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.

March: Finally

 

It’s March. Finally. March is hopeful, even if it’s miserable from moment to moment. This week it’s been sunny and warm enough that Catmandoo could sit in his fold-up camp chair on the wart for an hour or more at a time, and he’s had his breakfast en plein air  a couple of times, which makes him purr very loudly and smile like only a big cat can.

The Buddha on the front mini-porch went, in five days, from being covered in snow up to his toppest  top snail to free of snow to his waist, to free of snow completely, although still completely surrounded by it. I can see the very tops of the giant heather patch just beyond the Buddha and the plowed-up tall bank of snow. Out the back window, the ground is still all white; but I can see almost the entire of the compost bins, and the two raised beds right next to the house’s south wall are, today, free of snow, making me dream a little of over-wintered parsnips. The ground will have to thaw quite a bit before I can get at those, however.

And exactly on time, I smelled skunks at night during the last two days in February. I haven’t seen them, but the smell tells me they’re out, mating, and going on dinner dates to my compost bins.

Also during the last weeks of February, the wild turkeys, which I hadn’t seen curly poop nor feather of all winter, suddenly turned up looking for hand-outs. I heard a banging outside and, going to the kitchen window, saw 8 perched on both the top and bottom rails on the wart, gobbling down the seed I’d left for much smaller birds as fast as they could, and the rest of the 20-fowl herd on the ground, scratching for the scratch seed I’d tossed out after seeing their foot-prints the day before. Wild turkeys are entirely too large to look anything but goofy perched on a wart rail, especially the lower rail, and as soon as they saw me moving near the window, they took off in a turkey tizzy and flew into the trees – literally, into them, not onto them, and then fell to the ground – next to the kitchen pond across the driveway. I managed to catch a photo of one on the rails through the window before it had a chance to follow its mates.

I have all my seed orders made, except for the seed potatoes, which I want to get from a farm in Maine that I can’t seem to rouse on the phone and can’t work out from their very peculiar catalog how to order by mail. I’ve already heard back from one of the seed companies I’ve ordered from, so expect I’ll start getting seeds in the mail sometime during the next few weeks. Not the onion and shallot and leek sets, I dearly hope – I hope the companies will have the sense to hold those until April, when I might actually be able to plant them.

The unknown flower on my windowsill bloomed, and its bloom looks vaguely familiar, like I should know what it is, but I still don’t. It’s pretty, and must be something I planted – I’m guessing a leftover from some store-bought plant that maybe Mom gave me last winter. I’ve tried looking it up, but find several close-but-not-quite-right candidates, so I still don’t know what it is.

Which also describes the current political candidate situation. As it starts to look like it’s going to be either Bernie or Biden – oh, sigh. Like I said, close but not quite right. We love Bernie, but he’s old, he’s had a heart attack, being president will probably kill him, which we don’t want because we need him to keep us honest if for no other reason. He’ll energize the youngsters (and we oldsters who want him to be able to do pretty much everything he wants to do) and the folks who voted for him last time but switched to Trump when Bernie was cheated out of the nomination; and he scares people who forget that no president ever has been able to do stuff that they want to do unless they get the cooperation of Congress, so there’s not much chance that the folks who worry about us becoming a politically socialist state (vs a little more economically socialist, which we all like, in reality, even if we don’t understand that) will come to pass; or Biden, who’s too old, too conservative, and so un- inspiring that there will be too many who won’t bother to vote because it’ll feel like a vote for four more wasted years - just like last time.

Really, people, we’ve made fun of Biden for decades and refused to vote for him because he’s a big goofball with a tongue that trips over itself and no real ideas, so why are we even considering him seriously now? And besides, he sounds like he could be in early stages of senility, or at least, has serious old age memory issues. If he wins, he’ll be better than Trump – anyone who isn’t evil incarnate would be a thousand times better than Trump – but he’ll be boring, uninspiring, divisive because of his unwillingness to do anything new, and stuff that needs to be changed urgently won’t get changed at all, or not enough to make the changes we desperately must make quickly. Let’s face it, Biden’s a liar, too. He may lie as part of telling interesting stories, and if you’re a story teller, a little creativity isn’t a bad thing; but if you’re a politician, it’s a really, really bad habit to have, and besides proving a serious lack of discretion, makes us wonder what is really wrong with this person, after all.

So I’m very irritated. In fact, I’m beyond irritated, because yesterday, someone stole the face masks that I keep in our clinic waiting room during cold and flu season, so patients can protect us and the other patients using the waiting room from sharing their viruses. So now we have no face masks, and like the rest of the world, we can’t get them. 

I have a small handful of patients whose lung health really does put them at risk for all the viruses that have been going around this winter. I happily would have shared a few face masks with them for emergency use. Now I can’t. And now I also have to tell anyone with a cold or flu that they can’t come in for a treatment, or to pick up herbs that could cure them, because we can’t risk them spreading something nasty to all the other patients waiting for treatments for non-contagious issues. And that’s not fair; and it’s not kind; and it’s not necessary. But it’s very greedy. And now I’m very cranky.

I know people are feeling stressed, at risk, and like they’re living in dangerous times. I get it. But we need to use common sense, and we need to be kind, and we need to not give in to terrors that don’t exist in anything but our nightmares.

One patient called me this week and cancelled his appointment indefinitely, because he didn’t want to drive to the Upper Valley for fear of catching something. You can’t catch something by driving to an area, people, the viruses don’t float around outdoors like that. Most people aren’t going to catch this scary virus, but a bunch are going to catch one of the upper respiratory viruses that have been going around for months, some of which have developed into pneumonia  this winter, and those people will freak out, thinking they’ve caught the scary one. 

This winter, like most winters, people have assumed that their “cold” is unimportant, and have gone to work and about their business as if they weren’t sick, cavalierly infecting others and spreading virus hither and yon so that people don’t know how they got sick. Going to work and other public places when you’re sick isn’t a courageous thing, isn’t something to be proud of, isn’t a virtue.  STAY HOME.

Corona virus isn’t, and hasn’t been, the only illness we’re needing to protect ourselves from. So stay home from work if you’re at all sick – whether you have a fever or not – and learn to wash your hands until they’re truly clean, and do it often. Don’t cough all over other people and objects. Treat your colds, don’t ignore them assuming they’ll get better on their own (rest, fluids, extra sleep, good, warm, easy-to-digest food, some herbs that are both anti-viral and anti-bacterial, if you know how to use them). And keep in mind that there are cold colds – no sore throat, lots of clear or white runny snot, no fever, maybe you don’t even feel sick – which can turn into hot colds over a few days, and the symptoms will change, but you’re contagious even while the virus is a cold one. And if you’re tired, or recovering from a winter virus, or are in other ways perhaps immune compromised, don’t go to places where there are lots of people. Be sensible.

Don’t go into a turkey tizzy in a panic that doesn’t make sense.

And don’t piss me off – I’m ugly when I’m really cranky.

For the blog, 5 March 2020: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

All photos Deb Marshall