One Year to the Day

I don't know why this post sat in Drafts for almost two years, but here it is.

March 8, 2021:  Today is one year to the day that I started isolating. When I first heard about the strange new illness that appeared in China, I knew it was going to be big. Big and awful. I ignored the advice to prepare "as if for a snowstorm," and I stocked up--not with two weeks worth of food, but vastly more than that. "I may have bought too much," I said to my son. He said, "Don't worry,  you'll use it up." 

Well, that sure hasn't happened yet. The pandemic has brought out my inner hoarder. Instead of emptying a big plastic bin one food item at a time, I've replaced each item as I used it. You might say I was trained well; I was the daughter of parents who lived through the Depression and kept a kitchen cabinet full of canned goods that they rotated, and I was the wife of a man who was a "prepper" before his time. I think I still have decades-outdated tubs of nitrogen-packed emergency foods in the basement.

I also have:

Pandemic House

Other than occasional visits from members of my son's family, I'm the only one who's been in my house for the past year. When you combine this with my long history of random housekeeping and essential focus on activities that brought me pleasure during isolation, you have the perfect storm of clutter.

Pandemic Hair

I know women who let their hair grow over this past year and look fine, but I know I look like a witch with long grey hair, so I've been cutting it myself. I cut it often, mostly in a never-ending (and futile) attempt to improve the previous haircut. All these trims, and I still have no idea what the back looks like. But it isn't just my hairstyle that's changed. It's a lot greyer--that's okay, my bangs and side hair in the front is silvery, which is nice--and a lot straighter. I used to need a curling iron to straighten out the corkscrew curls of my bangs, but now I need a curling iron to create a soft bend in them.

Pandemic Face

This is a face that rarely looks in the mirror. This is a face devoid of makeup. It's a face that doesn't smile as often as it used to, is somewhat greyish in color, and has sets of wrinkles that didn't exist a year ago. It is hoped the summer sun and the eventual opportunity to actually see people will improve this face.

Pandemic Wardrobe

Pandemic wardrobe isn't as bad as it sounds. I discovered the comfort and fun of jeggings and fleece leggings, and treated myself to a bunch of brand-new turtlenecks when Boscov's and Macy's had pre-Christmas sales. Topped with the Eddie Bauer fleece pullovers my daughter Suzanne bought me many years ago (Eddie Bauers last forever) or the grey Cabela's hoodie from Salvation Army last year that I'm equally attached to, my around-the-house look is a look I actually like. Best of all, it keeps me warm. When the season changes I will miss these winter clothes as they cover a multitude of sins.

Pandemic Purse

I've never been a woman obsessed with handbags, but I do change them with the seasons. Not this year.

Pandemic Pantry

Yes, I bought all those things that everyone else bought--not because I wanted to follow the crowd, but because, like I said, I've been well trained. So my pantry shelves contain lentils in red, brown, and grey, as well as dried cranberry beans, garbanzo beans, lima beans, cannellini beans; kidney beans, black beans, and pinto beans. Also cans of beans. Jasmine rice. White rice. Brown rice. Brown jasmine rice. Basmati rice. Brown basmati rice. Pretty, multi-color rice blends. Chia seeds. Sesame seeds. Peanut butter. Tahini. Four or five kinds of oils. Five kinds of nuts. The pantry has a reassuring look to it.

Pandemic Paint

Like so many others, I took up a new hobby this year. I had photography and rug hooking, but the same old photo ops didn't inspire me, and I felt I needed to learn something new. Plus I thought it was time I stopped feeling guilty about the stack of books on watercolor painting I read years ago and never actually did anything with. So I decided to take lessons, but I wanted lessons that were a) not live, so I could participate whenever I felt like it, and b) cheap. Domestika, a company out of Spain, fulfilled both requirements. From their zillion (200+) online courses I chose one on watercolor techniques. The course was given in Spanish, and the generic translation so confusing that I often watched the video at least twice--once to read the instructions, and a second time to make sense of the instructions by watching to see what the instructor did. But the translations created some hilarity, too, always appreciated during isolation. The course cost less then $10! I enjoyed it so much that I ordered another on portraits . . . and another on painting birds. I haven't started those yet.

Pandemic Projects

My first pandemic project was my most successful so far. I cleared out the stuffed (and piled high) alcove at the top of the stairs that had been neglected for years, and created an "art spot" for myself. I started with my old sewing workstation and added a rug, new lamp, a cool extension cord with USB ports, a little new electric heater--and lots of art supplies. I've always loved buying art supplies. I'm also somewhat fond of buying sewing supplies, which served me well when (like so many other people) I started making pandemic face masks.

Pandemic Presents

I've always been fairly frugal and grateful for it--especially at this point in my life. Since I've been living alone I take advantage of pre-holiday sales to buy myself a Christmas present (don't feel bad for me--it is not the only one I get!), but tend not to indulge myself very often otherwise. But in my isolation it didn't take me long to realize we all needed pandemic treats. So I bought myself a new smart TV (50" isn't all that large by today's standards, but it was huge to me) and a Netflix subscription. 

Pandemic Vehicles

I still drive my 1992 Chevy Caprice in the warm months and my 2011 Subaru Outback in winter. Neither vehicle has gotten much exercise this past year. I haven't visited anyone, and most of my shopping is done online. For groceries, I order online from Walmart and pick them up curbside in Honesdale. Last year was when I'd planned to a) sell the Caprice (sad, but it was time) and b) trade in the Outback--probably for a newer one. But the pandemic cancelled those plans. Over the course of the year two things happened: car prices rose, and dealers' inventories of good used vehicles dried up. They disappeared! It was pretty amazing. Occasionally I'd check out the websites of Subaru dealers in the area, and the sections on Certified Pre-Owned vehicles were empty. So I don't know when I'll be making a change.

Pandemic Mental Health

It didn't take me long to realize that all the articles I've read over the years about the importance of social contact for the elderly were spot on. I may not think of myself as elderly, but I'll turn 78 next month. Even before we ever heard of Covid, I was thinking I really needed to find myself some new friends. Even one or two. Most of my friends have either died or moved away. For years I've joked that my entire social life takes place in December when I go to Beverly's Solstice party and Kathy's Christmas party. It's only a slight exaggeration. My only consistent social gathering was the Thursday afternoon Scrabble games at the library, which I'd been participating in for several years. Of course, they stopped when the pandemic started. 

Most days I speak with no one. At some point I started Zoom meetings with two friends every Tuesday evening, but that's it. It's not enough. Facebook has become my community, my social outlet. I'm beyond grateful for it, but of course it's not enough either. I realized how much I missed laughter one day when I started laughing at a funny Facebook post, and didn't stop. We sometimes say, "I was hysterical" when describing something hilariously funny, but that time I really was hysterical. It's not healthy.

But then again, neither is Covid-19.

My Rube Goldberg Pole Beans

If you're old enough to know who Rube Goldberg was, when you see this picture you'll know why I used his name.

This year I planted a few vegetables on a dirt terrace along the side of my house. I chose it because it's off the deer's beaten path. When I said I wanted to grow Kentucky Wonder pole beans, my son offered to put up poles and fencing. But it turned out there wasn't enough room for poles and fencing plus squash plants.

So I devised the . . . um . . . interesting setup seen here. I hammered a piece of rebar into the ground and tied a circular tomato cage to it. Then I partially nested another cage into the first and tied that one down as well (using strips of cloth). Because the cages weren't close enough to the ground to snag the young plants, I tied on lengths of string so that they would hang down.

This caused some major head-shaking among people who saw it, but the beans climbed the string, and then the cages. All was well until last week, when a t-storm caused the beans and their support to pivot and list to starboard. I counteracted this by running string from the beans into my kitchen, going through the window and tying it to an iron pipe. That resulted in perfectly straight beans until yesterday morning, when I found that another t-storm had moved them once again. The string to the kitchen was now slack because they were listing to port.

So I ran another string out to my son's ham radio tower. I'll tell him to think of my green sisal as guy wires. To prevent us from walking into them at neck level, I hung strips of cloth. Contrary to what you might think, these white strips are not an attempt on my part to surrender to the beans.

A Beany Tale

I'm an enthusiastic grower of green beans. My three bush varieties are just about finished, and my pole beans are too small to pick yet, so when I saw a sale on magnificent green beans at the supermarket today (labeled "Locally Grown") I snatched them up.

They were green-bean perfection: Perfectly straight, perfectly cylindrical, uniformly green. They looked like they'd never come within 20 ft. of a Japanese Beetle. From the length of them, I assumed they were pole beans, but they didn't look like anything I'd ever grown. I was curious, and started thinking about how I could get in touch with the grower so I could find out the name of the variety.

But when I snapped off the ends I realized these beans were lacking something: tenderness. And after they were cooked I lost all interest in identifying them, because the other thing they lacked was flavor.

I suspect they're one of those tough varieties that sellers grow because they hold up well in transit. Or maybe they hold up well after being commercially canned, because I detected a little of canned-bean flavor even though they were relatively lightly cooked.

So I'm glad I didn't pay much for them. And I know my Kentucky Wonder pole beans will be well worth waiting for.

And no, I'm not returning the remainder of the package to the store. Because after all, flavor is just . . . a matter of taste. ;-)

Bean Excitement!

Over the years I've devised some pretty feeble methods of growing pole beans. I guess the most memorable was my Rube Goldberg-like nest of tomato cages, which had to be tethered to the house and a radio tower. Last year's effort, a curtain of beans, was prettier, but the yield was almost non-existent.

This year I have nailed it (almost literally)!! Checking out a message thread entitled "Show Me Your Trellis" on GardenWeb, I saw the bean support of my dreams: a 16-ft. cattle panel (I had never heard of a cattle panel) bent to make an 8-ft. tall arch. The base was secured with posts driven into the ground. The whole thing cost less than $35. The bean arch met all my criteria for the perfect support; it was homemade, easy, permanent, and cheap. I was in love.

I borrowed my son's pick-up and set out in search of a cattle panel, which turned out to be surprisingly easy to find. It was only slightly more difficult to persuade my son to set it up for me. ("Homemade" and "easy" are relative terms.) Once he did, I planted my beans: Kentucky Wonders, which my family has always loved, and Fortex, which the bean people on GardenWeb rave about all the time.

It was exciting to see the seedlings emerge, and even more fun when they got tall enough to start climbing. I can walk under the arch, and I'm so looking forward to reaching up to pick handfuls of beans.

I chose the terrace to set it up because (so far) deer don't walk there. Apparently a woodchuck does, though . . . the lettuce I planted in a big bin got eaten the other night. Also growing in containers on the terrace are cucumbers and beets. Oh, and two containers of pole beans, which are climbing up my son's radio tower. When I thinned the plants growing by the arch, I couldn't bear to throw away those thinnings. They had tried so hard to produce their beautiful, strong root systems. (Can you tell I anthropomorphize everything?)

A Curtain of Beans

Last year I posted about my Rube Goldberg bean support. I'm guessing most of you are too young to know who Rube Goldberg was. If so, I'm sure the Internet can show you lots of examples of his work. I got a crop of beans from my efforts, but that sure was one unstable mess by the end of the season.

This year I've moved from Rube Goldberg to Frank Lloyd Wright. I'm sure the father of organic architecture would approve of Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans curtaining my ice house window. After procrastinating about creating a large and permanent support system for pole beans, to the point where I either had to plant them now or not do it at all, my desperate move was to nail strings to the top of the old window (unfettered by sash or glass) and hope for the best.

The best happened! I don't want to jinx things by sounding overly optimistic, but don't these plants look healthy? The only problem is that once they hit the top of the window they keep going inside the building, where they run out of sunlight in short order. I keep a little step stool in their so I can gently encourage the vines to climb back down the strings. The plants are covered in teensy beans, so while I don't exactly have the water boiling in anticipation, I'm looking forward to my first picking.

The Upside of Self-Isolating (Single Woman Version)

Let your hair air-dry! It doesn't matter now that part of it is wavy and part straight.

Eyebrows looking a little sparse? Who cares?

Hunt up your singleton socks and get some wear out of them. More fun if the colors clash!

Leggings getting a little baggy? Not a problem!

Yes, your hands feel like sandpaper from all this washing. But it's your secret.

You're saving wear and tear on your car.

And adding lots of steps (maybe) on your Fitbit.

Dried beans . . . rice . . . pasta . . . crackers . . . carbs without guilt!

And finally, you know those people you'd like to avoid? Now you can!

The Blessing of Journaling

Thanks to journals I've kept over the years, I know much more than I ever could have remembered without them. As you can probably tell from my blog, I haven't been the most faithful journaler—and I wish I'd done better. It got worse with the advent of email, online forums, and social networking, and now it's to the point where the majority of my journal entries are copied and pasted from emails to close friends. But those entries will still be able to jog my memory someday.

This weekend I ran across my gardening journal from 1982-84. Like a lot of journals started by a lot of people, this one petered out after a while. But I was interested to read several of the entries.

In 1983 I put the following in the freezer: 14 quarts of spinach, 53 quarts of broccoli, 11 heads of cauliflower, 10 pints of peas, 30 quarts of green beans, 2 quarts of cherries, 6 quarts of peaches, 5 quarts of corn, 25 quarts of tomatoes, 1 quart of Swiss chard, and 33 quarts of applesauce.

That same year, I planted 10 different Asiatic lilies. I also wrote at length about my nicotiana, poppies, day lilies, veronica, statice, balsam, delphiniums, monardas, strawflowers (I said the strawflowers looked "troubled"), tall dahlias, dwarf dahlias, zinnias, hollyhocks, herbs, coreopsis, anchusa, Futura impatiens (whatever happened to that variety, anyway?), gaillardia, tithonia, and wallflowers. The following year I got much more heavily into perennials.

Oh, and I mention that my children were 10, 8, and 5 years old? And that I sewed a lot of their clothes? And cooked three meals a day (from scratch) every day? I'm exhausted just reading this.

But the best thing I learned from reading the journal concerned a good deed I did for an elderly flower gardener. Here's the entry:

Last year I planted a few of my leftovers for Mrs. Reynolds, whose heart condition had prevented her from growing any new flowers. I brought over nicotiana, marigolds, and delphiniums, and planted them in her garden. This year I started some seeds especially for her: "Inca" marigolds, "Kablouna" calendulas, and "Domino" dwarf nicotianas.

I didn't know much about Mrs. Reynolds' family back then. I didn't know, for instance, that she had a one-year-old great-granddaughter who would grow up to marry my son.

Text Mess(age)

My cousin was excited about a special dinner date her daughter had this week with a new guy. Being a good, non-intrusive mother, she didn't call her daughter in the middle of it. Instead, my cousin sent her a text message. It read, DON'T EAT BEANS. CK TEETH FOR PARSLEY.

Problem is, she sent it to the wrong phone number. We have no idea who got the message on his or her cell. We can only hope it was taken to heart.

Trivia Night

My library had another Trivia Night last week. This is a team competition, held every two or three months. I'm the captain of our team, which consisted of four people the first two times we competed. This time one of our members couldn't make it, so we did some recruiting and got up to six people.

The contest consists of 10 questions in each of 5 categories. When I saw the list of categories, I thought we were doomed:

Candy
Railroads
National Parks
Math
Superheroes

One of our members owns a health food store . . . how much could we possibly know about candy? An embarrassingly large amount, as it turned out.

Railroads? National Parks? A member is an editor of a children's magazine, and another member is retired from a similar job. As you might imagine, they've picked up lots of useful facts—useful on Trivia Night, anyway. And I was startled at how many National Parks answers I pulled out of thin air. I have no idea how I knew them. I didn't know beans about railroads though.

I was hoping for some math problems (the not-terribly-difficult variety), but the questions in that category were about the history of math. One of our members is a college student, and another remembers her education. (What a concept.) We did well.

As for superheroes, my grandson keeps me up to date on Batman, and the others took care of some of the rest. It was our worst category, but still not bad. We came in a close second. But I award us my own personal Grand Prize for sustained hilarity.

Eleven In¢hes!

A lot of considerate folks have been leaving comments on my blog concerning peni$ enlargement. Perhaps this explains the size of the beans I've been harvesting this year.

From my journals.........1979 (January)

January 1: It is clear my housebound period is beginning. Ice is thick on our road.

January 4: LLL meeting at my house today, at 10:00 a.m. Eight women attended, along with three babies, five toddlers, and my three. Afterward, Tian and Nora stayed for lunch. Nora brought black beans, Tian brought salad, and I made rice and dessert. We had a happy afternoon.

January 11: Gillian, irrelevant as ever......
Zannie: "Mommy, how do you spell telephone? How do you spell Grandma? How do you spell lamp?"
Jill: "How do you spell rolling man?"

January 13: Suzanne turned on Joey's musical Winnie-the-Poo toy, his musical mobile, his musical cradle gym, and their musical "radio," and said to me, "Now Joey has a band!"

January 15: A nice thing happened today. My mother-in-law decided I worked so hard taking care of the kids that I deserved a television set better than the 12" black & white I've always had. She told me to pick out any model I wanted, so I chose a 17" Sony color with push-button tuning. I'm really excited—just what I needed on these dismal winter days!

January 18: Our new television set is here! The color is fabulous, and such a sharp contrast to the non-colors of winter outside. A golf program from Phoenix showed bright blue sky, green grass, and waving palm trees. The window right next to the set showed snow, snow, and more snow.

January 25: A call today from a Latvian woman who lost her dog. I mistook her for Nancy, who often calls me from Harvard with a phony accent to ask crazy breastfeeding questions. Oh, dear......

January 30: I made a special heart-shaped molded salad for their lunch, and then they stuffed most of a roll of toilet paper down the toilet.