for $40 and says that they’re large enough that they should be producing the next year after planting. Wow!

Monday Chris’s stump grinder guy comes to give me a bid on how many stumps I want taken out and where. Monday Four Winds Growers mails out my tree by third-day UPS. Not wasting a moment here, and I had to call my mom, and when Dad wasn’t home I had to call back later to talk to him directly: after all those years after those last boxes, we are going to have Page oranges again!

The one glitch? That no-freezing thing. But if the next-door neighbors can tent their young and vulnerable orange tree with a giant lightbulb inside last January, and they did, and they celebrated their 50th anniversary something like ten years ago, seems to me I should be able to manage doing that just fine myself. Or ourselves. (And let’s see, if I get a Gold Nugget variety too we can have mandarins in winter and spring and early summer…)

Just one tree for now. Pages are also rare in that they’re a citrus that is nearly thornless–and I have grandchildren to keep from getting scratched up. I’ll keep it short enough to stay inside one of my new walk-in-size fruit cages; that should thwart the raccoons at least for a little while. (My brain is suddenly singing Little Boxes.)

Some part of me knew when I wrote that throwaway line ending that blog post that I really really did want…something….

Imagine looking forward to your first bite of chocolate in 37 years. It’s like that.

I haven’t really talked about the wedding yet, have I.

I brought my gift of a soft, undyed, near-white silk lace shawl to the dinner the night before the wedding and was glad to see quite a few other people bringing gifts then, too.

Holly, the bride, was so thrilled with it that at the wedding reception the next day she sat down right there and wrote out a heartfelt thank you and commissioned someone to find me and get it to me, since of course everybody constantly wanted her attention and her new husband’s and she was trying to do right by everyone at once. But such a personal gift–she wanted as personal a thank you as she could make it, and right away.

She’s a good one. Our nephew is one very lucky man. She said to me later in the evening as we reconnected in the crowd, “I don’t know you yet but I love you, and thank you.”

Which is exactly how I felt.

We’d bought and potted those two trees in anticipation and hope of this day happening.

They planted my cherry tree today–and since it had recently been repotted by our friends, it had only barely started to grow through to the ground. Theoretically, as an ultradwarf, it shouldn’t get too much taller than this but rather more outward.

Well we’ll see. That’s good soil in that bed. I remember my dad trying to replace a broken six foot Blue Peter rhododendron a painter had fallen onto and having been told, Blue Peters don’t grow six feet!

Mine do, he told them.

I hope to take as good care of my fruit trees as Dad did his rhodos.  Although, having a backhoe in and adding six feet downward of great soil before planting–okay, Dad, you win. (That was when their house in Bethesda, MD was being built when I was three; he asked the builder to dig a little extra along the front for his future flowers.)

The surprise was the Comice: it was a mere bare root on February 14th and already it had a good taproot squeezing through one drainage hole and smaller ones through all the others. (I drilled about 20–the Costco pots had come with none.) They had a good firm grip on the ground below.

The men checked that thing out and knocked on the door for me: would it be okay with me if they cut the pot away? There seemed to be no other choice.

I want a tree, not a pot, yes please.

They made sure that where they’d prepared was where I wanted it. I thought, eh, I might have nudged it six inches thataway but that’s just way too picky–the hole was ready and it was good so it was just right. “Perfect.”

That was when one of them asked me about that sunjacket I always pulled on every time I stepped outside.

“I have lupus,” I said, sure that that would mean nothing to him–most people have no real idea.

“One of my co-workers, his wife has lupus. Sometimes she’s in a wheelchair.”

Ohmygoodness, so he did know–I winced in sympathy. I told him sometimes I’d been in one, too.

I came away hoping that it would give comfort to whoever she was out there to know one could go through whatever she was going through and still get to be older with this disease, and I wished I could introduce her to 92-year-old Rita.

They set part of the taproot in the carved-up pot for me to see. That tree had wanted to grow freely. And now it can. Pears have no rootstock options that dwarf them as much as you could an apple or a stone fruit, so we put it in the one corner where it would not shade the solar and it would not be too close to the house. It can take over there freely in the space we opened up for it. (Dying cypress, gone at last.)

And now that blank expanse of fence on the other side has some green to it, too. I love the long lush leaves of cherries. I pulled up a chair and my knitting and stared at the loveliness and the relief of having a tree in there already. It’s a great start.

Chris came to inspect the job in progress and as we spoke in the yard, movement high above caught my eye and I pointed it out to him: there he was, Coopernicus, right on cue (always the showoff.) I told Chris we’d gotten to see him courting with his mate perched on the silk oak next door through our skylights this past spring. He thought that was so cool.

Some hunting places gone, the new begun already.

Green. Real green.

Speaking of which, kudzu is a beautiful plant. We drove past stands of it again and again last week, including a row of what had to have previously been trees with half of one crepe myrtle still visible but disappearing fast, desperately reaching branches towards the highway in a plea of Save me! as the kudzu slowly took it down, took it all down–it was impressive. The stuff simply smothers anything in the South no matter how tall and no matter how wide. Kudzilla.

We saw one area along the road that looked very familiar in a Western way: lots of narrow dark grayed stumps going straight up throughout a swath of land and everything around it still perfectly green. You see that blackened cajun seasoning searing this patch, leaving that patch raw all over the dryer parts of the West in the summers as of late–but why…?

It took me awhile to figure out that someone had done a controlled burn to take out the kudzu in the only way to really get rid of it, I guess.

Speaking of invasive species…

I told the tree guy giving me an estimate two weeks ago that the berries of heavenly bamboo kill the native birds here. He was immediately stunned at the enormity of what that meant, turning to me, his eyes big: “But it’s everywhere!”

Yes.

And that is why, as of today, our fifty or sixty year old stand of the stuff is gone; if I want a six foot tall decorative line of plants, there is no good reason not to have them be blueberries instead.

The weed trees that were starting to threaten the fence are gone, too. The sawing went on all day. It was either pay for that, or pay for that anyway and for replacing the fence next year, so, out it went. The bird center people had asked me to wait till August and we did but it could not wait another growing season.

The workers left me, at my request, the already-dead many-holed stump near the corner: it is Nuttall’s woodpecker habitat. (Besides, better they hammer there than the house.)

It is so very strange and a bit of a wrench to look out the window and see naked fence. It’s also pretty cool. Like having a brand new house: we get to choose what we want and start over!

I stuck a spade in one spot and asked Richard if he thought the potted cherry should go in there.  The workers already dug a large hole for the pear on the other side of the house. We will add an English Morello near the first cherry, the tart but not too sour type that I think is what Costco has been selling that we like so much. Five hundred chill hours–we can definitely plant that.

So much to look forward to. Even if it’s hard to have those trees gone.

I watched a gray squirrel run down the fenceline next door towards our side, and about five feet short he slowed and stopped. Stared. Wait. There WERE trees here, I KNOW there were! It tried, but it could not conjure them back into existence and it slowly turned and walked–there is no other word for it–away.

A black squirrel later was so rattled by the changes that he took a flying leap for one of the remaining trees and actually missed. A wild scramble and he caught the other part of the doubled trunk behind it just before he would have hit the ground.

It kind of feels like that, doesn’t it, little guy?

Now to pick out varieties that won’t grow too tall, that won’t take too much work, that won’t shade the solar, whose fruit will, best of all, be sweet in the hand.

Any favorite varieties of anything you want to recommend, I’d love it if you let me know.

Going back to last Thursday, our first full day in Georgia: Anne and Ned offered to take us to see the lookout point above Amicalola (not Multnomah, Marian, it’s that funky hearing, sorry) Falls and then a little further down, the entrance to the beginning of the Appalachian Trail.

Where we both said it had been on our life list to hike the entire Trail. Richard had done a goodly distance on it in his younger days but they would have to cure lupus before I could really get to it.

The stone arch marking the spot was behind the ranger station and gift shop. It had rows of benches to the side for people to rest on right after their very long hike, and on those benches was a group of people maybe twenty-five years younger than us. Tattoos, clothes you would definitely wear out in the woods for roughing it, big boned, strong in opinions and body, one would guess.

And here we were, Richard in his oxford shirt (I don’t think the man knows how to wear a plain tee, it’s always an oxford shirt. Preferably blue. Rebel that I am, I occasionally buy him something radical, like a green one) and I in my trademark longish full skirt to keep the sun at bay and so that I don’t hash things too badly when I take one of my frequent tumbles: could we scream city-slicker tourists any louder? Those men guffawed quietly when we walked up to the stone arch, took pictures, talked about the trail wistfully, briefly, and then turned and left without taking a single step past that arch. (I regret that. One step wouldn’t have killed me.)

They couldn’t have known that we were all trying to let us have the experience without my spending one moment longer in the sun than I absolutely had to. But they were right, it was pretty funny.

On the way home, Ned allowed as how we really needed us some lunch, given the three-hour round trip, and he pulled into a barbecue joint to show us a little local flavor here.

I have memories from age sixteen of discovering Brunswick Stew at a little barbecue joint in southern Florida and there it was on the menu. It wasn’t the same thing–everybody has their own recipe–but it definitely made its own memories for the next chef to live up to. The best food comes from the funkiest places.

And yes, this is what they smoked the pulled pork in that Anne ordered. You’ve found it. The smoking gun.

We knew returning the rental car would take extra time, but my brother-in-law added the warning that Sunday evening is when all the businessmen are heading out. So we gave ourselves leeway for that, too. (He added that he didn’t know about rental cars because of course he’d never had to use one in his home city.)

There were stop-and-go backups on the freeway around downtown. On a Sunday in the middle of the afternoon. Who knew. The ETA on the GPS kept getting longer rather than shorter.

Dear Atlanta: please note that when you have two separate highway exits for rental car return north terminal and south terminal your average tourist will have no idea and their tickets will say nothing about separate terminals and your signs do not say which airlines are served by which. In or out of the airport they will not know where they are supposed to go. Turned out there was only one rental car area (I think), but the train from there was a complete mystery.

I turned the cellphone back on and googled from what we hoped was the right train–on our second time around.

The train made verbal announcements that were utterly useless to the hearing impaired. There was nothing written anywhere, not in the station, not near the train, not on the train, not when you get off the train (unless you step off because everybody else does and go far enough forward to find, at long last, a sign), there were no personnel around to ask. Only Google was my friend. (Was this a Bible belt Sabbath-day thing? I actually prefer not to travel on Sunday myself and not to make people have to work on my behalf on that day but sometimes you just really don’t have a choice.)

Dear Atlanta: when you are the busiest airport in the country, having a TSA line serving a few (and it was only a few) businessmen and one. single. TSA. agent. trying to process the several hundred increasingly antsy people in line–and five agents are standing around, one looking busy but the others simply chatting and laughing and having a fine old time till a flier finally desperately nicely asks them (it was the guy behind me) “Could you possibly open another line?”

Don’t tell them no. Open the line, okay?

They told him flat-out no. And after that chokepoint there was only one scanning line as well.

We had checked in everything but Richard’s backpack and my purse and finally asked the people ahead of us, with it visually clear that we were not going to hold them up by messing with our luggage, Would they mind, could we go ahead? We were about to miss our flight.

Now, on our way into Atlanta on Wednesday, we found that there was another train that was running from our terminal to baggage claim–and nobody was running that train. It sat. Thousands of people gave up and walked, dodging latecomers running at us playing rollaboard derby. It was not a wide hallway. I have never seen anything quite like it.

We’d been walking quite some way when an airport employee stood at one point in the forever hallway to announce that it was a 12 minute walk to baggage claim from that point and that the train would be there in half a minute.

She repeated that over several minutes as no train came.

At last one did open its doors and loaded disbelieving people and did what it was supposed to do.

So we had visions of no train in the terminal again and a real good idea of how long a walk that was.

The entire TSA-impaired line graciously motioned us forward. We thanked each person as they nodded and said yes and we continued on past them towards the scanner area.

And then an agent hauled Richard aside and said she wanted to check his backpack–too many electronics in there.

Please??? Our plane’s already boarding, see, it says 4:15 on the pass….

She apologized and moved as fast as she humanly could. She had to have been tired. That line was horrendous and nobody was backing her up either.

I asked Richard to pack slip-on Birkenstocks for the next time he had to put his shoes back on at an airport as we ran.

The new train did what it was supposed to. (I narrowly managed to keep him from getting on one going the opposite direction again.)

Gate 20 noIreadthatwrongsorryit’s10keepgoing! as we ran.

The stewardess was talking to someone while somehow draping herself across three seats at the front of the plane, relaxed, and when she saw that really tall guy coming in, stepped aside and offered the seat to him and then motioned me over too. Given that his knees do not go behind airplane seats in front of him, they just don’t, this was huge: we got the bulkhead!

I’m typing while a load of laundry is washing away so that he can go to work with socks and underwear in the morning.

Atlanta (other than that) was beautiful, wonderful, our nephew found himself a bride that–well, she reminded me of the tease my son’s mother-in-law gave all of ourselves when she said, You know it’s a good match when both families feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.

Yup. We all are. Holly’s a peach.

Richard and I stayed at my sister’s. She invited us to come a few days early and just hang out and visit and see the sights with her and her husband and play with her twin grandbabies and finally get to meet her daughter-in-law. I’m so glad we went.

And next time we’ll know how to get around Hatfield Airport.

Elvis’s voice on the GPS.

The bride was gorgeous and the groom so very happy too. A very very happy day.

Multnomah Falls is a beautiful place to drink in a good long view of the world.

(Correction: Amicalola. Got it.)

I started a new hat but there was no need: the twins’ mom is thrilled with the two handknit hats made for her babies. Who are just the cutest.

That’s okay, I know who the new one will be for. Right on it.

There is nothing like that moment of blinking in utter disbelief at randomly running into someone you last saw at high school graduation many states away. I guess the Diablo salmon at that place really is that good (it was).

More later.

One bright, one dull by comparison (picture here)–should I knit another baby hat for my nephew’s girl twin? There’s just a dearth of superwash merino in baby girl colors around here. Can’t imagine why… I think I’d have to break into a set that was going to be something else.

Which project wasn’t grabbing me the way I expected it to. Those six skeins could make a lot of little things instead of one big thing. Alright then.

Amazing how deadlines clarify the view.

I went to the audiologist and got the wax out of my hearing aids.

Then I went to the doctor and got the wax out of my ears. Which are always responding to the expensive foreign objects in them by trying to flush them out–amazing how much better hearing aids work with clear airways.

“Any other concerns I should know about?” my good doctor asked me.

I mentioned the bit of a bug, the bit of a flare (83/55 bp, I’ve certainly done lower), being a bit tired, but, eh. No big deal. And in passing I mentioned the peaches and the listeria recall.

She said most cases are low-level illnesses that end quickly with no real concern, for the healthy, anyway. But: in rare cases there’s a lag time of about a month and then it can really go to town, including meningitis. “So,” she counseled, “tell your family to be on the lookout in case you start acting weird.”

Start? …Seriously?!