social distancing

Day One Hundred Four

June 25, 2020 at 10:17 am by Claudia

Thank you for all the wonderful birthday wishes on Don’s birthday! I didn’t respond to the comments as they are really for him and he will read them later today. We had a lovely quiet and peaceful day. He loved his presents and I even made him a card as I had none on hand and wasn’t about to go into a store to buy one. It was a great day and a privilege to honor my husband and shower him with love.

The other day, I cleaned up the office upstairs. It was cluttered and Don’s desk was a mess. Plus, during the pandemic, we store some of our canned goods up there as we only have limited space in the kitchen. I took some pictures for IG and one of them was of this box, which is incredibly precious.

And this is the text I wrote to accompany it – I’ve made a screenshot of the post.

That last sentence is “It is far from over” – it’s been a bit obscured by the watermark.

When I think back to that time and what my grandmother shared with me, I am haunted by the loss of those young women. Grandma said they could see funeral wagons going down the road several times a day. She had returned to the family farm from nursing school to take care of her sisters. She also came down with the flu but she survived.

Since I have their funeral cards in my great-grandmother’s tea chest, I looked at them to check on the year they had died. 1920. Two years into the pandemic. 10 days apart. I can’t imagine what the family felt, the heartbreak of doing everything possible to save Rhoda and Maggie only to lose them in the end.

If you follow IG, you might want to read the post because some of the commenters have shared their experiences with people mocking them for wearing masks. In one case, my dear friend Deb shared that friends of hers who were wearing masks at the beach were spit upon.

Why such a reaction to wearing a mask? Why such animosity? And why such a determination to act as if it’s all over with, that all is well? We can lay some of this on Trump, of course, but not all of it. I know the answers – these are rhetorical questions – but this willful ignorance and anger and mockery continues to shock me.

The numbers don’t lie. And now we have the Trump administration turning its back on the epidemic – stupidly, because it won’t help his ‘numbers’ and it will result in more deaths due to their negligence.

Stay sharp and stay safe. I know that I am basically preaching to the choir here, as most of us are being very careful indeed. Don and I have already decided that we will hunker down here for as long as necessary. We managed a birthday celebration without going out to buy anything. I called it “Happy Birthday, Lockdown Edition.” We are fortunate that we can order online, that we can get necessities without too much contact with others. We have masks. We use them. We wash our hands continuously.

Stay home, my friends. Don’t start thinking that because some states have opened up that everything is okay. The numbers we have seen in the past few days tell a very different story. New York is doing well; relatively, of course, as there are still people who are ill. But because Cuomo was so strict about everything, we are seeing great improvement. The challenge is not to act as if we can go back to what we were doing before March. We can’t. Whether in NYC or on the prairies, we still need to be vigilant.

Stay safe.

Happy Thursday.

Day Ninety-Eight

June 19, 2020 at 9:47 am by Claudia

Rocks, rocks, and more rocks.

You’re familiar with the little path in the Secret Garden – the one with stepping stones and bark that leads to a crabapple tree. I started that path several years ago when I discovered that there was a tree in bloom that I hadn’t noticed before. Don, in his ongoing work outside clearing paths, etc., cut back a lot of brambles and expanded that path this summer.

He has been doing incredible work up in the woods, hoeing all the weeds, widening paths, making new ones – it’s really quite magical up there. In his eagerness to clear things he went a bit over the top earlier in the week. He cleared out a section that borders on the path in the Secret Garden. I was working inside and had no idea what he was doing and then, when I went outside, I couldn’t hide my disappointment. Suddenly, the right side of the path was more exposed and all the little areas where wildflowers (and weeds) grew were gone. He did a good job of clearing, mind you, but when we talked about it afterward, he realized he’d gone a bit too far.

Then he came up with the idea of rocks. We live in a very rocky area and there are lots of big rocks up in the woods. He wondered if adding large rocks to that space would change it for the better. I thought it was a good idea. So he started digging out rocks. The first few he brought down on his own, but I soon joined him because they are HEAVY and I didn’t want him doing it all by himself.

Here, you can see the area we’re talking about. The path is to the left. The area that Don cleared is to the right.

We’re gradually adding ‘filler’ rocks to the big ones, but most of these are quite big, quite heavy, and might I say, gorgeous. We dig them out of the ground and transport them down the Secret Garden via wheelbarrow and, in two cases where the rocks were really big, via a dolly. We’ve done all of this in the past 5 days or so, taking breaks (like today) when we need to rest our muscles. Previously, Don would dig out a big rock and carry it to the wheelbarrow. He quickly realized that was hurting his back, so we either lift the rock together, or roll the rock toward the wheelbarrow. Much better. There are rocks up there that are HUGE and way too big to move – and we wouldn’t anyway because they are a part of the landscape.

Then we decide where to place them. They’re truly beautiful, each of them unique.

This photo was taken from outside the garden. The area to the right of the rocks in the background is a series of stepping stones that I added several years ago and they take us up to the back forty.

Our largest piece.

We’re going to add a bit more, especially smaller rocks to fill in those spaces. We find them everywhere on the property. I’ve been taking a lot of them to make a larger border on the garden bed in front of the porch. I already added larger border rocks to the big garden bed, which were found by Don when he was clearing the paths. I really like the larger stones in those borders as they give the beds more definition.

We worked for four hours yesterday and it was hot and humid, so yours truly was exhausted.

In anticipation of your questions, no, we don’t know if we’ll plant anything between the rocks or just let the area evolve. We get wildflowers that pop up in this area, so we’ll see. The whole idea is to keep it natural. The Secret Garden is surrounded by the house and trees, so the play of light and shadow on the rocks is ever-changing.

It’s a big project and so far, it’s costing us nothing but sweat and time.

There you have it.

Stay safe.

Happy Friday.