In This Time of Corona...

 

This year has been quite the year!

Recently, I have been circling back to the thought I need to write more. I have been writing, but in a style for social media. I have been handing out jots and dashs of gardening information on social media for my employer, Graziano Gardens. (Like us on Facebook!) It’s a bit like morse code. Trying to capture The Followers for those vital milliseconds as they scroll through their morning feed on a social media platform has its points, good and bad. My photography skills have gotten better; the photo says a 1,000 words idea. The bad: after a couple years doing this will I feel like I am repeating myself?

The last thing anyone trying to capture eyeballs wants to do is be static. In this Time of Corona.... I like the phrase, it harkens back to a book I read in college in the original Spanish, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.  In the book the hyperbole of the events taking place begins to warp the characters; they were suffering from some unseen plague that seemed to strike and kill perfectly healthy people overnight and for no reason that could be traced. The result was people lived entirely in the moment, denied no desire, acted on impulse. Yet, there were characters of extreme old age that continued to live on, and for whom time seemed to stretch to the point they felt they had lived 200 years, in their 80-90 actual years. 

I digress.

In this Time of Corona… Gardening has definitely seen an uptick. We’re staying home more and finding connecting with nature to be part of the cure. I know my nephews have found a whole world to explore in the garden. I have also taken up mushroom hunting and they have tagged along. I have been teaching them a little bit of foraging as well (“No! You can’t eat that!”) and how to orient themselves, so they can’t get lost. Heaven help me if I lose my Viking-of-a-brother’s children! Having lost my father late this last winter, and my mother in turn her husband of over 60 years: I volunteered the two of us for the CWIP Summer Invasive Species Mapping Blitz to get her out of the house. 

I have also taken up fermenting, been canning and dehydrating, and attempting to make wine. A couple days ago, I woke up to the whole house smelling like a brewery one morning; again a flashback to college weekends. Those memes with a football stadium filled with people captioned-- “An AA meeting 2021” -- spot on!

I have also honed my bread-making skills, taken three online courses revolving around making websites and internet marketing, and scraped and painted my deck-- in addition to gardening. 

I feel like it has been six years, not six months.

What have you been doing in this Time of Corona?