Day 41: Cleaning
around the house
Day 34: The Edge
I read somewhere recently that sanitation workers are struggling to keep up with the amount of trash people are putting out during the quarantine. We're all cleaning out our houses, I guess, because what else are we going to do with so much time on our hands?
We've been doing a little in the house but mostly in the yard. Today, for instance, I used the edger (we have an edger now -- like a router, one tool I've always wanted to have) to clean up the stepping stones in our front yard.
Why?
Well, I woke up this morning and thought, "What can I do in the yard today? It's an April Saturday -- one must work in the yard." But I'd already mowed for the week. And I'd already moved the composter. And I'd already cleaned out the weeds in our jasmine. And I'd already cleaned out the briars in the corner of our lot. And I'd already moved the elderberry bushes. And I'd already enlarged our mulched flower garden. And I'd already mulched everything. "What can I do?"
Saturday has its own rhythm, and even in these strange times, K and I try to keep all our rhythms and rituals as sustained as possible. We've introduced some new rituals (our almost-nightly family walks, lots more family board and card game playing, more family movies), but Saturday is Saturday -- it must be spent outside.
By the time I was finished working on the stepping stones, each had a clean edge cut around it, several of the stones that had settled were elevated with a bit of gravel under them, and the last few stones that weren't in line with the rest of them were shifted back into place.
As I worked, I listened to podcasts on cults: Heaven's Gate, the Manson Family, the Branch Davidians, a couple I'd never heard of. They all make the little sect I grew up in seem fairly tame in comparison, but they all have one thing in common: a narcissistic man at the helm whom everyone views as being somehow a step above the rest of humanity.
Then there are the members and the obvious question: how do people allow themselves to be sucked into such groups? Take Heaven's Gate, for example: their beliefs were so morbidly ridiculous that it's difficult to imagine anyone taking them seriously. And members of that cult (and many others) left families behind in order to join them. They gave up everything for beliefs that sound like some sixth-grader's science fiction story for his fifth-period creative writing class. Yet all religions have their little absurdities: Islam has Mohammed flying off on a magic stallion into heaven. Judaism has talking snakes and donkeys and a man surviving in the digestive system of a marine creature. Christianity has zombies immediately after Jesus's death on the cross:
And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!" (Matthew 27.50-54)
Hinduism has Hanuman the monkey god -- all religions have elements that just seem silly. The difference, comedian Bill Burr points out, is that most of us grew up with those more traditional religious stories and heard them all our lives: they're party of the fabric of our childhood. These cults, though, we encounter as adults, more capable of critical thinking.
In the past, I'd probably write next that I found myself thinking about these things when I put the Boy to bed, thinking about possible lives we could have given him if we believed this or that, but I didn't. I didn't even think about it until now. Don't know what to make of that, if anything.
Day 32: Changes
We pulled out that hideously overgrown ornamental tree by our front door earlier this week (or technically last week, I guess, but everything's mushing together like a cheap blended scotch), so we had to replace it with something. Well, K felt we had to replace it with something. I was rather okay with just leaving it, but I was also okay with replacing it -- I was just okay with it. Today, I headed out to get the replacement and a few flowers.
The plan was simple: go to Home Depot for the replacement battery for my drill and a few other things, then head over to South Pleasantburg Nursery for the tree.
"Take a picture of what's there and show the man what was there," K said. "He'll help you pick something out that will fill that space."
L went with me. "Take L -- she'll pick out nice flowers," K suggested.
Home Depot took much longer than expected. Ridiculously long.
Then we head over to the nursery only to discover it's closed: order-by-phone only. So it was back to Home Depot.
Their tree selection is not stellar, let me tell you.
We decided on a relatively mature Japanese maple, but there was no price tag, only a bar code. The Home Depot app, hastily installed, couldn't find the price, so I photographed the bar code and went into buy it. "How much could it cost?" I asked myself.
The answer: $170.
"Um, no, I don't think we want that tree," I managed to stammer out. We went back and found a less mature specimen that was only $95.
The question is, why does a tree cost $170? Or $95? Or any given price? I understand Home Depot's mark up is fairly predictable, but what about their purchase price?
K and I talked about it this evening. Somehow that price must take into account the salaries of the nursery employees, the resources (food, water, electricity) applied to the sapling or necessary for the nursery itself, the taxes and other expenses the nursery pays -- all that compounded over the amount of time necessary for the sapling to reach its desired height and divided by the number of saplings that reach that marketable state at the same time.
"Whatever the expenses, it's a rip-off," K laughed in conclusion.
Back home, K planted the tree while I embarked on a second project: moving the composter we got for free when friends moved north. It's current location was much closer to the house, but the barrel had somehow gotten off the gears that turn the whole contraption, and that was simply because it was no longer level, thanks in large part, I think, to the dog's digging.
Day 27: Holy Saturday 2020
For everyone in the local Polish community, Holy Saturday has meant one thing: a visible continuation of traditions from the Old Country -- the blessing of the Easter baskets. When we began the tradition, the parish pastor had no idea what it was. He quickly learned and just as quickly fell in love with the tradition.
This year, then, was the first Holy Saturday in a decade that we didn't have a basket blessing here in Greenville. In some ways, that made Holy Saturday wholly different. But some things were the same.
That tree in the front yard that I wanted to cut down yesterday? It's now gone, along with my back.
More similarities: there was baking, baking, baking. For whom? For our family. For friends. For our neighbors. For anyone who wanted it, I guess. The difference? The Girl was involved -- not just involved, but insisting on seeing the whole process through to the end alone. Well, almost alone -- moving it to the cake stand was a bit too scary for her.
What else was the same? The kitchen was a disaster area for most of the day.
An artist at work always leaves behind a mess. And one of our culinary artists is better at cleaning up the mess she leaves behind than the other, and I'm much more likely to jump in and help clean with one of the artists than I am with the other. Lessons to learn.
Previous Years
Basket Blessing 2019
Basket Blessing 2018
Baskets 2015
Blessing the Baskets
Day 26: Good Friday
Good Friday is always a work-filled day among Poles, which I've always found somewhat ironic. In some ways, it's the most solemn day of the Catholic calendar, and you would think that devout Catholics -- of which in Poland, particularly rural Poland -- would spend the day in prayer. In my experience, they usually spend the day cleaning and cooking (often things they don't eat because it's a fast day, though Catholic fasting is hardly a discipline compared to some forms of fasting).
Today's job for me: take care of the leaves in the backyard. "After all, it is April," K smiled at breakfast. I wanted to cut down a topiary tree in the front yard that we've decided is dying and needs to come down. I've wanted to take it down for years, but I guess that's for tomorrow.
Day 20 in Two Parts: A View of the Day and a Rant
Part 1: The Day
Our weed eater -- I think that's a brand name but I could be wrong -- has been broken for some time. How long? Embarrassingly so. Today, we finally got a replacement, but we didn't get as sturdy a model as might be expected. The reason? Turning things over to the Boy.
A battery-powered, small trimmer that E can handle. His reaction? "I love, love, love this!" He's going to want to trim every day.
Part 2: Will This Change Anything?
K and I were talking a few nights ago about how this whole tragedy perhaps could have been significantly lessened if our inept president weren't the egomaniacal narcissist that he is when our talk turned to how this might affect the country. K suggested that it would be a turning point, that the fact that America -- the most powerful country in the world, the richest country in the world, the superlative-in-every-sense country in the world -- was brought to its knees like this will necessitate some change, a whole new way of looking at things.
I disagree.
What I fear is that instead of turning this country's populace into a science-first, technology-led country where politics and religion take a backseat to what science says (and if this were the case now, we might not be in the situation we're in), it will only reinforce the same backward thinking that continues to threaten us now. Instead of seeing it as a science problem, they'll see it as a religious problem. "God took his protection away from us because of X, Y, and Z" -- fill in your favorite liberal boogieman.
We really don't have to wait for that -- it's already happening. The amount of religious stupidity coming out of this is just mindblowing. Stuff like this.
One would think that given the evidence, anti-vaxxers would be shutting up about now:
The person credited with saving the most lives ever is Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine. The disease had a much higher mortality rate than the novel coronavirus that is confining many people to their homes right now; about 80% of children and 60% of adults who contracted smallpox died of it. In the 20th century alone, it killed more than 300 million people before the vaccine eradicated it worldwide in 1979.
The polio vaccine is estimated to have saved 10 million people from paralysis just since 1988, and prevented 500,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. A global vaccination campaign for measles that began in 2000 prevented an estimated 23 million deaths by 2018, the organization reported. (LA Times)
One would think -- but then again...
And this old nonsense about Bill Gates ushering in the apocalypse. (Money says he's using a Windows computer here...)
And people trying to call judgment down on a virus as if it's an incorrigible child.
And when you mix in bat-feces crazy like Alex Jones and people who take him seriously, well...
When you see everything -- everything -- as part of some conspiracy that was foretold in a book written by Bronze Age soothsayers, no amount of science, logic, or critical thinking can penetrate your worldview.
It's not just a pessimistic sense that there's a problem: there's quantifiable data to show there's a problem. Google has begun compiling reports on the changes in people's mobility during this time.
As global communities respond to COVID-19, we've heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as Google Maps could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19.
These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.
What do the data show? Well, as a disclaimer, Google warns about doing what I'm just about to do:
Location accuracy and the understanding of categorized places varies from region to region, so we don’t recommend using this data to compare changes between countries, or between regions with different characteristics (e.g. rural versus urban areas).
Still, data from three locations show the vast difference in national and local response.
Here's the data from our county:
Now, we made the news recently as being the most mobile county in the nation during this time, so our stubborn little county is an outlier, but it's where I live, so it's the data I'll use.
And here's the data from the administrative district in Poland where K grew up, where Babcia still lives, and where I spent seven years:
A randomly selected district in Italy.
Are these two countries faring better than America? I suppose in raw numbers, they are. The long term picture looks better there. Why? Because they don't have people going around saying, "I'm covered in the blood of Jesus -- I'm saved and safe" like we do here.
Of course, in Poland, some bishops and priests are desperately trying to get churches reopened on some kind of limited basis, but even there, they understand the risk and want to have limited attendance. These bloody American Evangelicals -- i.e., "covered in the blood of Jesus," which is itself a disturbing image, but the second, British meaning of "bloody" works as well -- want to have full, regular church services. The data makes their claims a little spurious, though:
And it's not as if this virus is enough: we as a species can't even go through this without some people turning it into a hell on Earth for those who are stuck with them:
In Hubei province, the heart of the initial coronavirus outbreak, domestic violence reports to police more than tripled in one county alone during the lockdown in February, from 47 last year to 162 this year, activists told local media.
“The epidemic has had a huge impact on domestic violence,” Wan Fei, a retired police officer who founded a charity campaigning against abuse, told Sixth Tone website. “According to our statistics, 90% of the causes of violence [in this period] are related to the Covid-19 epidemic.”
It is a pattern being repeated globally. In Brazil a state-run drop-in centre has already seen a surge in cases it attributes to coronavirus isolation, the Brazilian broadcaster Globo said.
“We think there has been a rise of 40% or 50%, and there was already really big demand,” said Adriana Mello, a Rio de Janeiro judge specialising in domestic violence. “We need to stay calm in order to tackle this difficulty we are now facing.” (Lockdowns around the world bring rise in domestic violence in the Guardian)
The virus is always teaching me something new:
The increased threat to women and children was a predictable side effect of the coronavirus lockdowns, said activists. Increased abuse is a pattern repeated in many emergencies, whether conflict, economic crisis or during disease outbreaks, although the quarantine rules pose a particularly grave challenge.
Predictable for some, that is. I hadn't even thought of this -- that's how privileged I am.
So, no, I don't think anything will change. At all.
Day 13: Landscaping
A house is a never-ending project, inside and out. There's always something to fix, move, repaint, replant, shorten, lengthen, reinforce, replace, recalibrate, nail, screw, fasten, dig, hoe, spread, gather, clean, spray, scrub, feed, kill, water, or simply do. Our yard has been part of this ever-growing project, with a couple of landscaping elements that weren't even there when we moved in and some that were there long gone, and some that we put in ourselves also long gone.
Our driveway planter has now grown and joined the original planter in the front yard that has changed very little since we moved in.
It also grew at the road end as well: the elderberries that were languishing in the backyard are now in the front yard, and we can't just plant elderberries in the yard and be done with it...
Day 10, Part 2: Blooms and Games
Tuesday Evening
Finishing Basement
We woke to foggy weather. In Lipnica, that always meant a gloriously sunny afternoon. Here -- I'm not so sure. It stayed cloudy most of the morning before turning sunny.
It might mean sleepiness if it's Sunday. Everyone was tired this morning: L because she's a thirteen-year-old; E because he's sick; K and I because that's how we normally wake up.
Or it might mean more work in the basement.
