From all of that, I end up with about two quarts of salsa and a gallon of tomato sauce.

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. A good chunk of the hundred pounds never makes it to the kitchen. It gets eaten warm off the vine, sliced onto a plate with a little salt, tossed into whatever’s for dinner that night. Still. Two quarts. And the salsa isn’t just tomatoes. The Anaheims and jalapeños come out of the same garden, so those jars hold most of the back half of the yard.

Most of a tomato is water, and most of putting one up is cooking that water away. I knew that, sort of, the way I know a lot of things I’ve never had to do myself. After a few seasons of standing over a pot watching it cook down to a fraction of itself, I know it differently.

I don’t look at the canned food aisle the same way anymore. I understand economies of scale. A cannery isn’t working one pot at a time on the back of a stove. But the content-to-can ratio doesn’t care how big the operation is. Somebody grew all those pounds to fill all those cans. Multiply that by every can on the shelf, then by every shelf in every store. I’ve tried doing that math standing there with my cart, and my brain just quits.

Then there are the ingredients none of us can pronounce. Nothing in my jars needs a chemistry degree to read. I won’t pretend to know what all those other things are doing in there. I only know mine get along fine without them.

Tomatoes aren’t the only lesson. I’ve processed chickens twice. I didn’t like it much, and I’ll save the details for another day, but it was the same lesson with feathers. Food doesn’t arrive as food. A lot of work happens between the living thing and the package, and most of us (me included, before) never have to think about it.

Seeds turned out to be their own small revelation. I save what I can: radish, lettuce, flowers. One radish plant left to bolt makes thousands of seeds. Thousands. Meanwhile the seed company would like $4 or $5 for a packet of fifty. I know there’s more to producing seed than letting a radish go to flower in the corner of a bed, but still. Somebody in that industry is doing very well. I don’t bother saving squash or cucumber seeds. They cross-pollinate with whatever’s growing nearby, and next year’s plant is a crapshoot. Those I’ll keep buying.

The compost pile feeds the soil, the soil feeds the plants, and the plants feed the frogs. Well, the bugs on the plants feed the frogs. The frogs came back this year, and they moved into the basil, the raspberries, and the zinnias. They’re better pest control than anything I could buy, and a lot more fun to find. They’re no help at all against Roadie, who eats the pea blossoms before they ever get the chance to become peas. That pest wears a harness and sits on command.

My mother and grandmother both gardened, and seriously, so I didn’t come by this out of nowhere. I’ve always liked the idea of the victory garden, a yard that does a job. Ours isn’t fancy. It isn’t built for lounging, and nobody’s going to photograph it for a magazine. But it produces, and it feeds my husband and me for a good part of the year. The zinnias are there because I want them there.

What I keep coming back to is simpler than any of the math. I know I can do this. I know what went into the jar because I put it there, and I know what went into the soil because I put that there too. It’s a quiet sort of satisfaction, and I’ll take it.

It happens with A.I. too. “It’s stupid. It never answers my question.” So I ask it about whatever they were asking about, and it answers. At length. Sometimes with sources.

I’m not bragging. Okay, a little. Mostly I’m puzzled that my results are so vastly different than others.

When I say “it’s all about context” or “A.I. can’t read your mind,” people get defensive. They tell me they did give it context. I shrug. That’s usually where the conversation ends.

So I’ve been wondering if it’s me. Maybe I learned to look for things in a way nobody teaches anymore.

I’m old enough to have done research in a card catalog. Long wooden drawers, little brass pulls, and a metal rod through the bottom of the cards so nobody could walk off with one. You looked things up by author, title, or subject. If you didn’t know any of the three, the drawers had nothing to say to you. You learned quickly to think about how somebody else would have filed the thing you wanted. Then a Dewey decimal number walked you to a shelf, and half the time the book next to the one you came for was better.

I have a degree in English Literature from before the internet. (People are always surprised by the degree. I like that.) Nearly every class was research and argument. Find the sources. Decide which ones to trust. Make your case.

Encyclopedias worked the same way. One entry said “See also,” and you went, and then that one said “See also,” and an afternoon was gone.

And then there was Sunday School. The teacher called out a verse and we raced to find it. I was very good at this. I wasn’t holier than anybody. I just knew the order of the books cold. Ruth comes right after Judges. You don’t flip. You go. (Mostly. I recently learned a few of the minor prophets have fallen out of my brain’s index cards entirely.)

I have no idea if that has any bearing. I suspect it does.

Every one of those tools made you meet it halfway. You had to know how the information was arranged, and you had to ask in its language. A search box and a chat window are friendlier. They look like they’ll understand whatever you type, and they’ll try. But underneath they’re still drawers, sort of, and what comes back depends on which drawer your words open.

That’s my theory, anyway. It’s also possible I’m just stubborn and keep asking until something gives.

I’m grateful to every librarian who let me sit on the floor between the stacks, and to a Sunday School teacher who turned the Bible into a race.

So Sundays are mostly me, the Seahawks and popcorn. That’s the entire production.

He likes to point out that we have reverse roles in this house and he’s right. I can tell you who’s starting at left tackle for teams I have no reason to care about. Baseball too. He couldn’t name five players and has no interest in learning. I’m okay with that too.

Here’s the part I can’t explain. I don’t like violence. Not in movies, not on the news, not anywhere. And football is a violent sport. I know this. I watch it anyway, and not politely. I watch it the way other people watch their team – up off the couch, hollering at a screen.

The closest I’ve gotten to an answer is border collies.

A border collie is a wolf with the last step removed. The stalking, the staring, the running, the gathering, all of it still there. Only the part where it eats the sheep got taken out and replaced with a whistle. And the dog isn’t sad about it. That’s the happiest that animal is ever going to be.

Football looks like that to me. Everything a fight is made of, right up to the hit, and then somebody blows a whistle and spots the ball and it doesn’t mean what it would mean anywhere else.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

It probably has more to do with being nine years old on a couch next to my brother.

Rick is fourteen years older than me. He taught me the game. The positions, the rules, who was good and why. I couldn’t tell you a single play from any of it. What I remember is being handed something by somebody I thought was very grown up, and being able to keep up.

The Seahawks isn’t my only team. Green Bay came down through my mother’s side, but it stuck because of Favre and Rodgers. Both of them played like the rules were a suggestion somebody had made to them once. Both of them were right, in that rebellion, often enough to get away with it. I love that in a person.

The Seahawks won the Super Bowl in February of 2014 and I watched it at a party in the ‘hood in Tigard. People talk at parties. People stand in front of things. I try at those and I never manage to pull off watching. I have been quietly sore about that particular one for twelve years.

This last February I was squarely planted on the couch for every minute of it. Loud whenever it was warranted. Nobody standing in front of anything. Eric watched too, I think. I couldn’t swear to it.

They open against New England again tonight. I have the game paused to finish writing this, which I think tells you everything.

Jackie died this morning in Ojai. She was fourteen. Three weeks ago two younger eagles jumped her near the lake and she rolled onto her back and fought them off with her talons, which is apparently what you do, and then she couldn’t fly. Anemia she couldn’t climb out of. That’s the whole story.

I have not been following Jackie and Shadow for long. Shadow is her mate. They have been together eight years and their nest sits a hundred and fifty feet up a pine above Big Bear Lake with a camera on it around the clock.

I got pulled in the way everybody gets pulled in, which is that Facebook decided I needed this and I did not disagree. Egg count. Snow on the nest. It’s a very effective machine, and I was one of hundreds of thousands watching it run. Possibly millions, across all the feeds carrying her.

She had a hard year. Ravens got her first two eggs in January. She laid two more in February and both of those hatched in April and both of those chicks fledged and left the valley two weeks ago. Then she got in a fight and that was that. I keep wondering if the second clutch cost her something. Nobody knows. I’m not sure why I want it to be a reason.

Nature has no empathy. Shadow will find another mate, probably by fall, and the cam will keep running and people will name the new eggs. None of that explains the crying.

Part of it, I suspect, is geography. I grew up in Lake Arrowhead, about twenty miles west of Big Bear along the Rim of the World Highway. Same mountains. Same pines. That nest is in country I knew before I knew much of anything else, and I don’t think I registered that until I was already in too deep.

The rest of it is that I watched, every day, and somewhere in there I stopped watching a bald eagle and started watching a character. Devoted mother. Tough old girl. Fought off two attackers and couldn’t quite get home. None of that is what she was. She was a fourteen year old raptor doing raptor things in a bad year, and I dressed her in a story, and then the story ended the way stories do and it landed on me like news about someone I knew. That’s my doing, not hers.

I don’t get touched like this often. I get touched more by an animal going than by a lot of people going, which I know is a strange thing to admit out loud and I’m going to admit it anyway.

Here is the part I want to sit with. All that noise did something. The Ojai Raptor Center opened a fund the day after she arrived and took in more than eight thousand donations in the first day, mostly twenty five and fifty dollars at a time, and they were clear from the start that the money was for this eagle and every eagle that comes in after her. They take in about a thousand birds a year. Almost none of those birds have a name. While she was dying they were also posting about how to tell a bald eagle’s call from a red-tailed hawk’s, and how you protect a bird’s wrists while you’re treating her, teaching a few hundred thousand people something they had no reason to know last month.

She was a better ambassador for the birds that come next than she ever was a celebrity. Nobody gets to be both on purpose.

The announcement this morning did not open with her name. It said Patient 26-519. Somewhere in that building she was a chart and a blood count and a set of numbers that kept going the wrong direction, and a room full of people sat up with her for three weeks anyway, knowing how it was probably going to end. Thank you to them.

For five years I was the site manager at CreativePro, where Gene wrote a column called “Scanning Around with Gene.” He was late a lot. It never really mattered; the columns didn’t run on hard deadlines, so late just meant late, and when they landed they were always worth the wait. Gene is a wonderful writer. He was forever tinkering with old printing presses, running his own experiments and then writing them up in a way that made you care about lead type and letterpress and the whole machinery of getting words onto paper, whether or not you’d ever given any of it a thought before.

When I left, he wrote a whole column as a goodbye, and, this being Gene, built me a twelve-pound trophy out of parts he’d been hoarding in his garage for years, waiting for the right occasion. That was the kind of man he was: collect the odd beautiful thing, sit on it a while, make something out of it.

I hadn’t thought about him in ages. The last time I really did was ten years ago, on our year around the country. We were in Hannibal, Missouri, on a day of hard rain, walking the town, and we came around a corner and there it was — a Linotype machine sitting out on a pallet, exposed to the weather, looking about as sad as a beautiful old machine can look.

It stopped me cold. All that ingenuity, all those moving parts, out in the rain on a pallet. I thought about Gene the rest of that day.

And now, still googling, I find there’s a book — a whole collection of his writing, in print. I probably won’t spend the forty-one dollars on it. But there’s something right about it: a man who spent his life fascinated by printing presses, set in print for posterity.

His line for it stuck with me. Solutions end stories. Grievances extend them.

The piece is about the national version, where the wound converts to subscriptions. What I couldn’t stop thinking about is the local version, where there’s no money in it at all. The payment is different here. It’s standing. Sympathy, the benefit of the doubt, a certain unassailability, a seat at the table you’ve just finished explaining you were shut out of.

So I’ve been paying attention.

There’s a post I keep seeing. Someone was overlooked, talked over, left off a list. The telling is careful and there’s genuine dignity in it. Underneath is an ask that never gets said out loud. Tell me you saw it.

It took me a while to notice it isn’t one person. It’s some of the people I follow, and they don’t know each other, and they’d be insulted to be grouped together. They’ve each arrived at the same shape on their own, which is the part that convinced me Malone is onto something. Nobody taught them this. They just watched what landed.

And it lands. Thirty comments, sometimes more than they get on anything else all month. Hang in there. You deserve so much better. I know exactly how you feel.

It’s never the last one, either. Six weeks later it comes back around, same shape, new occasion.

The wound also attaches to whatever’s in the air that week. A newspaper article, an announcement that went up without much warning, a budget line. Lately it’s the primaries, which are generating more material than usual. Sometimes it fits, and fits well. Someone who actually got steamrolled by a process has something worth hearing when that process comes back around. Other times you can watch the stretch happen, the topic bent sideways until it rhymes with the original injury. That’s the tell. The topic was never the point. Staying in the conversation is.

One of them will explain, for the fourth time this year, that they were stonewalled and never listened to, and that this is exactly why they keep beating the “we can do better” drum. I believe them about the stonewalling. I usually do. The question I keep swallowing is the simple one. How are we supposed to do better while you’re this committed to reminding everyone how bad we’ve been?

Some of them do acknowledge it when things improve. Graciously, even. And then, within a few weeks, the wound has found somewhere new to be. A different committee, a different oversight, the same shape of story. The improvement gets banked and the account stays open.

Malone offers a test, and it isn’t “was the injury real.” Most of the time it was. The test is whether the grievance can still lose. Watch what happens to the evidence. Criticism means they were over the target. Silence means nobody could answer them. However it turns out, it confirms the same thing. A story that can’t lose isn’t being checked against the world. It’s being protected from it.

I don’t assume I’m outside this. I’ve got stories I’ve told more than once, and I could tell you exactly which ones get the best response. Malone catches himself doing the same thing inside an essay about catching yourself doing it, which is either the flaw in the piece or the entire point.

Mostly I think about the thirty commenters. They’re being kind. They’re also, without meaning to, placing an order. The comment is the sale. The wound is what got restocked.

I’m grateful for the people in my life who mention a thing once, go do something about it, and never mention it again.

I stood there for a second afterward, rag in one hand, jar in the other, thinking: what just happened?

Here’s the simple version, as best I understand it.

The first thing is the plumbing. My left hemisphere runs my right hand. My right hemisphere runs my left. They talk to each other across a thick cable of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. So the question in the title has a literal answer. There’s a wire.

The second thing is that my brain saw the jar before I did. Vision doesn’t wait for me. It runs a little simulation of the next half second, all the time, whether I’m paying attention or not. Counter, rag, trajectory, jar. Collision. That prediction is what triggered the rescue, and it happened well ahead of the part of me that would have said “oh, the jar.”

The third thing is that I didn’t need to look at my left hand to use it. My joints and muscles are constantly reporting their positions upward, so the brain always has a live map of where every part of me is sitting in space. That’s why you can touch your nose with your eyes closed. It’s also why my left hand knew how far to travel and how hard to grip a smooth glass jar it wasn’t looking at.

The fourth thing is that I have wiped a lot of counters. Practiced movements get handed down out of the conscious part of the brain into the cerebellum, which handles timing and coordination and does not require my involvement. That’s the whole point. It frees up the part of me that gets to think about other things while the counter gets clean.

Which explains the piano.

I took lessons when I was about ten. I got the treble clef. I could read it, and my right hand found the keys, and that felt like real progress. Then came the bass clef, and I was done. I could not read two staffs and run two hands at the same time. It wasn’t the notes. It was that nothing had been practiced enough to sink down into the cerebellum yet, so both hands were still up in the conscious part of me, and that part of me can only really do one thing at a time. It was taking turns and calling it music.

I’m sure the rest of it was a ten-year-old brain still under construction, and a ten-year-old girl who would much rather have been outside playing in the dirt. Given the choice again, I’d probably still pick the dirt.

But that little jar rescue was four systems firing faster than I could notice, and my contribution to it was zero. It happens dozens of times an hour. Reaching for the coffee cup while reading. Stepping over the cat.

Mostly stepping over the cat.

I am grateful for a body that keeps the jars upright without asking me first.

He turned out to be a freak of nature. Confident. Personable. The most dog-like cat I have ever lived with. He is harness trained and loves a walk. He sits on command. He has taught himself to reach out and tap me with one paw when he wants something, which is almost always pets. Given the choice, he would rather hang with his people (me and Eric) than do just about anything else.

But the thing I want to tell you about is the food.

It started at the farmers market when he was maybe six weeks old. A produce vendor asked to meet him. He was cautious about the whole thing until she broke open a cherry tomato and held it out. Oh my. He went in face first and could not get enough.

Once he was big enough to hang outside with me, he found the little mushrooms that pop up in the garden. I went straight inside to look up whether they were poisonous. They weren’t. Whew. Now he hunts them like a bloodhound.

The full list, as best I can keep up: tomatoes, broccoli, brussels sprouts, pea blossoms, snow peas, string beans, strawberries, raspberries. If I am harvesting it, he wants his nose in it, and he wants to try it at least once. Meat too, of course, but a cat eating meat is not exactly news.

I can say with confidence that Roadie is my most invasive garden pest. I have a genuinely hard time growing peas, because he finds the blossoms and eats them before they ever get the chance to become peas.

I love that he is so food motivated. He knows that if I call him while he is outside, a treat is involved. If he is within earshot, he comes running. If he doesn’t come, I can usually guess what happened. He has let himself into a garage or a shed or somebody’s shop and gotten stuck. Thank goodness for tolerant neighbors who go check and call to let me know they found him.

A freak-of-nature cat, and a garden I mostly get to keep. I wouldn’t trade either, peas included.

The phrase is “my husband.” Women here say it constantly. My husband put up the fence. My husband won’t touch squash. My husband’s people are all out toward Winlock. Not Dave, not Ron, not whoever he actually is. My husband. And said to people who, as far as I can tell, already know exactly which husband is meant, because this is a town where everyone knows whose husband is whose.

I never heard it in Tigard. I’m sure it happened. But it never landed on me as a pattern there, and here it landed pretty quickly as I got to know various women in the area.

So of course I went looking, because that’s what I do when something snags.

It turns out linguists have a tidy little rule for this. You say “my husband” to someone who can’t place the name, and you use the name with someone who can. The phrase is supposed to earn its keep by telling a stranger who this man is to you. By that logic a small town should be wall to wall first names. Everybody already knows. The name does all the work.

Which is exactly the part I keep turning over. If you say “my husband” to a woman who has known the man for thirty years, you aren’t telling her one new thing. So the phrase is doing something other than pointing him out. It’s keeping the marriage in the sentence. It puts him and what he is to you into the room together, every single time he comes up.

You can hear it two ways, and people do. On one end it sounds like a small claim, a flag planted on a man who already has a name. Here is mine, and he is accounted for. On the other end it sounds like the reverse, a kind of reverence, keeping him held back a little, not handing his name around to just anyone. Territory on one side, respect on the other, the very same two words for both. I suspect most of the women saying it mean neither. It’s just the local water, the way some people say the wife, and the meaning floats around the phrase whether anyone put it there or not.

In Tigard I was a person who happened to be married. I’m starting to think Toledo is a place where being somebody’s wife is a thing you say out loud, the way you’d say where your people are from.

Here’s the part that unsettles me. I’ve started catching myself doing it. It slips out at the market, my husband this and my husband that, and it sits wrong every time, like a coat that isn’t mine. I’ve called him Eric since before he was my husband, and Eric is the name I’d rather say. But a place gets into your speech before it asks permission.

My husband thinks I’m overthinking it.

(There it is. It’s already happening.)

So A.I. didn’t land in my life as some foreign object. It showed up as the best tool I’ve ever found, by a wide margin. What’s new is the choice it hands me. For the first time, this old girl gets to decide whether she even wants to learn the new thing, or just use it.

Take websites. I know my way around them. But I don’t actually want to learn the latest framework-of-the-month, and now I don’t have to. “I don’t want to learn it, just write it for me, Mr. A.I.”

So I tried exactly that. I just finished rewriting the website for our local food pantry, start to finish, in under five days. I kept this one in WordPress (it made sense here), with most of the pages and content generated in PHP. The part that struck me was where my attention went. I spent it on the things I actually care about: the features, how the content reads, the look and feel. I never got bogged down in the mechanics underneath.

Did Claude make a great website? Absolutely. Is it a well-written website, under the hood? I have no bloody idea. And I’m okay with that, which is exactly the sort of thing I’ve always been okay with. The plumbing was never my department. The result is.

Next up is a restaurant rewrite, and this one leaves WordPress behind. The menu will live in a spreadsheet that gets read and formatted into the page, so the owner can update a cell instead of calling me. Down the road she may want online ordering wired into her POS. I’m not losing sleep over how that works. When the time comes, Claude will figure out the integration.

That’s the thing I’m most grateful for, when I sit with it: A.I. keeps the complexity tucked out of sight. Could I go learn the guts of it, the languages and the APIs and the whole stack? Probably. But that was never my job, and it was never the fun part.

I’ve spent a career saying there must be a plug-in for that. Now, more often than not, there is.