Weathering the turn of the year

2020 has been one long dark night.

We yearn to congregate again.

We're still stuck but oh so close.

See the forest through the trees?

We're rounding the bend.

God help us trudge on.

 

A sort of fevered imagination

Blessed with an abundance of imagination by the Creator, I have put it to good use this past year.

“What sort of a fevered imagination you must have,” said Mr. Tilney to Catherine Morland in “Northanger Abbey.”

Ditto.

Thank you, Jane Austen, for describing my chief occupation these days.

Imagination is my coping mechanism when I hear the collective cry of the people on this planet.

We are our brother’s keeper; but with each passing day, we grow farther apart in survival mode.

Consequently, I create the world in my mind that I wish it could be.

While I hide behind my mask, I imagine.

Since I was a child, I have spent my summers by the sea.

However, at the end of each season, we closed up the summer house and locked the door until spring.

“Winter is coming,” my parents would say; and I would no longer hear the sigh of the sea rocking me to sleep, except in my imagination.

This fall I acutely dreaded the separation.

Working remotely at home, I had cabin fever; and our seasonal home became a safe house.

“What if we winterize the summer house and spend our weekends there?” I asked my husband and mother.

And I imagined a little Christmas tree, a manger, an angel on the front door. I would read or write with Mom’s crocheted afghan tucked around me, while the snow fell and the wind howled and the sea roared.

Dressed warmly in my wool coat, I would walk along the seashore wearing its winter face, a solitary woman immersed in the elements yet shielded from the unwelcome drone of the news of our day.

We filled the oil tank and hired a contractor who wrapped the pipes; and Saturdays and Sundays became vacation days again.

While the constant threat of the pandemic looms large in our minds, we leave our worries behind when we step inside the summer house.

Surely there can be sanctuary someplace and sometime in this world, despite Covid-19.

At least, I imagine it so. 

The tale of our 2020 kitchen garden

 

Yesterday I savored the last tomato from my kitchen garden and immediately lamented its loss. 

Sweet as sugar and dripping with juice, it was the last of its kind, lining the kitchen sill to mellow in the sun.

It had been a long road to this tomato.

Last March I first envisioned the perfect tomato.

Furloughed due to the pandemic, I sat at my desk writing a shopping list, thinking about the depleted contents of the fridge and the sparse shelves in the supermarket. And that’s when I first pictured this tomato.

I saw in my mind’s eye dozens of canning jars in my pantry, filled with the chunky red fruit.

"There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown," wrote Alice B. Toklas.

What if we could grow enough vegetables in our 16- by 8-foot kitchen garden to banish these worries?

I plotted the plot for a couple of months.

Then in May we tilled the soil.

After visiting three greenhouses with no success, we found a handful of tiny tomato, cucumber and hot pepper plants at a small farm stand.

We planted them and watered them every evening.

Back to work, but working remotely from home, I charted their sluggish progress. Slowly, the little plants began to flower.

One morning in June we gazed in horror at the garden plot or what remained of it. During the night deer had eaten all the tomato plants. Only the cucumbers and peppers survived their rampage.

We found another farm stand, offering a few tomato plants with the unusual name “Mortgage Busters.”

Not taking any chances, we fertilized and coddled the new plants that were getting a very late start on the season.

Unbelievably, they liked their new home and seemed to sprint overnight. We placed cages around them.

Then we awoke one morning, and all our work was for naught. The deer had returned for a second helping, and this time they delicately ate all the young fruit, unable to reach inside the cages.

This was the final straw. My husband hired a carpenter friend who built a fence around the kitchen garden.

Following suggestions from a friar, we began a Mary Garden within the fence, placing a small statue of the Mother and Child in front of a big beautiful bush of red roses. Herbs, including rosemary, encircled the saint.

We left the ravaged plants alone, and miraculously, they regenerated without interference. Wild birds at the feeder nearby swooped down on the plants, keeping the insects at bay. When the tiny fruit appeared, they were an unusual purple pinkish color.

Looking back, we could have bought bushels of tomatoes and paid a chef to prepare them for what it cost to fence the garden and buy all those plants.

But in the end, our 2020 kitchen garden survived on a wing and a prayer.

During these uncertain times...

Escape to an island with a moat to keep us safe.

Choose whether gray clouds hang over us or if blue skies prevail.

Stand still and accept whatever befalls us or sail away.

Let the waves of uncertainty pelt us or know this too shall pass.

Count your blessings and soar like an eagle.

The summer like no other

It is a summer like no other.

Nature is at its peak.

Day after day the sun shines with short bouts of cooling rain. 

Birds of every hue sing in the trees. 

Hydrangea blossoms burst out of cottage gardens. 

Sea and sky mirror each other, painted by the Artist's hand in brilliant shades of blue.

   

Yet a hush has fallen over this seaside village.

In summer's past, the sounds of summer by the sea reverberated throughout this jetty of three tiny streets.

Today, the sound of surf rushing over rocks is deafening because the inhabitants of this place are mute.

Tucked inside their cottages, they mostly seek sanctuary from the pestilence that has gripped even this obscure part of our world.

Down the hill at the town beach, bathers are social distancing six feet apart on this sweltering summer's day.

It is the summer of living separately.

Pathways

Globally, we are forced to take a different path. 

The pandemic changed our locations, routines, mindsets, assumptions.

No matter who we are and where we live on this planet, we worry.

Consequently, we must let go of the past and seek a new path.

Take the road less traveled.

Never hit rock bottom.

Brace for impact.

Look up. Climb higher.

Expect lows and highs.

Avoid the beaten path.

Kneel and pray for peace.

Seaside walkabout

Come to the seashore and walk with me.

Hide from the world awhile among the beach roses.

Stand atop these standing stones and watch the surf slide in.

Sit in sand by the water's edge and listen.

Explore the ocean floor laid bare.

Walk into the waves and wade.

Feel the caress of God's great blue Heaven above.

Dreamscape

Keep out! Police officers banned entrance to the beach.

Last night I dreamed of the sea.

Landlocked and housebound, I heard the crash of waves, the shriek of gulls, the whirring sound of unrelenting wind pelting sand at my back, the crunch of shell and stone underfoot.

I sat on a boulder and for the first time in months felt safe.

No swimmers on this fine spring day.

Fuchsia rhododendrons beckon passersby but none in sight.

A single sailboat seems to sit patiently on the tranquil Sakonnet River.

Feeling blue. Blue skies and blue seas.

Clamoring for attention, purple clusters of blooms climb over the stone wall.

All the comforts of home

J.R.R. Tolkien described the comforts of home: "whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all, merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness."

Fifty days housebound, we remain in the security of four walls as the pandemic rages on.

In New England, frost covers the ground this morning, laying thick on the green grasses of mid-May. It was 70 degrees two days ago. Last week it snowed.

The weather is as changeable as our moods.

Working remotely, I spend my days doing much of the same tasks I did at the office; but I feel an undercurrent of uneasiness -- something is terribly wrong.

"There is nothing like staying home for real comfort," wrote Jane Austen.

Yes, Jane, but despite the comfortable confines of home, we grapple with weariness, fear and sadness.

God, help us!

View from picture window: purple azaleas dusted in snow.

The steep pitch of the barn clings to snowy pine needles.

Flag waves with each frigid blast.

Evergreens decorated with late April snow.

The stuff of ordinary days

Homebound, I spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff of ordinary days.

A creature of habit, I am lured to the sea.

Every Saturday morning I shed my work-a-day skin and plunk myself in the sand.

No matter the season, I walk along the seashore in cadence with the waves, which are as familiar as my own heartbeat.

When the cobwebs in my mind have washed away, I head to the town library, where I wander.

Laden with a cloth bag stuffed with books, I leave a half-hour later.

Thus ends my Saturday sojourn, which I had faithfully observed until three weeks ago.

Today I retrace the footsteps in my mind to a few paragraphs I had stumbled upon, in a random book I picked up one Saturday.

Intrigued by the beautiful photographs in a new book "Little Compton -- A Changing Landscape" by the Little Compton Historical Society, I tucked the heavy volume into the bag. Our summer place in Tiverton is but a stone's throw away from this neighboring town.

Turning the pages, I spotted a photograph of Walker's Roadside Stand, a place I have frequented since childhood.

I read: "Coll Walker grew up on a dairy farm in Swansea."

How interesting, I mused. I grew up in Swansea as well.

I read on: "In 1963 when he was ready for college, his parents, Ian Walker, a native of Scotland, and Frances Peckham Walker, decided to buy ten acres of Obbie (Osborn) Sherer's Red Top Farm on West Main Road. It was a way for Frances to move back to her hometown and would help pay for Coll's education. In years' past Obbie ran a roadside vegetable stand on the property that occasionally sold bear meat. The Walkers configured the vacant buildings and opened their own vegetable stand in 1964."

Then my eyes alighted on the sentence: "Ian, a high school principal, grew the  produce ...

Suddenly, I was 12 years old again, sitting in the public middle-school auditorium of Elizabeth Stevens Brown School in Swansea. At the start of our assemblies, Mr. Walker, a short, elderly gentleman who spoke with a Scottish burr, walked to the lectern on the stage, led us in the Pledge of Allegiance and then spoke the words that I can still hear in my mind's eye:

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want / He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters ...

After all these years and in an instant, I began to acknowledge the profound effect this man and this prayer, the 23rd Psalm, have had on my life. Mr. Walker planted the seeds that would grow into my vocation, just as surely as he grew the vegetables that graced our table at the summer house.

With tears in my eyes, I read on: "After college and some time in the Peace Corps as an agricultural agent, Coll returned to Little Compton in 1970 when his dad became ill. Ian Walker had always run the farm as a hobby. Coll saw it in a new light. He thought there might be a future in a roadside stand business. Walker's Roadside Stand sits near the site of Little Compton's first English farm built by Benjamin Church in 1675. Coll's son Ian, named after his grandfather, is the newest farmer to work these fields."

Homebound, I spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff of miraculous days.

Shelter in place by the sea

Escape to this snowy, seaside New England town.

Sit on this bench and watch waters ebb and flow.

Take shelter with the ones you love.

Discover daffodils poking through snow, the Creator's promise of new life.

"Snow what? I'm bored in the barn."

A gaggle of geese gathering reminds us to keep in touch.

Seek and ye shall find: A sheep grazes, obscured in a world of white.