Pandemic, Zombie Apocalypse - Eh!

Mr. Catman enjoying new spring sun

You know it’s bad when your mother refuses to let you into her house.

OK, she’s 87; I get it. I think. But two weeks ago she let me in and made me sit across the room from her; last week she told me I couldn’t come in at all. And I’m not sick. But I’m glad she’s taking it seriously. But maybe I’m just a little bit – well, not hurt, exactly, but – oh, what the heck. This way there’s nothing to regret later, right?

So this week, after a lot of angst, I decided to shut my office until at least April 20, more likely beginning of May. The building my office is in is locked now 24/7, so letting patients in would be slightly problematic, only because it’s a little hike to get to the front door; a lot of my patients come for tune-ups or other things I can treat from a distance with herbs, which I’ll continue to mail to them or let them come pick up at my house; and I’d already decided I’d only do treatments on the days the chiropractor with whom I share office space isn’t there, so we aren’t mingling patients in the waiting room. I was doing a lot of stressing over whether to close or not, but I woke up Thursday with my decision made, and have been much less stressed since then.

Catnip emerging

I am going to treat patients who are in pain, but they’ll need to call me and be able to come on a Monday or Wednesday. I brought a lot of herbs home to save me the 1.5-hour trip every time I need to send something out to a patient, but even so, I’ve got a list more than half a sheet long of unpredictable things I need to go up to get next week, so I’ll be there on and off anyway. There’s one new patient I’m going to work with over email and phone and sending herbs, as much as possible; acupuncture itself will have to wait for her, but we can do a lot without needling.

It’s going to be a long weird ride. Right now, I’ve been told, the MDs at DHMC are expecting we’ll get a peak in a week or two, and by May things will be calming down. They’re rescheduling all the not-critical appointments and treatments for after the first week in May. They don’t know, of course, but it’s an educated guess.

I’m mostly wicked busy doing the paperwork this thing has made much bigger, and talking to patients on email and phone; and also talking to friends a lot on phone and email, some of whom I only hear from a couple times a year. Now’s a good time to get in touch, we have the time.

Eygptian onions emerging

I’m also wishing it were mid-April, when I might risk planting a few cold-ground, cold-season vegetables – like fava beans, lettuce, turnips. But it’s supposed to snow again next week, so I’m trying to remind myself not to jump the gun and waste a lot of energy and seed! But there are plenty of things to do outside on warm days anyway, which usually there isn’t time to get to except in a hurry: I can move the in-garden compost bins to the far side of the fence, freeing up a small bed for vegetables that should be quite fertile this summer, and distribute the ready compost (if it’s thawed out yet – there’s still snow in my back yard just beyond the garden) around the garden. I’ve been wondering if I make a hole in the top one of the hay bales I stacked up last fall and filled it with compost and dirt, would it be a cool experiment to see if pumpkins and winter squash would grow there and cascade down? Where am I going to put the log infused with shiitake spore when it arrives from the supplier? It needs shade, but be open to rain and breezes, and not so far from the house I don’t check it often, and it needs to be put somewhere it can stay for the next 3 years or so. Can I turn the space on the south side of the garage into a place to grow corn and tomatoes? It’s very warm back there, but the ground is a mess of human and natural junk – now would be a good time to clear that all away and start the process. 

Old pallets turned into platforms for the potato bags I grow my potatoes in. Cardboard below to kill off weeds and grass. This system works really well if you don't have garden space for such things.

That’s the short list. And of course, as soon as I realized I was going to have time off that I’ve been longing for in order to do some stuff around the house that there’s never time for, I forgot what things it was I was longing for time to do.  I’m starting to remember a few things now – like finish painting some shelves that never got painted, and a stair wall that never got finished; hoe out the pantry and wash all the shelves; sort through some cupboards and baskets and so on that need organizing, if not hoeing out; fun stuff like that. The Husband has already put up two stair rails we've needed for 30 years.

Jonquils by a raised bed.

If I get desperate for something to do, I could dust. Only if I’m desperate. I know someone who went through and cleaned her freezer and refrigerator. I’ve already started the annual washing of winter coats and hats and clothes and putting them away, a little at a time.

The birds have snookered me into believing I need to keep feeding them for at least another couple of weeks – they got me when it snowed earlier this week (the front-stoop Buddha went from being bare of snow to buried up to his tits again), so I broke down and bought a 20-lb bag of sunflower seed to last the next couple of weeks, even though the bears are out, and I know better. 

I’m still seeing cardinals and woodpeckers and mourning doves and all the usual feeder birds, but today I saw the first robin poking around looking for worms, and a goldfinch (still have some thistle seed leftover) and everyone seems hungry. It’s going to be a miserable cold, wet week so I’m not sorry I can feed them. But in the back of my head is the video a patient showed me of the bear in her back yard, lounging in a snow pile, happily eating the sunflower seed she puts out for the newly-arrived ducks. I’ve had bears on the kitchen wart in the past, don’t need to do it again.

The Tall Guy is back more than a month early from his winter western ski-area hiatus, because the ski areas all closed down because of the virus and because traveling is becoming problematic. The Southern Gent is stranded in Pennsylvania living in his camper, with nowhere to empty his waste tank – he figures he’s going to need to drive it to the town wastewater site.  My friend who just moved into a pretty nifty assisted-living place – literally 2 weeks before they shut it down to outsiders – is probably having a much harder time adjusting to the new place than she might otherwise. She, and all the residents, can go out, but no one who doesn’t work or live there is allowed in, the cafes and dining room and closed so everyone has to eat in their rooms, the gym and library and hair salon and all the other facilities there are closed…she doesn’t complain, but, wow, what timing. None of her friends from here can go there and it must be lonely. The Actress and her husband are back early from their winter southern adventures, because he’s due to have joint-replacement surgery – which, of course, has been cancelled for the time being. And the British Car Gal, who is newly retired, has cancelled her road trip south, her sister’s foreign trip has been cancelled, Lady Music’s Australian trip has been cancelled, and, well, oh, well.

Crocuses by a raised bed wall.

 

On sunny days it’s not so bad – but on grey, overcast days, or wet days, it really, really looks like November out there. Except for the crocuses, and the jonquils starting to poke up through the leaf litter.

I’m still without a functioning furnace. Sigh. I’m guess it’ll be usable in May or June.

Now I’m going to go try to figure out how to pay my office rent, my credit card bills, and all of the rest of the bills without any income. Gonna be interesting.

As the Chinese curse goes: May you live in interesting times. We’re definitely there.

Those of you who are patients and need herbs or advice can email me at: taichideb@tds.net.

For the blog, 28 March, Spring of the Zombie Apocalypse.

All photos Deb Marshall

Notes On The Current Zombie Apocalypse

 

Let’s all just forget the zombie apocalypse for a few minutes and concentrate on some good stuff:

• Canada geese are back

• First crocuses in bloom tucked up against the south wall of the house

• Red-winged blackbirds are back and burbling joyously

• Every day, more of the garden emerges from snow – except today, when it snowed overnight

• Johnny-Jump-Ups are in bloom in the snow

• Time to start checking for ticks! Remember ticks and Lyme disease? They’re still around!

 

Suggested reading during the time of pestilence:

• Any, or all, of the Miss Read books about Fairacre and Thrush Green. Very soothing, nothing ever happens, and yet, very engrossing.

• Wind in the Willows

• All of Howard Frank Mosher’s novels about a small town in The Kingdom (northern VT, for those of you in souther places)

• Any of Bernd Heinrich’s books. Heinrich’s a naturalist who lives in VT and ME, and studies all sorts of things, and writes about it all very entertainingly

• Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery novels. I hate mystery novels, but these are about a whole lot more than crime detection; and they’re set in Canada, between the VT border and Montreal

Things to do while we’re waiting for this to be over:

• Sit out in the sun and be amazed that this year, in mid-March, it’s quite comfortable sitting outdoors; and there are no blackflies or mosquitos, and the ground’s still frozen so no grass to mow or garden to labor in

• Go outside at night and listen for the woodcock’s mating buzz and flying-falling swirl. If you’re lucky and the sky’s light enough, you might even see them fly

• Go for a drive. Take a picnic with you. You can’t give anyone the virus, or pass it on, if you’re out in your own car and picnicking where there are no other people. Just remember to use gloves when, or hand sanitizer after, you pump gas.

• Walk the Rail Trail. Take a picnic and thermos with good stuff. Bring a dog.

• If you do those things, don’t forget to check for ticks afterward!

• Laugh, sing, shout, breathe deeply in and deeply out. These things exercise the lungs and make them stronger. Be sure to do deep breathing outside, not in elevators!

Bird bath pedestal waiting for the end of snow

Things not to do during the zombie apocalypse:

• Dust. It makes you sneeze and cough, and in many cases, leads to severe bouts of washing and spring cleaning, and before you know it, you’re painting, weeding stuff out, and planning a yard sale.

• Plan your first-ever garden and order the seeds. Your first-ever garden should be small, or in big pots, and you don’t need to order seeds for that, you can get them locally, and you should start with lettuce and basil and a couple of tomato plants, and maybe a few radishes and a potato bag. If you ignore this advice and buy hundreds of dollars of seeds and fertilizer and potting soil and so on, don’t forget to order a hose, too.

• Hoard stuff. Those four giant boxes of lettuce I saw in one lady’s cart are going to rot before she can possibly eat it all, and take up all the space in her frig until then.  Same with the too-many bottles of milk, the dozens of onions and potatoes – this time of year, they’re all gonna sprout on you. And toilet paper? What’s that all about? We have running water and towels, and besides, this virus doesn’t include diarrhea. And mayonnaise – why are people hoarding mayonnaise?

• Watch tv and listen to radio all day long. You already know what you need to know – minute by minute updates are only going to feed fear (of running out of toilet paper, apparently) and not tell you anything else you need to know. Check in once every few days – that’ll be often enough. Obsession = stress = compromised immune system.

• Imagine that you’re deadly ill when all you have is a cold. Or one of the other flus. Or the stomach bugs that are still going around. Or one of the other upper respiratory viruses still making the rounds. Just stay home, treat it, don’t panic, and realize it doesn’t matter what bug it is you have unless you aren’t protecting others from it but are cavalierly spreading your germs around, or you get so very ill you need to get medical help. Those are the only reasons you really need to know what virus you have. And yes, one of the stomach bugs lasts 4+ days.

Gryphon and Dragon patiently waiting on the path to the blueberry patch, for their summer garden spots

All photos Deb Marshall

Spring Is - Actually - Here

 

Last night at midnight, I was outside, once again, trying to wrestle enough wood into the house to fill the woodstove full enough to produce heat through the night. Our furnace is still non-functional; and as is my wont when I’m out rangling firewood in the dark and very cold hours, I was audibly swearing about how that inanimate object – which was not so very inanimate as I was trying to move it – was not cooperating, and mentally cussing out the Husband who had, once again, gone to bed without bringing in anywhere near enough wood.  His enjoyment in playing pioneer man in our furnaceless house has fallen off significantly in the past six weeks, and with it, his enthusiasm about hauling in firewood. 

And my pioneering spirit, which when I was younger enjoyed such a challenge, never kicked in this winter – instead, I’ve just been cold, and crabby, and crabbier, and thinking a lot about crying. 

Then I heard it: a woodcock, buzzing his mating call, in spite of the cold air and snow still covering the ground. Suddenly I didn’t mind being out in the cold and dark – a woodcock buzzing means  Spring is here! – until I’d finally wrestled the wood indoors and my back started its post-wood-hauling ache.

But it made me think. If the woodcock thinks there’s enough bare ground to build a nest…and it’s been as warm as it has been lately…and the snow’s off the two raised beds next to the house on the south side…then maybe…just maybe…possibly…I could dig the parsnips.

Morning routine: Cats come up to my bedroom and yowl until I wake up, open the door, plop Catman onto my bed, and fish the plastic baggie of Catman crunchies out and hand out snacks. By the time they’re happy and leave, I’m thoroughly awake. I try reading myself to sleep again because it’s really quite early, but usually have no luck. I get up, dispose of the crunchy detritus, head downstairs. Let the cats out. Start the woodstove fire. Cuss the Husband out mentally, because there’s still only the couple of sticks of wood leftover from what I hauled in last night. Put some clothes on, go haul some more. Rue my aching back.

Let the cats in, hand out pills (treats and real pills for Catman, treats I call “happy pills” for Biscuit), refill stove-top water pot, vaporizer, and water a few dry plants. Get the cats their breakfast. Down cellar: clean out cat litter boxes (four, always needing clean-out, morning and night – Catmandoo is a true man, and you wouldn’t believe what he’s capable of producing), fill the plastic containers I use to carry birdseed out to the wart – two of sunflower seed, one of mixed nuts and fruit, one of cracked corn, one of scratch feed for the turkeys, if they show up again – and head back upstairs and out onto the wart to pour out seed onto the railings, and scatter the scratch feed on the ground below. 

This morning, a little brave little chipmunk was sitting on the wart stairs stuffing his cheek pockets as full of nuts and seeds as possible as fast as possible. This is another sign of Spring – chipmunks semi-hibernate in winter, waking on and off to eat food they’ve stored in their burrows before dropping back into sleep. If a chipmunk is up and out and eating birdseed in the still-cold air, hibernation is over, unless the weather changes radically, and Spring is arrived. 

I grabbed my hand trowel and headed down the steps, causing the chipmunk to scoot off. 

This is the first time the hand trowel has been out since late fall, and I’d abruptly dragged it out of its hibernation and it wasn’t sure it wanted to go. The first raised bed is just steps from the wart stairs. I tried plunging my trowel into it, but no – it was frozen solid except the top inch, and my arm, and trowel, bounced back. Hmmm. Grumph. The raised bed next to it, however – all around the edges closest to the cement blocks that are the walls of the bed - the earth was soft and I could move it. And in a moment, I was able to reach in and grab a parsnip and wrestle it out! And then another; and another; all around the happy edges. Two inches closer to the center, the ground is still hard as a rock.

I gathered my large handful of parsnips by the roots and stood up, then covered the two parsnip beds with old screens to keep the cats from getting in and digging their own holes, for their own purposes. I noticed that my aching back was suddenly feeling at least 50% better than it had been before I started parsnip-wrestling. 

While moving old screens to cover this bed, I did the first of this year’s weeding – there are strawberry plants gone wild in my garden beds that have to come out. For a moment, I let myself wonder whether, in a week or two, I’d dare risk planting the cold-weather crops, long before their usual time: beets, broccoli rabe, lettuce, peas, fava beans, more parsnips. Hmmm.

Took my treasure into the kitchen, rinsed off the dirt, and sorted them into two piles, one to take to Mom who will be as surprised and thrilled as I am at the early harvest.

I considered saving our share for supper, but no – these were breakfast! 

I don’t even peel them, just scrub and scrape off the tiny air-rootlets, cut off tops and bottoms, then slice them the long way, into matchsticks. The way to cook overwintered parsnips, which become sweet and lovely in their frozen beds, is to sautee them in butter – lots of butter – until some get crispy, and all get soft and a little golden. Then grind some salt over them – don’t sprinkle, grind, or use flakes – and try to keep from inhaling them so fast you can’t really enjoy precious bite of them.

Over-wintered parsnip harvest is brief and mysterious. One never knows what will be there – big roots, little roots, crooked roots, straight roots, no roots, or roots nibbled and gnawed away by chipmunks and mice? One has to keep checking the ground and grab them out before any other critter who also loves sweet root gets to them, and before they put all their energy into making new foliage, which will, surprisingly, show early growth when you pull away the old dead leaves, even when the roots are frozen solid in the ground. Once the foliage is fully into production, the roots get hard and bitter. If you want to keep your own seed, you must sacrifice some of your harvest to this new growth and the flowers and seeds that will follow.

If you buy seed, you must sow it in hope and faith and ward off despair: parsnip seed is notoriously delicate, hard to germinate, and not rarely, won’t germinate, or germinates badly. It takes forever – weeks – to germinate; and needs to be planted in relatively rich soil. Not near the compost bins, I learned that lesson a few years ago when the winter mice ate all the roots below the snow, leaving only enough of the tops to make me expect a wonderful harvest, and left me in tears when I discovered they’d already been eaten. Two falls ago, the chipmunks ate all the two beds of parsnips overnight, before the first frost arrived, and there was nothing all that long winter to hope for.

Overwintered parsnips are treasure. Even a good harvest lasts only a week or so. 

Overwintered parsnips taste like freedom, spring, winning, joy. Overwintered parsnips drive out despair. 

Overwintered parsnips are magic.