I'm Thinking…No!

I’m not really sure what the Chinese New Year is, but it should be the year of the chipmunk.  Dear Lord, they’re prolific and running rampant this year.  I bought a bunch of bulbs in the spring on line – yes, ok, I’ll admit it – Publishers Clearing House had a sale.  They have probably been so busy delivering plant material that they haven’t been able to drop off my big check yet, but I digress.  I planted the bulbs in a conspicuous place (so I’d remember where they are) and nothing.  Not so much as a tender shoot has punctured the soil.  I blame the chipmunks.  

As I’ve mentioned before, my late grandfather had a philosophy about cars.  He said that if you put gas in the tank and air in the tires, it should run forever.  That’s all a car should need.  I feel that same way about plants.  If I water them regularly and give them fertilizer every so often along with a passing compliment while Mother Nature does her thing with occasional bursts of sunlight and showers, they should reward me with copious blossoms.  Many do, but some give up early, like the irises and poppies I’ve tried two or three times now.  Although the poppies did come back this year – maybe they’re the biennial variety?  I, of course, with my usual calm dignity, take it as a personal affront.  If I’ve taken the time and effort to plant them, their role is pretty straightforward. There are the mystery plants too.  They look very nice the first year, getting my hopes up.  You guys are perennials.  That means, you come back every year.  Don’t give me, “The winter was too cold. My roots froze.”   The landscapers with their blowers in the spring chewed it up my irises, and apparently the physical and emotional scars were just too much for them.  Anyone know a landscape therapist?  Or the ornamental shrubs and trees that I put in, forgetting that they would grow larger.  That cute little Austrian pine I put in to cover the gas lines in back into the house is now more than two stories tall.  It looks great from the second story window, and of course we get a bird’s eye view of the gas connections.

My real confrontation with small animals started several years ago in a former house, and has escalated when a neighbor started feeding baby gophers “because they’re so cute.”  Indeed they are.  Every bit as cute as the baby woodchuck my niece “adopted” years ago.  The cuteness wore off when it chewed and scratched the couch to bits looking for material to build a nest.  Gophers get low marks from me on the “adorable” scale. Not all of nature considers them unattractive – apparently the foxes find them tasty. They destroyed zinnias, several large containers, in fact anything with blossoms.  The neighbor’s cat discouraged them in her yard, so they moved comfortably over to mine.  Next came a plump woodchuck (that’s a groundhog to non-New Englanders), who feasted on my false sunflowers and peonies before moving on to the coreopsis.  I’d go out in the morning to find something missing – a garden bald spot that had opened up overnight.  As a college acquaintance of many years back used to say, “there they were, gone!”  There are a couple of cats in the neighborhood that make some effort to keep the critters at bay.  That’s a help, although there’s one – a tabby – that is attacking the other cats.  I don’t know to whom it belongs, but if it treats its owners like it treats its neighbors, that must be a fun household. 

Her Ladyship and I took a ride over to one of my favorite nurseries about 20 miles away.  It was a delightful day, but the problem is that I want to buy everything.  I’d like to add a rose garden because much of the back lawn isn’t doing well.  I usually get permission to do pretty much whatever I like because we’re down at the end of the street and nobody else can see us.  One of my real “happy” places is over on the New Hampshire coast.  We’d make a yearly pilgrimage, although we didn’t trust doing it this year. It’s part of what was a magnificent estate.  There are rose gardens, a Japanese wooded garden complete with stream and bridges, and a replica of an English estate garden with high hedges standing in for stone walls.  It also has greenhouses filled with exotic plants, and some truly spectacular beds of zinnias and dahlias.  Many of their plantings are been developed right at the gardens, so you won’t see many of them anywhere else. This has given me the inspiration for putting in a small garden of roses.  I’ve put in some sweetheart roses – the little ones, and they’ve done well, so that’s what makes me think that tea roses might prosper there too.  

We’ve gone “organic”, except that we really haven’t because there are no organic folks large enough to take care of our large association. So, what began as an experiment in using less chemical warfare has now devolved into benign neglect. Because of the way our home is situated, there is no “front” lawn – only a grassy area in the back.  So, I’m taking matters into my own hands, poking holes and spreading grass seed and fertilizer. After a week of rain a while back, it’s looking better already.

You’d think that something so intimately connected to the natural world would be trouble-free and continual upward movement.  Not at all true.  Gardening is like the wars between England and France – they seesaw back and forth, each at some moment claiming victory.  There are side skirmishes with the chipmunks and squirrels, who continually feast on spring bulbs.  One chipmunk, that I call Herman, though he doesn’t respond, even came up onto my back deck and dug his way into a couple of containers.  Herman and a couple of buddies (or consorts) have been digging tunnels and uprooting bulbs at a prodigious rate for some time now. I’m convinced he’s networking with the squirrels.  “You guys dig up the big bulbs.  We’ll take care of the little ones.” 

We usually have a small flock of hummingbirds coming by each year.  I’m not sure what the term for plural or group of hummingbirds is.  I’d say “gaggle”, but they don’t make any noise, so that’s probably not it. However, they do come in groupings.  In fact, I was sitting on the deck reading a few weeks back and one flew right up to the container not two feet from me.  We didn’t interact much, although I could tell he or she was pleased and rewarded for their efforts.  

The great gardening adventure goes on with morning watering routines, clipping and deadheading, trips to the nursery, and planning new projects.  It slows down as we head into the hot days of summer, often because money and my energy are running low.  The overall plan is set things up in May and June, maintain in July, and then hit cruise control into August and September – watering and prayer mostly. I can’t get out to do as much as I should in the hot weather. The daughter mentioned that she was bored and needed some activity a few days ago.  Of course, her idea of activity is a run to Starbucks. I suggested that she might mulch the front gardens.  As this is a family blog, with few rating benchmarks, I won’t tell you her response.  Let’s just say, it wasn’t something I can put in print here, along the lines of “I’m thinking . . . . . NO!   

Every so often a topic comes up that requires some serious reflection.  Most of the time, these are issues that jump out from the news or from our daily contacts with others.  One such item on the front page of a recent newspaper caught my eye.

A man that grew up in this area but is now living on the West Coast with his wife and two young daughters, has been recently diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.  He was a star football player at a local high school some years ago, so he’s now in his late 40’s.  Here’s what caught my eye.  His medical expenses are extraordinary, including the cost of transportation to and from the facility where he’s being treated.  A family friend has set up a GoFundMe account to help defray some of these medical costs, which are mounting at a rapid rate.  So let us, as Americans, ask ourselves, why is such an account needed in the 21^st century, in a nation with the most resources on earth?  

If this were a stand-alone item of interest, then I’d say ok – these rarities happen.  But it’s not.  Our local newspaper regularly features articles like this – a family with a young child battling a rare disease, a couple where one is awaiting a suitable donor for transplant, and by the way, there is a GoFundMe account set up to help them.  A couple of years ago, a friend of ours moved back to her native New Hampshire from New York City to be with family in the final stages of cancer.  Once again, there was a need for one of these charitable accounts to pay for her medical costs. So, let me ask once again, why are catastrophic illness so regularly covered only by the generous donations of friends and strangers?   

When the term “Medicare For All” becomes part of the public discussion, big chunks of our society have conniptions, talking about “socialism”, as if taking care of each other  is a bad thing.  Communities of the past understood and valued the concept of “it takes a village”.  As society advances, particularly in a pandemic, that should be expanded into “it takes a village, sometimes a state and a nation.”  “Every person for himself or herself” didn’t even make it out of the Middle Ages.  What happened?  An anonymous opinion piece in today’s paper talked about the “persecution of evangelical Christians”.  Where are these so-called Christians when there is clamoring to close the borders to stop immigrants or send them “home”,  families at the borders are being separated and children put in cages, cutting Food Stamps and other relief programs while at the same time, we’re seeing long lines at food distribution centers.  Support for the unborn is prolific and loud, but after birth, apparently, life isn’t quite so important, or at least “it’s not my problem.”

A nationally known humorist wrote, a few years back, that should a liberal come across a stranger wounded in a ditch, as in the story of the Good Samaritan, he or she would treat their wounds and take them to the nearest inn, paying for their food and lodging.  A conservative would shake their hand, wish them well, and offer to say a prayer for their recovery.  Just this past week, our President was pictured on a golf course at a resort he owns in Virginia.  Meanwhile, as the country is spiraling backward in the pandemic, his administration was sponsoring litigation in yet another attempt to nullify the Affordable Care Act.  How is that for timing?  As millions are unemployed or losing their employment and thus their health insurance, let’s remove health coverage for an estimated 23-plus million more Americans.  Their next of kin can always set up a GoFundMe account if they get sick.

Before the subprime mortgage disaster, medical bills were by far the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. The days of the town doctor taking care of everyone, sometimes being paid in chickens, eggs, or vegetables, are long gone.  The costs of medical care, particularly medicines for chronic conditions, skyrocketed in the last few decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, making adequate medical insurance a necessity, not an option or a luxury. One or two conditions can now reasonably run in the thousands of dollars per month to treat.  In 2018, the median per capita income for Americans was $33,000.  Does that make illness affordable?  I’m thinking . . . . . . no.  

Some view health care as simply another business.  But there’s a difference.  We can choose to purchase a new car or television.  We can choose the foods we eat.  We can decide how much gasoline we’ll use by controlling the amount of driving we do.  That’s what economists call, “elastic demand”. Health care, on the other hand, has an “inelastic demand”.  That means, we don’t really have control over the medical conditions, the illnesses, or the setbacks that happen to us, and therefore the choices are limited to: we treat or we don’t.  How sad it is when we read about senior citizens living on slender retirement incomes having to choose between food and medications.  That happens more often than we want to admit.  We – Her Ladyship and I,  are some of the lucky ones because we can afford medical insurance that covers almost all of our needs.  We receive our medications like clockwork, and we pay a token amount. We don’t worry about medical appointments, we just go. We pay significant monthly premiums, but we can afford to.  We can also afford the copays and those few items not covered by insurance.  Again, we’re lucky.  We’ve earned them, but I still think we’re lucky.  While we worry about getting older, we don’t have to think too much, or worry too much about the cost 

While no system is without flaws, most of the top tier, industrialized countries of the world seem to do significantly better at taking care of their citizens than we do.  Whether those countries, including most of Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and so many others provide higher benchmarks for medical care, contain costs, or simply take “profit” out of the equation is open to debate.  The fact remains, though, that Americans receive a significantly lower standard of care overall than in other countries.  It’s a choice we’ve made, and not a particularly good or noble one.  

Her Ladyship and I went for a drive today, and I can tell you all that it’s official.  Every highway, secondary road, back road, country trail, and a good percentage of driveways are now under construction.  Road crews are busy as bees digging up or smoothing out every road in New Hampshire, and most of Massachusetts too.  There are some solid reasons for this.  The pandemic has kept many people off the roads, so it’s holding up fewer people – although the DPW doesn’t want to advertise this.  They want us to think they’re holding up thousands. Also, and some of you may not know this, but Juno, for which the month of June was named, was the Roman Goddess of Road Construction.  Oh, yes.  Rumor and folklore have it that she personally oversaw the resurfacing of the Appian Way, limiting chariots to one lane. Continue reading ““End of Road Work” – My Happy Sign”

What I’ve written here, or said out loud in the past, here now, or sometime in the future will probably offend someone.  So, in the interests of keeping the peace and preventing gatherings outside my front door, I apologize. In fact, my front door mat says, “Go Away”.  I’m sorry for those of you that come to the front door and take umbrage at the sentiment. I just thought it was definitely a message for our time (and totally hilarious). Continue reading “I’m Sorry”

So, what happened to all the toilet paper some months back?  There was a time when we could hit the supermarket and buy toilet paper in moderation – I typically would buy a package or two of four-roll, two-ply because I’m very sensitive, which would last us a week or more.  All of a sudden, pandemic hit and there was not a roll to be found.  Empty shelves as far as the eye could see. Hand sanitizer too, along with paper towel.  For months, you could always tell where these sanitary items were in the store. Chips and snacks, sodas, greeting cards and then, nothing. Empty shelves as far as the eye could see. So, what happened?  Other than those brothers in Tennessee that were stockpiling in their garages to resell online at a huge profit until the long arm of the law shut them down, who does that?  It does say something about a person’s character when they see a profit to be made in panic. Symptoms of the coronavirus were fever, cough and respiratory problems.  I didn’t remember reading anything about loose bowels or diarrhea. Continue reading “Shopper Hoarding”

Only in America can wearing a face mask during a pandemic when going out be a divisive and political issue.  Everyone else in the civilized world realizes the importance of not exhaling germs though breath.  We see them in South Korea to Italy and Spain.  It’s a necessity that prevents the spread of the most vicious virus in a century.  The Chinese are doing it, perhaps because they tend to follow directions better.  Around the world, as the infection spreads, we all need to take precautions.  Not in America.  Here we storm state houses with assault weapons to protect the right to not protect ourselves.  Ministers are ranting and raving about reopening their churches, even though they know full well it could cost lives.  One pastor this morning on the news was screaming that church is “essential”.  I’d like to have been on a communication wave that allowed me to respond, “Not if you’ve done your job properly in the past.  Then your flock will know what to do.”  Yes, indeed. Apparently “pro-life” can be flexible or selective.

In one tweet reported this week, a solid citizen wrote in response to a reopening plan, that she needn’t wear a face mask because, as she put it, she had a constitutional right to control her own body.  First, it’s not her body we’re worried about – it’s the unlucky souls that happen to venture into her sphere of contamination.  And second, she was probably waving signs protesting at a Planned Parenthood facility some time back because she feels that other women don’t or shouldn’t have that same right of control.

Why is it that some Americans have a poor grasp of safety precautions or even recommendations?  We pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, while the virus is spreading out-of-control in more than two dozen states.  The experts tell us we’re not even close to containment, while other countries, including China, the epicenter, are controlling the spread and seriously reducing the numbers of infected people and deaths. But we’ll follow our fearless leader, out on the golf course this weekend.  There’s the image of Nero and his fiddle. Some of us, not a majority but enough to keep the ball rolling, persist in our general lack of common sense.  When told that cruise ships are having serious issues and are unsafe, there they are, bounding up the gangplank.  They’re also the ones not long after sobbing into the computer screen where they’re confined, asking why they can’t be allowed to go home. Just today, two news items about new clusters of disease.  One was a teenage pool party attended by 100 young people, and boom, up goes another mushroom cloud of COVID-19.  In a related article, two hairdressers had symptoms yet still felt compelled to go in to work, and infected 150 of their customers that could be tracked, so there may well more. They’re the ones in the grocery story without masks, heading up the aisles the wrong way, or pile into the person ahead of them in line and start unloading their groceries without regard to safe distancing.  I heard a lady in the store the other day and, although she had mask, talking on her cell phone all the way around the store.  Her voice was quite raspy and thus distinctive, and she’s a better than even odds a carrier.  Fortunately for me, she was in a cashier aisle a distance from me, but I noticed that once she put the phone away, she started an animated conversation with those around her.

A recent survey showed that 8% will refuse to wear a mask at any time or place.  It’s that bold, as my grandfather used to say, “My mind is made up – don’t confuse me with facts.” mentality that will continue to cause surges in the coronavirus in certain parts of the country.  The medical experts are coming up with more and more useful information.  We now know that the virus travels not just on surfaces we touch, but in the air we breathe and the droplets of moisture we exhale. Disease doesn’t particularly care if you are conservative, liberal, or moderate.  It’s not curtailing your personal freedom to keep others around you safe.

We’d all like life to return to “normal”, or what it was before the pandemic.  Yes, I’d like to be popping over to the hardware store for a quart of deck stain, rather than ordering it online, paying a $35 delivery fee, and hoping it matches the old stain.  Yes, this is the time of year that I’m zipping to the nursery for plants and gardens I’ve been dreaming about and planning all winter.  But whatever comes up from previous years will just have to do for now.  Everything is rather stark, but, oh well.  When you look at the staggering numbers of obituaries in the newspapers every day, it’s a sobering reminder that the risk is just too great to be going out all the time.  Home is just safer.

Be well, my faithful readers.

Answering machines and voice mail have been the new norm for long enough that, well, now they’re the old norm.  Do you remember when they were first developed, back when they were separate devices hooked up to the telephone?  We’d record the message about six times until it was just right. Now, of course, they are built right in, so if we don’t answer the phone after four rings, as we do in the age of screened calls, the system springs into action so the caller can record something excruciatingly long that often goes well beyond the allotted time.  Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a great routine about people calling just to leave a message. “Oh, you’re there.  I thought you’d be out and I’d leave a message.” There are those, however, who still don’t know to wait for the “beep”, so we only get the last bit of their message, something like “call me when you get this”.  Great.  Who are you again? Continue reading “Please Leave A Message!”

We’re becoming more and more familiar with what prison life must be like.  Can’t, or shouldn’t go out when we so desire. Sitting in a coffee shop, or even going into one, is fast becoming just a memory.   We’re getting up at the crack of dawn to go grocery shopping, or for those that are city dwellers, waiting for it to be delivered. Leaving the mail in the box for a few days or weeks to make sure it’s not contaminated. Even filling the gas tank is a rare event.  “Curbside service” used to be something special, like valet parking.  Now, it’s a staple of life.  I even used it this past week to fill the barbeque grill tank.  I know – it ran dry last fall and I thought to myself, “I’ll leave it until spring. There’s plenty of time.”  Oops.  So many things that are now becoming fixtures in our lives – drive-up windows, deliveries on the front porch, stockpiling toilet paper.  I really can’t understand that last one.  Why are shoppers going nuts with toilet paper?  For all advisories, bladder failure isn’t one of the symptoms.  Perhaps if you’re taking the President at his word and drinking Windex, maybe.  For the rest of us, “business” as usual. Continue reading “Isolation Fatigue”

We all have, or claim to have famous persons dangling precariously from branches of our family trees.  My middle name, for example, is a family one – Hardy.  My grandmother, my father’s mother, was a Hardy that reputedly came over on the Mayflower.  Visiting the harbor in Plymouth, England some years ago, I found no Hardys on the manifest, so that’s probably a myth.  However, one distinct feature in the family is the beaky nose.  We’ve referred to it has the “Hardy” nose.  My father, grandmother, two great-uncles, great grandfather, and more cousins that I can count had it.  Looking up images of the famous author, Thomas Hardy, for which I should mention dramatically here, drum roll please, I’m NOT named, he too had the renowned Hardy nose.  Are we related?  Perhaps distantly, as the family goes back to the Norman Conquest.  So too in my mother’s family, the Doyles from southern Ireland, Arthur is a family name – my grandfather’s middle name and my great-grandfather’s first name.  Are we related to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?  It’s possible, and family folklore has long claimed it. Continue reading “Tracing Her Roots”

Every so often, I reread material that I’ve previously posted. As I went out this morning to get my newspaper and white, fluffy rain was dropping from the sky, I thought this appropriate to repost.  If you’ve read it before, feel free to move on.

OK – I’m looking out the window and snow is again falling from the sky.  We’re getting on to late April, and apparently Global Warming is not fully doing its job. Last weekend, we endured freezing rain and lots of it – I considered leasing one of those big Duck Boats that conveniently come up behind you and quack loudly in city traffic.  The floodwaters had subsided after a few days, so I thought – “I’ll bring out the deck furniture”.  That would create the illusion of some open space in the basement, but no . . .  . . . Continue reading “It’s Snowing Again! Again”