Squirrels do not get going at the crack of dawn and I hoped that at 7:30 a.m. they were still all nicely tucked in bed.

As if.

I came around the corner of the house yesterday to where the fig tree was, knowing they’re sweetest picked earliest in the day.

There was only going to be one ready. I had a clamshell snapped over it. There aren’t a lot this year. I had a bird netting tent sideways on the ground covering that lowest branch because it was too flimsy to safely hold the tent’s weight up, but at least it was something and there was a tea rose right to the side there.

Not that all that would do anything other than Rube Goldberg the access a bit. I am no Mark Rober.

It saw me before I saw it. The fig was knocked off the branch but inside the clamshell it hadn’t pried open yet as the squirrel tried to leap away–hitting the top of that tent from the inside.

Then the netting on the left, where the rose thorns were.

Then the netting on the right, and all three times it leaped for it as only a squirrel can: they can do seven feet from a standing position. So you know those whiskers were getting a little bent out of shape and its nose was feeling this.

Poor thing. I had certainly meant it no harm other than fig deprivation but it did occur to me that squirrels don’t learn from fear (or they would cease to be able to squirrel) but they can from, Well, *that* wasn’t fun.

It finally found its way out: it meant having to take a few steps actually towards me before it could get away from me. But if there’s a way to do something a squirrel will find it and it did.

That fig tasted pretty good.

The beach is done, the seed-stitch hillside above it is done, the steps built into the hill are finally done and the first redwood has begun.

Once this thing is finished and washed, the yarn will bloom and fill out and the areas will all look more solid.

Meantime, Lillian celebrated turning three today with much enthusiasm. It’s fun to be big!

Just for fun, a Ukrainian beaded necklace in granny squares. In late ’60’s colors to keep in character.

Made some progress on the afghan.

Meantime, I had some plums from Andy’s that needed to be put to good use, most quite small and a few of another variety a fair bit bigger. I whipped a warm stick of butter with 2/3 c sugar, then with 2 eggs, then added in a mixture of 1/2 c flour, 1/2 cup almond flour, 1 tsp baking powder and a pinch salt. Put it in a 9″ nonstick springform pan with a parchment bottom (my 9″ circles came with pull-up handles) and arranged halves of the small plums in a circle, skin side up, and half one of the big ones in the center.

I should have taken a picture of my pretty sunflower cake before baking it. It really did look like one with those golden plums and darker plum in the center.

When I pulled it out of the oven 45 minutes later (the recipe I was riffing off of with that almond flour said an hour and I knew that was wrong, 45 was pushing it but okay) I looked at that thing and there was only one description for it.

A bellybutton cake.

And it is very very good.

I didn’t think I could decrease every other row in dark yarn on black needles while knitting the alternate rows plain while switching between the two circulars while keeping track of where I was on each needle and where the start of the row was while Venn-diagramming the hat at the center of it all while reading the captions while attending a Zoom of knitting friends.

It will surprise no one that if you want to enough, yes, actually, you can.

I was in and out moving the hose every three minutes, taking care of my fruit trees, and had just found the ripe late summer peach in a clamshell with great delight–when I felt something.

There was a snake hanging down in the side of my hair.

Oh right, the rubber ones. Silly snake.

I had a routine checkup and was wearing a vyshyvanka (Etsy link) from Nataliya, a lovely woman from whom I have now bought similar ones for my granddaughters.

One was to be for Lillian’s third birthday? There was the surprise of a small bracelet of red wooden beads tucked away in the package in celebration of a child she did not know simply because she wanted to share in the joy.

The female doctor and nurse admired my blouse and I did a little advocating for Ukrainian starving artists.

But what really made my day was the older woman I passed on my way out who stopped me and with a thick Slavic accent asked, You shirt! You make eet?

A woman in Ukraine did, I explained.

Ees beautiful! Beautiful!!

She was so happy to see something clearly so familiar to her and in that moment it felt like we were offering each other this wonderful, mystical sense of a universal place called home.

I guess you can make rayon out of just about any cellulose-based fiber, and I’ve seen a few oddball yarns from time to time. Sugarcane viscose? As Richard put it, well that one makes sense, it would be like bamboo, they’re both tall woody stalks.

Stinging nettle? I’ve heard its praises sung but I remember stinging nettle at my grandparents’ mountain cabin in Utah when I was a kid–I learned the hard way to stay on the path but that it didn’t have the manners not to lean over it. You had to be careful. It hurts like mosquitos itch.

Crustacean shell yarn, touted for health effects: that one didn’t seem to last on the market very long. Imagine if your recipient had a shellfish allergy you didn’t know about. It was the only yarn I’ve ever heard of with a warning label.

Rose yarn. Okay, put away the pruning shears and that’s another stiff long-limbed woody plant, okay.

Today Etsy sent me one of those “New Items!” notifications re a vendor I’d bought from pre-pandemic. Yeah, I clicked.

It really was. 100% dandelion yarn. Shiny, white, described as soft.

Dandelion?

Laceweight, too, so you’d be putting a lot of time into figuring out whether it was worth putting any time into and whether it would hold up, or else you’d have to hold a bunch of strands together; well, hey, the vendor wouldn’t mind if you bought extra cones. Oh and look they have peppermint yarn, too. Does it give your hands fresh breath?

I’m picturing a Monty Python Killer Rabbits sketch with bunnies leaping for your shawl for snacks and then polishing it off with a mint.

Next Tuesday, Amazon said. The box showed up today. Ask me if I mind.

Comes assembled, they said. But, it turns out, screw the knob on the drawer yourself, lady. Yeah, I think we can handle that. (Note the lack of application of said knob. That drawer came in handy already!)

I tested out the setup by talking with my mom while trying not to lean on its slight wobbliness, and we now know that my sister Carolyn’s name types out as Kill Christmas. You know, I can actually do that kind of word mangling better than it can but it’s trying.

Speaking of whom, she and her husband have been househunting online. A few days ago, she flew to see her grandkids in Ohio with a day trip to the town in New York where she’s been looking. On that very day the most perfect house for them went up for sale–and now it’s theirs. Great condition and reasonably priced, to top it off. And she got to see it in person. Because it was on the one day.

I can’t wait to see what she does with her new horse carriage in back. Would it kill Christmas if I asked her for a pony? Always wanted one when we were kids.

Nina got her peaches and dried apricots from Andy’s and I threw in some of his plums, too. The lady at his farm agreed with me that fruit straight off the tree was the perfect homecoming after time in the hospital.

My heart monitor came off and went in the mail per protocol.  So did a birthday present for Lillian, who is turning three whether her Grammy can fathom that number so soon or not.

Writing all this it suddenly struck me what it was that I didn’t do today and I didn’t even think of it till just now: I didn’t knit.

Wait, how did that happen?

My friend didn’t answer when I first called from my cool new gadget today; she was in the middle of being discharged from the hospital. She’s home. Praise be.

I told her I would go to Andy’s this week and bring her some peaches in celebration.

And dried apricots, she requested. His Blenheims.

Will do!

You know how it’s a TV cliche, or used to be if it isn’t still, that if a character went to the grocery store there always had to be a French baguette sticking way out of the bag?

Someone by the hills near here was unloading their groceries when, yes, a baguette was suddenly in the picture. But it wasn’t stolen from inside the open car–but from on top. The neighbors’ trail cam busted the culprit.

One Roadrunner sandwich, coming right up.

About twenty years after she moved away, M-L was here at church today, catching up with old friends: she was on a trip that took her close enough to here that she couldn’t pass up the chance.

I cannot begin to say how much it meant to get to see her.

We laughed over memories of her twin toddlers being told to offer Oreos to my husband and those two adorable little boys sneaking around the corner, snarfing down the creme centers, putting the cookies back on the plate, and proudly offering up the soggy remains as if no one could possibly ever catch on.

Her husband was the one who, during the flood of ’96, opened his front door to see if any water was backing up, just time to see their koi from their backyard pond swimming past his feet. Brad loved to tell that story.

He was also the first person in the county they’d moved to to contract covid, when even the tests for it were new. The first one there to survive the ventilator. He wrote a rare-for-him Facebook post that day of his intense love for his family, his gratitude to all who’d taken care of him, his plans to hike in Finland with his family the next year where his wife’s mother was from. He was going to go to rehab to build his strength back up and then at long last, home!

He stood up at the side of the bed–and was suddenly gone. This was before they knew covid causes blood clots.

I’ve long kept in touch with M-L, but to get to see her and share in person the love and the support and the grief and the pride in her now-grown kids and mine just meant so much.

We got home. I had an email waiting. Richard made a phone call and was out the door but told me not to come and not to be exposed. Were visitors allowed? As he explained afterwards, Part of being visiting clergy is an inability to read when you need not to.

And so he in his K95 mask got to visit our friend Nina, who is in the hospital with meningitis, and to be there for her husband, who knew Richard would know what this is like.

I tried to keep her company before and after by email while trying not to wear her out. I know how responding to even the most appreciated message or in-person visit can wear out a sick body even while reviving one’s spirit.

She is delighted at my new phone gadgetry and could I call her on it, she asked.

Today? Or would tomorrow be better, I asked.

Tomorrow.

I told her I’m looking forward to it.

If you take the Post’s recipe and use a bit less sugar and a tablespoon less butter and add in an egg, then it’s totally a health food, right?

(I added too many blueberries because I had them so I was going to use them, it overflowed, and Richard walked in the door saying, You’re burning something, with me responding, It did at the beginning but don’t open that oven yet.)

I’m typing this to remind myself to scrape that out of there after it cools and before the next time I set the oven to preheat.

I didn’t call you but I didn’t call anybody else either yet so don’t feel bad. The one call so far was made by the tech to the company to do that one last step to get me officially registered by having them hear me say yes I’m me and yes I want this.

What I did do was order a 31″ tall foot-square table afterwards (with a drawer! The thing doesn’t need a drawer. Who knows, but still, I got the one with the drawer) to put it on. It’s actually wood and, the kicker, no assembly required (yay!) and under $100. Sold. I’d had no idea I was going to be buying furniture today, but the woman said, You have a table? You’ve got to have a table. She couldn’t imagine me sitting down on the floor every time I got on the phone.

So we set it up on a box for the moment–and I sat down on the floor to try the thing out. I like breaking people’s brains that way.

The box kept trying to flip its lid.

So.

There’s this small tax on your phone bill and mine that we’ve all paid all our lives towards accessibility. And what that means is that if you go to an audiologist and have your hearing loss documented, that audiologist can then call CapTel, who, after verifying that you have internet, will then send a technician out to your house. They will install a machine that does what human transcribers listening in on your calls used to do: it routes your call through their system which automatically transcribes it into captions on a mini iPad-sized screen next to your keypad.

There was about a one second lag time between speech and caption but hey, there were captions. Slow is better than no.

There’s also a volume setting that goes to too loud even for me, and I didn’t know there was such a thing. And one where you can change the voice to lower pitched, or, if you’re a rare case, higher ones so you can follow better.

You can only have one answering machine: it or a regular one, and we have a regular one and Richard was busy working and I wasn’t going to make a unilateral decision and wasn’t sure I wanted to save captions of spammers anyway. Easily deleted, of course, but, so, we didn’t set that part up.

I didn’t use my new gadget yet.

I think I’m a little afraid of being disappointed if it isn’t perfect. The guy on the other end that one time had an accent that the captions bungled and I wasn’t sure of the vocal quality either; I just need to try it out with more voices and get over being new to this.

We are all going to trip over that unfamiliar piece of furniture-to-be in the hallway at one point or another–because the main in the kitchen where we were going to set it up didn’t work (who knew?) and the only other place we could make it work was outside Michelle’s old room. Which means a chair in the hallway, too, oh heck throw in a footrest, right? (Uh…) I told the tech I was glad I’d told the architect during a remodel years ago that I wanted that new space to have room for any future wheelchair to turn around in easily.

I want to be able to hear my mom. And that is what finally got me to blow off the pandemic and get this in motion and welcome what turned out to be a very lovely stranger into our house.

I said to her at the end, It must be wonderful being able to make it so people can communicate again.

Her face lit up as she exclaimed, Yes! And then she begged me to get the word out so more people could have this. “The government doesn’t advertise,” she said and a moment later said it again, but if only people knew! They pay for it anyway and it could do so much more good in so many more lives.

I promised I would pass the good word along.

The contrast: I read recently that you generally don’t see treetops all entangled in each other because they can sense each other’s growing ends and turn out of the way. I imagine they avoid some degree of future fragility that way.

And then there’s this.

Someone designed an experiment to see how a low-growing rosette-leaved ground cover in pine forests interacted with its environment. Because, science. They designed a gizmo to measure how much a leaf pushed it out of the way in 24 hours’ time: testing repeatedly, they found it put out pressure about equal to lifting a dime.

The kicker is that the plant is named Elephantopus–now there’s a safari-and-sea portmanteau for you, who thought that one up? And the force it exerts vs its size and weight is equal to the capability of an actual elephant.

No word from the octopus family on the matter.

They studied one next to some up-and-coming rye grass: it folded its leaf in such a way as to block out twenty shoots’ worth and hog all the sunlight for itself and starve out its competition. Scrappy little thing.

I’m picturing the tulip poplars up there looking way down and going, Now kids. Behave.

Or more specifically, the mailman did as he maneuvered his truck around us a moment later, waving in greeting, too.

She was closing her garage door. I was putting our recycling bins away after dinner. I caught her eye and waved hi.

And this time she waved back, hesitated a moment, and we found ourselves walking towards each other and meeting our new neighbors.

She told me eighty people had applied to rent that house and she didn’t know why her family had been picked, but she was very glad.

I told her the owner’s kids were the same age and gender as hers when he bought the place a year after we bought ours and I bet you remind him of those days.

She hadn’t known that but you could see her liking him all the more for it.

And I thought later, and I bet he wants there to be kids enjoying those good schools like his got to.

Just then the neighbors two doors down from me pulled in at home–and they had young boys. Playmates! (as the new woman’s kids suddenly appeared behind us.) More introductions.

I mentioned that the biology teacher at the high school had co-written the textbook and had so inspired my oldest that she’d gotten her PhD in that field.

It’s a great neighborhood, I told her, you’re going to love it here. The other neighbors nodded a definite yes to that.