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.

I kept flipping back and forth between pictures 22 and 23 to be sure: no, the one photo is not an inversion of the other. There really must be two almost-identical spots in that house where you have to climb a ladder to find out what’s on the other side of that door above. Doors. Guys. Would a circular stairway have killed ya?

The grandkids would LOVE having a secret hiding place where the grandparents wouldn’t go!

Wait. Circular staircase. Attic. Yarn stash. Right?

And then there’s #23 and 24 of this place, which I’m linking to not because of the house but because of the quilt shown there but not quite shown enough. There, across the room from the spice rack lamp. Does anybody have any idea what that pattern is called so I can run look it up? I love the colors and if I could see it spread out a little bit more I’d love to knit it. Pick up stitches or intarsia? Panels or all at once? Copy or riff? (Riff, always.)

Given how much I’ve needed inspiration in that direction I’m glad I stumbled across that, even if whatever I make next is totally random from there.

Time to start sketching and trying and thinking about it.

I offered a neighbor an apricot seedling and found out she grew up on an apricot orchard and has a bountiful tree in her back yard, to our mutual delight at the shared enthusiasm.

Meantime, two people in two days asked a variant of what came down to the same question, when I thought about it: what are you not doing that you wish you were?

One of those wanted to know if I was knitting anything, and I admitted I hadn’t been of late; there’s no happy anticipation of making someone’s day, no way to know who needs that pat on the back. I guess we all do right now.

Well, huh. I couldn’t fix everything, but there is now some cranberry pumpkin sourdough rising overnight in the kitchen, the smell of cinnamon on my fingers, and I am looking forward to the smell of it baking filling the coming morning.

It’s a start.

(With the weekly apricot progress picture.)

Some had flowers in their gardens too good to only keep to themselves.

Some offered to bake. And it’s always more fun, not to mention safer calorie-wise, to bake for others.

And so we had a drive-through Relief Society party (ie for the women’s organization) at the church parking lot. You stop your car–sometimes it was a line–you say from a safe distance your preference of type of cupcake, everybody with masks on, or whether you’d prefer flowers to calories; one person brings your choice to you (if a cupcake) in a little box with a heart at the top so it won’t smush all over the inside of your car or make you have to hold it while you’re trying to drive, several people at social distances away from each other are bringing more to other cars and nobody breathes on anybody.

So-and-so pulled in to park and could you move just a bit so they can get out. Sure.

We could actually some of see each other’s faces for real for the first time in over a year and we did chat a bit from there; not too long, more are coming, we let them have their turns.

Man, did that feel good.

The response to the original query was such that not only did I get a chocolate cupcake with chocolate ganache and cream cheese layered in the filling, I was offered to take a random one home to Richard along with a blue hydrangea stem.

His turned out to be vanilla. With sprinkles. Which made me laugh. Our kids memorably swooned over sprinkles on a cake someone brought us when they were, well, kids.

All the leftover cupcakes were going to end up on the one family’s doorstep if we didn’t rescue them.  No! It’s okay! Him, too! Take one!

After tasting mine, I understood the danger. Man, that was good.

(In previous years that sour cherry’s limbs were so flimsy the birds couldn’t perch on them. There were seven when I pulled the camera up.)

Over at someone’s listing.

You want a big house, you want a short commute, you want to look out on all the city lights. I get that.

But–someone help me out here. There in the basement.

A king-size.  Bunkbed.

What??

And on a different note, after previously saying they had 100,000 doses on order but couldn’t make any appointments and actually canceled second appointments for some who’d gotten through on the earlier rounds, my medical clinic came through today and my hours of site-searching paid off. My first vaccine dose is next Thursday. Richard can’t get it yet in this state, but now at least I can.

I gave it six years. Even though an earlier volunteer had produced a single fig seven feet off the ground the same season it had sprouted out of the ground: whoosh! But it was clearly going to be big and was already pushing the fence down. Out.

But this one, not a sign of fruit ever. It was a nice enough looking plant so I kept hoping, but the Black Jack I bought on pie day that year was the one has given me several hundred figs while all this one could do was sit around and look pretty.

Turns out fig trees sometimes come as male specimens.

What we got was a lesson in root swirling in pots. (It was growing in a narrower one than what I set it down in a moment to snap its photo.) Kind of a potholder weave look to them, isn’t it. (Or Marilyn Monroe trying to hold her skirts down over the grate while her hair goes flying.)

My Black Jack is starting to leaf out for the new season and over here, there’s a newly freed-up pot waiting for an apricot seedling to spend a year or two in. Max.

I had an instant reaction of, That one. Even if it’s really too big. I love the angles everywhere. The kitchen. The trees. The boulders. The nature path. It fades into the landscape like a Frank Lloyd Wright and then you walk inside but you’re still somehow mostly outside.

If we were moving to Portland now and were sure we could afford those property taxes longterm I’d be seriously considering putting an offer on it today contingent on physically seeing it and an inspection report. (I might change those small windows up high to plain and solid rather than segmented. Philistine, I know.) Just tell me none of the glass is single-paned.

Maybe I just need me some blue-green slate flooring like that here. I grew up with a slate floor entryway that had been quarried just down the road and my feet just want to dance on that for the inner child who once scraped her boots off where it didn’t mind the mud.

But wait till the trees leaf out in those gardens. Wow. (Which floor is the laundry on?)

Meantime, the Washington Post had a story about a man who grew up in not the best of circumstances in Washington DC–and became a falconer, rescuing injured birds while saying they’d rescued him. There’s been a documentary made about him and them.

Quote from the Post: “The Falconer” will be available for viewing from Friday through March 28. To sign up for a free screening, visit bit.ly/Falconer-DCEFF.? ”

Which I sure did.

Thought I’d put that out there in case anyone else wants to see it.

And now there are six. The two new apricots, including the one that was just a little curl coming out of the ground last night, already have their second leaves.

But there was a squash sprouting whose root was growing down the side of the plug against the plastic tray and never got the memo to get inside and it tried for a few days to be rooty enough–and then the whole thing died.

So tonight when I found an Anya was starting off its root at the edge like that I took another plug, put it up against it there, and wedged them together outside of the tray. Not too hard. We’ll see how it goes.

Note to self and to anyone who hasn’t planted theirs yet: point the pointy part of the kernel towards the center of the plug. I didn’t on all of them.

Meantime, courtesy of Anne, a physicist vs a squirrel. Whee!

Sunday I checked a set of apricot kernels that didn’t seem to be doing too much yet and, actually, one of them had a thick taproot coming out the bottom that hadn’t been visible the day before–not only that, the tip was starting to look darker–it needed a place to grow to, fast, so the plug went into a larger jiffy pot as a bit of a stalling tactic: I’ll go to Yamagami’s for bags of soil after we get our covid shots.

Twenty four hours later I had a new sprout.

Twenty hours after that, it is on its way.

—

Okay, I wrote that, and then I stumbled across a conversation with a guy who’d not only saved but had grown about 40 Anya kernels and at their fifth year wrote up the characteristics of what he had. Every one of them was really good, some closer to the original Anya than others but every one at least double the brix of your average grocery store apricots. (Explanation of brix here.)

It’s not just the sweetness, though: it’s the depth and nuances of flavor.

It made me feel really good about all those kernels I sent out. Nobody’s going to get a clunker, they’re all going to be great.

If you know anybody with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, this is huge: a well-respected Stanford bioresearcher (San Jose Mercury News link), one of those who worked on the Human Genome Project, has a previously world-traveling son with a severe CFS case and was appalled at the lack of knowledge, funding, or interest in it, not to mention the fact that many patients are told it’s all in their heads.

His son is fed via tubes, in bed, and unable to speak.

I have no doubt that the dad’s reputation and previous work helped him land the funding he did. The result is a test that so far has identified every one of the severe cases tested (two year old Stanford link–there were 50 more patients affirmed last year by it) and ruled out every healthy control volunteer. It is finally a verifiable, quantifiable thing.

And now he’s applying what he’s learned to studying covid long-hauler syndrome.

Our house had a yellow front door when our kids were little. It was not a color either of us would ever have picked.

When the invasive white flies were taking over and killing our ash trees, we had no idea that yellow meant food to them. We found ourselves with a blanket of small white gnats plastered against that door constantly, a whoosh of them inside every time we opened it, and at last we gave up and repainted the darn thing and they went away.

That and the scientists released a tiny non-stinging wasp from where they’d come from that ate them.

Since then I’ve found the idea of painting your whole house that color unfathomable. Pavlov would say I have issues.

And yet there’s this house. Actually, I know someone with a house like that: he’s a CEO and has to be able to entertain big, and does, and that’s fine. So:

One stovetop, two trash compactors (but one might be for recyclables?), five? no three ovens plus (checks description) one convection oven and a microwave. Don’t miss the faux columns being held up by the granite countertop on so wide an island that us mere 5’5″ types would have to leap halfway across the top of it to pass the dish to an outstretched hand on the other side.

And yet for all that, the kitchen cabinets alternate wood stains like a self-striping yarn knit sideways.

Gotta say, the library with the sliding ladders is a nice touch in that certain Disneyed Beauty and the Beast way.

But a pool in all that perfectly good fruit tree growing area. Nope. Deal’s off.

If anyone’s considering putting in quartz countertops–and I would say the majority of kitchens I’ve seen that were clearly remodeled towards putting the house on the market have them–you might want to read NPR’s report on them first. Now that the industry knows their workers’ lungs are getting silicosis, they’re still not doing enough to protect them.

Granite is far safer to work with (and personally I think it’s prettier), and if you get a dark one (scroll down to the bottom for details–I’ve linked to that site before, it’s a good one) if it’s truly all granite you likely will never have to refinish it because it will never absorb a thing.

Meantime, in political news, the ever-loud-and-angry Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene decried our giving foreign aid to undeserving countries like, y’know, Guam!

The representative from Guam decided to gift her with some Guam Chamorro Chip cookies as a warm welcome to the new Representative, and the governor is sending her a history of the territory. All done with island charm, it sounds like.

So you know that means I had to go run look up what a chamorro chip was. Made from some exotic dried fruit or something?

Apparently it’s mini-chips. Of the chocolate, shall we say, persuasion.

The curb view at my house this week, with two nests in that tree.

I rather like this old/new house.

But I keep wanting to ask the folks who gutted and rebuilt it, why? Two stoves: that’s eight burners you could be trying to stand over and stir at the same time! And for all that, only one oven. It’s been surprising to me how few houses under a cool million have a double oven when to me it’s as close to a necessity as common sense will allow me to call it.

But then there’s always this house which used to have one. Which is the reason I’m writing about houses again because you have to see that one quick before they remove the pending listing. They built it with rocks, then cinder blocks, then finally bricks on the inner side. I guess that counts for insulation?

I think they were trying to thwart Oklahoma hurricanes with that shape?

It looks like the upper oven failed, they gutted it, they left the outer frame of it intact and then stuck a microwave inside. And if you think that’s weird, the kitchen floor is made from telephone pole slices.

It’s creative, for sure.

But I just don’t see where the yarn stash goes.