Seven miles instead of 75. It delays his being fully vaccinated by five days, but still. I conferred with him and then grabbed it. I also immediately canceled the original. The site said Sutter would offer it as a first shot to someone else and asked that that be made possible as soon as we could, which was only reasonable.

Immediately after I finished that up, the doorbell rang: my friend Constance, who lives hours away these days (there’s a shawl in my book named after her.)  She had been in the area on a work assignment and was stopping by on her long drive home.

We ended up on chairs in the shed. It was trash day but for obvious reasons I had not put the bin back right away. This gave us a spot that was outside, as one should in a pandemic, under a ceiling-height roof and with sides, as my lupus needs to be out of the sun, and it was perfect enough of a spot for visiting that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that a whole lot sooner. Anyway. We had a lot of catching up to do after not seeing each other in person for too many years.

And then I sent her home with a 5 gallon fiber pot full of new topsoil and peat moss and a baby Anya apricot tree to put in it, kind of a grow kit. Just add water. After you get it back out of your car.

And on a totally different note. My late father, a modern art dealer, would absolutely have howled. Sometimes the art world can get a bit precious, and that poor innocent couple who picked up a brush from somewhere in the spilled paint on the floor and scatterings of paint cans and such in front of the mural and added their touch to what they thought was a public-invited graffiti project, well…wouldn’t you?

(When in doubt read the little white box on the wall next to the art in the gallery, but never mind.)

The apricots in pots, the short, five-branched one and the tall–which, although the leaves kept growing bigger, had stopped producing new ones until its roots could likewise grow more to support them. So, you know, you’re planted now, hurry up!

I’ll move them into bigger pots next winter. Gotta start somewhere.

And then there’s the one from last year. I overwatered it one particular week last summer and it suffered and stopped growing. Totally my fault; I kept giving it as much when the weather turned cool as I’d been doing in the high 90s. Apricots do not like soaking their feet.

During the winter the top and a side branch appeared to have died off so I pruned it, little though it was, and hoped it might survive.

Note the pretty, glossy Costco pot I bought for it turned out to have had a red coat of paint slapped on top of plain plastic but which shredded off almost from the first time water touched it. Not cool. But so 2020.

Anyway, that Anya is only just now waking up for the season: those leaves at the top started to appear yesterday. But it was very much to my relief that it did wake up. I didn’t kill it after all!

Not to mention, I really want to be that extra year ahead. I want to begin to find out what we’ll get with these.

It always amazes me when a plant manages to recover from its deathplantbed and just keep right on going after all.

Someone in the neighborhood was having an Easter feast with several cars’ worth of attendees. Probably all vaccinated, right?

Still, it left me with a sense of, oh, if only.

I texted Happy Easter to my kids. In response we got a photo of one exhausted toddler sound asleep mid-dinner in his high chair and some FaceTime with his 18-month-old cousin who, having discovered this wondrous indentation right there in the center of her, had to show us her discovery of having a belly button. As every not quite entirely verbal yet baby that ever was has done for all of time. While her big brother made sure she had enough jelly beans. This was clearly Jelly Beans Day, to her amazement, holding some out in our direction. She opened and got help closing the little plastic egg halves again and again.

The St. Bernard, as always, refused to hear her name coming out of a screen because she knew that’s just not real. She got to her feet and walked away.

The first apple blossoms of the year.

And, on the right, the apricot that was just the tiniest beginnings of two leaves tucked way down in there a week ago.

One of the real estate sites somehow thought I wanted a cabin in Carmel. It’s absolutely adorable and comes with its own Rapunzel tower and I’d love to camp out in it even if my hair hasn’t gotten quite *that* long in the pandemic, but man, that is the most flammable house I think I have ever seen.

And on a different note, I did a fair bit of knitting today: it’s the weekend of the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Gerrit Gong was one of today’s speakers, and he was reminiscing about his late father.

Whom we knew and adored. When his dad was blind from diabetes in his old age, his mother asked if I might knit her a scarf in angora: because her husband couldn’t see anymore, but he could still feel, and she thought it would be a blessing to him.

You bet I did.

Woke up with a smile on my face. We have a date, at long last: seven weeks till we get to see who we want to see and go where we want to go.

It felt celebratory to pick up the topsoil I’d ordered from the local nursery; I wasn’t going to risk my back lifting them before that drive to Antioch. Even if I’d ordered the half-size bags for caution’s sake.

And now there are two apricot seedlings in good-sized but not huge pots for them to get a good start on life in and they look glorious.

One bag done. A second is in the back yard.

There are eight (!) more of them because, uh, I think I overdid it. Like, a lot. The guy just barely managed to fit them into my Prius and I should have paid the $55 delivery fee for their strong young men to come bring them and stack them up wherever I might ask because some things you just can’t weigh in terms of the equivalent number of bags that that would work out to and hey lady did you realize you’re starting to get on the old side, but, oh well. Too late now. They are totally smelling up the inside of the car because I forgot to get the dolly and found my limit for one day and had the good sense to stop.

But those two trees are finally where they should be for the next year while they grow their roots a bit. They’d so needed it. They’d stopped producing new leaves until their roots had somewhere to reach to, too, and now they look so good. And it makes me so happy.

Guess who forgot to take their picture as I was taking them in.

Whoah! Suddenly there were green boxes. All in the same two places. Did we want to go (I looked them up) 317 miles round trip or 146? We actually finally had choices, but only at those two.

Was this a trick question?

Wait. Maybe it kind of was. On 24 hours’ notice, too. I asked him if he was serious and I looked up distances and I basically twiddled my fingers a few minutes to let anybody closer snatch all those slots in Antioch. The 7:30 one did vanish, but none of the others.

We had had appointment slots get claimed while we did the required repeated hoop-jumping so many times.

A few years ago, Sutter Health scooped up our formerly independent medical clinic in a trend of providers consolidating to lower their administrative costs and fight insurance companies.

Well, there’s finally an upside for us: Sutter lets their patients schedule a covid vaccine at any of their facilities they’re willing to get to. The drugstores go by the county you live in. Sutter goes by Sutter.

He’d been okayed by his doctor a week ago, who was surprised that that hadn’t happened yet, and both of us have been looking multiple times a day every day since. With everyone 50 on up eligible as of today, and everyone over 16 in two weeks, and the medical officer of our more-populous county having sued the state in a fit over the fine points of the law re distribution, ending with us being dead last to receive vaccines, (gee thanks) all the sites said three months and we figured that’s just how it was going to probably end up being.

Green boxes! Tomorrow! When the screen said Confirmed Appointment I nearly burst into tears for sheer disbelief and gratitude.

Road trip road trip!

He couldn’t change his schedule at work that fast and had to be in meetings concentrating in the noisy environment, so that meant me at the wheel and, as is normal for me, not hearing the GPS. His co-workers on the phone were cheering him on. The traffic was relentless. Google said 75 minutes to three hours; it was nearly the latter (so much for the idea that nobody’s commuting by car right now), but we tried for a good hour early just in case which got whittled down greatly but not quite entirely. We made it. We were good. The staff said of course I could use the restroom!

A stop at an In’N’Out drive-through for burgers to minimize contact, eating in their parking lot (which also meant we didn’t have to drive into the sunset); he spelled me at the wheel for the long road home.

He got. His shot. He got it! Moderna. Four weeks till the second. Neither of us wants to make that trek again but the appointment’s on the books and his if he wants it and if we have to we will in a heartbeat. We want to see our grandkids! And we so want not to get nor give Covid-19 to anyone.

As we rounded the bottom of the San Francisco Bay on the return, I mused out loud that, if we’d ever driven alongside what looked like the end (it wasn’t quite) of the Suisun Bay before, I couldn’t remember it at all.

He couldn’t either; maybe on our way to Yellowstone when the kids were little? Maybe?

So strange to see a whole beautiful wide Bay–that wasn’t ours and whose contours we did not really know. But it welcomed us anyway, and we are grateful.

From the peach that bloomed first: I even made myself thin them like I’m supposed to. They say six inches apart but the tree didn’t cooperate, so I figure, Eh. Five. Call it a size 6 Petite.

It was in the low 80s today and the previously dormant-looking sour cherry went, Hey! My kind of weather! Alright!

A few flowers for your day. The other peaches have enough left hopefully to pollinate this Indian Free.

A bit of warm weather and the mango buds that have been closed tight for so long are beginning to respond: some clusters are starting to set fruit, some are just now lengthening and opening up.

The tree got a bit leggy after spending too long under the ash-damaged and -darkened greenhouse. The surprise is that the buds seem to have come through the winter better with just the Christmas lights and the endless rounds of cover/uncover with the frost blankets than with the heater and Christmas lights and the Sunbubble. It’s a lot less electricity, too.

But it requires I be home every day at all the right times morning and evening checking the sun vs the cold and doing the origami thing with that big piece of white fabric (and the next and the next.)

Funny how I seem to have been able to manage that this past year.

We lost a bunch to cold spots but many more grew to replace them. I think it’s going to be a good year for showing friends what a local Alphonso mango, the best of the best and not heat treated for import, tastes like. I hope so.

Those dense leaves must look quite inviting even if I mess with them twice a day. All that motion and upward flips of green after a bird flitted in there could only mean that it was starting to set up a nest in there.

All we can do is hope the warmer nights hurry up so I can leave them alone to raise their young in peace. We’re getting there.

Saturday’s picture. Middle pot on the right, we’ve got a root but no stem yet. The green in the lower left has doubled today.

Apricots don’t like their roots sitting around soaked, and they’re starting to show out the bottom, so I need to figure out the best medium for the next stage of planting. Do I put them in something they’d have to be moved out of later in the growing season, something small enough that I could deal with when my back is being antsy, or do I protect the roots by putting them in something larger that they’ll stay in for a good year or two at least?

The fabric pots are great for getting a plant to create a strong root system because they’re constantly being air-tipped when they reach the edges and creating new side roots in response.

But the roots do grow through the bottom, which would be hard to extract them from, so you’d want to go bigger rather than smaller. Or use something more solid. Even if that makes it harder to chase the moving sunlight or to move them away from the wild rabbit’s reach at night.

Or I could just stop overthinking it, plunk them in whatever and tell’em good luck. Don’t forget the eggshell pieces around the stems to thwart the snails.

I have this plant that grows next to the house. I didn’t put it there; it was a surprise. It simply showed up one spring and every one thereafter, leafing out of the ground and then sending up a purple flower stalk next to the walkway. I had no idea what it was. It never spread–it was just the one plant. For easily twenty years now.

Last year there wasn’t much of a flower to it at all, which made me realize how much I’d been looking forward to it. Oh, well.

This year, the rainy season is nearly over and we’ve gotten about a third of normal. Dry dry dry. My allium did come up under the sidewalk light as always but it’s tiny, with no sign of any flower to come, but at least it’s still alive.

I ordered some cream with my groceries. I had a craving for making chocolate tortes. I wanted to run the beaters, melt the chocolate into the cream, mix the one spoonful I like to make of leftover ganache into my hot cocoa the next morning, all of it.

The new next door neighbors, as it turned out, do indeed like chocolate and are not allergic to dairy.

She opened that door in excitement before I could even knock.

She’d had to work today and it had been a long hard day and then she’d just gotten home to my message. Not five minutes later I would get a text saying how good that torte was.

And as I kind of floated down the sidewalk, there it suddenly was.

Wait. Where did you come from? What…?

It was a new allium. With the tips of its unusually short leaves just brushing the sidewalk. There had been so little water there was almost no stalk, either, but there it was, radiant in the late sunlight.

And it wanted me to notice.

When we were little kids playing hide and seek, didn’t we all secretly wish we had a trapdoor? Although, this one has a certain Cask of Amontillado feel to it, doesn’t it? Is that really a telescoping stairwell? Hey up there! Don’t move that dresser!

Personally, I’d just as soon build in the walls of the whole actual ground floor and not leave the house hanging waiting for the ending of the first story, but that’s just me.

I’ve been wondering what a good little Mormon would do with a wine cellar in a house–I mean, to my eyes, it begs for a yarn store impression with a skein stuffed in each slot, and think of all the designs you could make with the colors of your stash before you even knit it, but then how would you mothproof them?

I do really like that greenhouse, though.

How about the latest peach flowers at my nice peaceful house instead. Where, while doing the dishes, I had a sudden pang of missing how one daughter could call from the other room, That was a small Corelle plate.

Or, That was a bowl.

She could identify each piece by sound when they fell. Practice makes perfect.

Thank you for filling out the pre-arrival form, the clinic’s site said. Please bring proof of ID with you to the vaccination site.

Which is how I found myself plunked down on the tarmac at the county fairgrounds in front of a college kid hired to screen people: I couldn’t hold onto my hat against the wind off the Bay and hold my cane and fish through my purse. He needed proof that I had an appointment to get that shot.

It’s…in the email address I didn’t have on my phone. It’s on my account at the clinic–and I didn’t remember the password. I never use my phone for that. Crum. I figured oh well so much for that as I told him I’d checked before leaving and the site had said to bring ID and I’m a tech-idiot.

He waved the grandma in. I guess because they were going to look me up inside anyway; let them have to deal with me if I wasn’t legit.

Name? Address? Phone? Appointment time? Yes, there you are.

I was legit.

I did not feel a thing and wouldn’t have known I’d even gotten the shot if I hadn’t been paying attention.

The fifteen minute wait afterwards: I was looking around at everybody, wondering if they felt as overwhelmed with the release and the gratitude as I was; one of the nurses monitoring stepped my way with, Are you okay?

I laughed, yes, very much, thanks.

Another minute. Another. I had planned to be knitting. But no, just look at all these–people! Resuming normality starts right here with a cavernous room full of strangers together just doing, y’know, life-type things together and not walled off or Zoomed but for real and mostly pretending to pretty much ignore each other like strangers do in our older habits and isn’t this just so cool!

Out that way?

Yes, that way.

(Meaning the long way around in the most sun. It had been a lot of sun for a lupus patient.)

I found myself back near where I’d had that earlier conversation and the one guy was nowhere to be found to try to thank him; there were now three young African-American men directing people where they needed to go. Second shots are that building, first shots are this, back out to the parking lot is thataway past that building, yes.

Seeing where I was coming from, alone, (somehow nobody else came out of there when I did) they all asked me if I was okay.

And that’s when I found myself just speechless. One stepped closer and repeated: Are you okay?

It took me a moment to get past the enormity of all the thoughts of the last thirteen months and now this that tried to all jam through my brain hole at once and blocked it tight.

I finally managed to say something and it was the one thing I wanted most right then: Did they do you guys first? (You who are out here in public serving the public being exposed to the public, being so essential to every one of us who’s being given this great gift.)

This beautiful young man answered my question with a smile by repeating his, asking after me.

There was a space between moments of people coming and going just then.

So I told him about flying to help our daughter with her preemie for three weeks as she recovered from complications, how we’d had tickets to go see them again, and then it all… And now she’s starting to talk! I cannot WAIT to see her!

He just pictured that sweet baby girl and loved loved loved all the love in person to come for our sakes. For so many. The tenderness in his eyes. I felt myself in the presence of such a good person.

I asked again. Did they give you guys shots too? They should!

No, he said with a twinge of sadness mixed in with his joy for me, for everybody.

Had it not been for this whole pandemic thing we would probably have given each other a hug on the spot.

I will remember him and that conversation for a long, long time to come.

California announced after I got home that come April 15, a month sooner than they’d previously thought they’d have to set it for, everyone over 16 will be eligible for a covid vaccine.

I don’t know those men’s names, but I’m going to be praying for them all in the meantime. Particularly the one. Stay safe, guys, and thank you for being careful.

I had wondered if I would run into anybody I knew today. I didn’t. But I feel like I do now.

There’s a new anti-viral drug that was already being studied when covid-19 came on the scene. They’re not done with the Level III studies, but so far it reduces covid viral levels to undetectable, it seems safe, and it can be taken as a pill rather than through a needle. Go Emory scientists!

There’s a silk cowl that just needs blocking now.

And at this 1919 house, where they forgot to put in the stairs (pic #3) if your sense of balance doesn’t know which way up is you’re going to have a heck of a time knocking on the door.

Note the bicycle wheels in the next picture. And the listing description: “Green energy. Construction elements: recycle materials.” I think we have a new creative euphemism.

And then we have a nice tall house in the hills that someone walked away from before it was finished, and someone’s hoping that for a huge sum of money someone else will want to take it on and finish those extra touches like railings on three floors of overlook decks way way way above the ground.

The twelve year old graying plastic wrap still on that new tub just makes it. They need this place for a movie set. Just as it is. I’m sure they do.

Any Hitchcocks needing a remake?

Your turn or mine?

Flip a coin, he said.

(Looking briefly around. No coin to be found. I handed a cashier cash once these past thirteen months and they stared at it like I’d just poisoned them.)

Uh, how about a credit card? (Yeah that’s a bizarre thought but it goes with the money theme of deciding for you when it doesn’t really matter, right?) Heads or–no wait, top or bottom?

Top?

(Flips it in the air.) Top. You win!

–

p.s. Thank you, everybody. This is the pattern by Louisa Smith that DebbieR was referring to and I really like it.