Andrea is walking with Pam when she trips and falls. Andrea has often fallen before but now when she falls things break. She drives straight to Emergency. Dr. Fenway looks at the x-rays and tells Andrea that she's lucky — if her humerus had snapped a few inches higher she would never be able to stand on her head again. Andrea is not sure whether to laugh or not. Dr. Fenway, laughing, explains that he can't operate until her Covid test comes back, which will take a week, and he gives her an extra pain pill.

Q: What is Dr. Fenway's definition of "lucky"?

Pam is fifteen years younger and a foot taller than Andrea. She has two sons that she has pulled out of rivers and yanked away from campfires and she feels terrible that she didn't catch Andrea when she tripped. Pam is married to Joey, a tree guy, and she's always worried he'll topple out of a redwood tree someday and break his arm or worse but that's negative thinking. She phones Stan to see how Andrea is doing.

Q: What is the difference between a redwood tree and a sequoia tree?

Stan is growing deaf and can't hear bird calls very well any more. Last week Terry pointed out a Townsend's Warbler that Stan would have been able to identify long before anyone else just a year ago. He can still hear the phone however and he picks it up and hands it to Andrea with a smile. Andrea sometimes screams at him when he can't hear things and one thing he cannot bear is a woman screaming at him. "What are you smiling about?" Andrea asks from the couch. And asks again. Louder.

Q: Is Terry becoming a better birder than Stan? 

Terry emails Tomiko: Andrea is home but in a lot of pain. And Leila's ex Steve just had a stroke and is in the hospital. You already know about Ashley. Just fills me with sadness. We are all getting so old! Tread carefully dear friend. Hope you and Robert are doing all right.

Q: Why can't Tomiko remember who Leila and Steve are?

Robert's blood sugar dropped to 29 but the EMT's revived him in time and he is out of the coma now though he still can hardly keep his eyes open and it is hard to pay attention to what Tomiko keeps asking him.

Q: Can watching the news cause dementia?

Hospitals are the worst places in the world to be if you've had a stroke but Leila knows Steve will be all right; he always is. Steve broke maybe a half-dozen bones in his right hand alone during their marriage and he has a scar on his ankle where a shark bit him once, so she'll just send flowers and a text after she finishes sterilizing the doorknobs and disinfecting the place where the delivery boy stepped when he left the groceries. She hopes the store has remembered to put in the rubber gloves, wipes, and bleach she needs for the bathroom; yes, thank God, they have. She can't believe her friend Ashley, who doesn't even wear a mask.

Q: Does Leila already have the virus?

On top of everything else, Ashley is losing her hair, long strands of silvery spider webs that mat on the back of the wheelchair where she sits looking out at the redwood trees across the street, her journal in her lap. She bends her head and writes: I cannot stand this new, wizened, crippled old woman I have become. But at least I'm not a whiner like Emily. She looks up as an ambulance roars past. She wonders who it is going for. She always sends a little prayer to whoever might need one.

Q: Did Joey land in a net?

Emily knows she is lucky, everyone tells her she is lucky, Dr. Fenway is even writing an article about her for JAMA, about her miraculous recovery from pancreatic cancer, but there are times like now when she is hiking through the woods that she is just so damn mad about all the shit she went through for so many years that she can barely contain herself. She slaps at a branch in the path and kicks a rock aside and when a yellow jacket zips out of nowhere and bites her cheek she slaps at it, like a woman trying to wake herself up, and as the bite swells — she is allergic, did the damn yellow jacket know she is allergic? — she tears up and shouts, because it's true, and because no one else in this story has said it, "It hurts! Damn it hurts!"

Q: Does Stan, out with his binoculars, hear a woman screaming?