Two days ago, I cleared out the dead leaves that the winter winds had swept under an evergreen bush in our front yard. Used two rakes, a blower, and a hand shovel. Filled two tall yard waste bags with detritus.
Yesterday, I laid landscape fabric around the four rose bushes off the deck in back, to keep out the grass and weeds. Used up all my landscape staples. The four sacks of black mulch left over from the fall weren’t enough to cover the area, so I ran out to the hardware store to pick up two more sacks, along with more landscape staples and a couple pair of work gloves. Only needed one sack of mulch to finish my project around the rose bushes, so I put the other in the shed.
After working on a user manual for five hours up in my office, I dug up the early weeds and grass encroachment on our crab-apple by the walkway leading to our front door. My plan was to stop there and go to my fencing club; I checked my Facebook account, and saw the club had closed. I then dug out the leaves that had accumulated under the evergreens off the east side of the house. My wife hadn’t returned from shopping, so I brought the garden shears from the shed and trimmed down last year’s suckers from under the crap-apple, then laid down more landscape fabric (those landscape staples I bought yesterday came in handy) and used the mulch I hadn’t used the day before on top. Rain began falling as I closed up the shed and went back into the house, where my wife joined me minutes later.
And in the forty-eight hour span of my yard work, the governor of my state ordered all schools, libraries, restaurants, bars, and gyms to be closed through the end of the month, and strongly recommended to avoid any crowd of over 50 people, in order to hamper the spread of the corona virus.
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Day 1 could have been any day last week. There’s nothing special about today that calls for it to be the start of this… whatever. Journal, testimony, eyewitness account. I’m sure to come up with some clever title for it someday.
I don’t have any agenda for writing this, other than to fulfill a need to express myself. I’m not going to write every day; right now I’m thinking a weekly update sounds about right.
This isn’t the first moment of high anxiety, and I’ll certainly talk about those other fretful moments at some point. But like most Americans, I don’t know when this will end, or what the world will look like when this is over.
We’re in unfamiliar territory, and the only way I can keep myself together during is to write about this difficult journey, at least until that final day when we reach the end of the line.
The Diligent Dilettante 