Frozen in time

We wait... 

In the dead of winter, we are frozen in place.

Temperatures dip, and Arctic winds blow.

Snow falls sporadically, clinging to every tree branch and blade of grass.

We hibernate and pray for an early spring.

The woods beckon, a magical forest draped in winter white.

Behind a stone wall, dormant farmland stretches to the sea.

Freed from the barn, horses clad in blankets brave the cold.

The snowy path to the barn is all uphill.

Under the snow by the stone wall, daffodils bide their time.

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.