Editor,

An apricot pit from the compost pile made its way up to the top of the driveway a few years ago and took off.  The fruit this year is amazing and I really don’t love apricots.

The past few days I’ve sent one of the kids up to pick a bowl of almost ripe fruit to boil down with sugar and lemon juice into a quart of jam.  It’s divine.

We joke that at least we’ll have jam to eat this year.  This is the dreaded lean year when all three kids are in college simultaneously so if nothing else we have apricots with oatmeal for breakfast, maybe apricots on toast for lunch, and perhaps apricots with mashed potatos or something for dinner.  The apricots somehow make me feel safe.

This afternoon I ran up to the high garden to gather up the soaker hose and pull a few weeds when I heard some guy shouting “Look at this!  Look at this.  It’s full!”  There were two big white pickup trucks pulled toward the top of the driveway and one of the drivers was stripping apricots off my tree’s branches.

I walked around to where they were, told one of them to get off the property, and was promptly lectured by the thief that I was a stingy b****.

Had he simply said sorry they looked so good or something I would have let it slide but he was so repulsive I got his license plate, the business card he dropped, and sought assistance from the Los Alamos Police Department who were very nice.

Stealing apricots really isn’t the end of the world.  I probably won’t starve if a few buckets go missing but sometimes enough is enough.

The kids have their own little landscaping business and one of their best customers is an elderly lady who had recently had her Buddha and Virgin Mary statues stolen from her yard.  What sort of person steals a religious statue from a little old lady at two in the morning?  

Is Los Alamos on the road to perdition?  Who knows.  Keep an eye on your garden though.

Lynn Hanrahan

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