Hindsight 2020.

 

 New Year’s Eve, 2020. We are planning a meal of left-over turkey, followed by an hour of TV watching and an early bedtime, the better to greet the New Year. Such wild excitement, you say, should not be permitted at our advanced ages! Perhaps you are correct and we should eschew the television. The series, after all, is purported to contain sex scenes of some heat. One would not wish to spoil one’s night’s sleep.

 As if. A year of lockdowns, masking and grim statistics is finally over and vaccines are beginning to arrive, with high hopes for all. No one except the dourest of prognosticators would have predicted this year and its misery. As a senior with compromised immune system, I am clinging hard to the idea that the vaccine roll-out will be fast and efficient so that we can resume the even tenor of our pre-Covid lives, more or less. For so many, a lost family member or friend who succumbed will forever leave a sore spot on their hearts and a gap in their lives. For the rest of us, things have been frightening, frustrating and futile. We had, for instance, a small New Year’s celebration planned in the form of a roast beef dinner in a restaurant with good friends. Cancelled, as so much has been.

 It is both useless and unfair to condemn the past months entirely. There have been good happenings.

There has been fun. One of my best memories is the item that I awoke to find on my birthday. My insanely jokester neighbours had manufactured a gnome out of cedar branches and, adding a sign saying Happy Birthday, installed it on the lawn.  I modified it to add a mask and remove the sign, since the latter had melted in the rain, and it graced our front yard for quite some time. A fine work of art indeed. The ‘gnome’ offensive is not a new one. I have found gnomes in trees and flower beds, and many on-line representations to mark various occasions. And I do confess to, very occasionally, trying to reciprocate. Mostly, though, they win. The amount of wiring they had to do to create the Birthday Gnome had to be seen to be believed.

 It is easy to find beauty where we live. In season there are lovely falls of snow, (I am not sure of the date of this photo, but beautiful it is), gentle rains, sunshine and flowers, birds at the feeders, deer and the very occasional bear in the field behind the house. I was fitted with hearing aids this year and have rediscovered the joys of bird song, frog song and the ability to hear the sparse traffic as it turns in front of our house, enabling me to keep track of the neighbours and the school bus.

 This year we removed the wood furnace that has warmed the house since it was built, and had a propane furnace and new, larger, air conditioner installed. It is a lot less work for JG and it enables us to warm up the house by changing the thermostat setting before we get up, a nice change from hiking down to the basement and fiddling with lighting and stoking the furnace. We also got a new mattress for our bed, not before time, and are now sleeping on a flat surface without two dips in it. For now, anyway.

 Small things add cheer and interest to days that all seem to melt into one another, far too much the same. An orchid that friends had given us grew a new stem and produced, all at one time, ten blooms. I gloated over it a lot. Here is its portrait at the five-bloom stage, with the buds swelling happily. My cacti did not give me the same satisfaction, although one that was also a gift from neighbours did pretty well. And my daffodils were splendid. The weirdly warm week we had early on got them started and the second batch of spring brought most of them out. I only seem to have a photo of the beginning, annoyingly enough.

 A less beautiful thing that spring brought was an infestation of caterpillars - as I recall, two types, Forest Tent and Gypsy moth. The oaks were very badly affected and lost a whole set of leaves. Stubbornly, they grew a new set, much smaller but sufficient, we hope, to carry them over. JG did a lot of caterpillar squishing and egg mass removing but only the coming spring will tell us if they are going to make it.

JG assessed the big maples that framed the entrance to our laneway and decided that enough rot had set in – whether courtesy of the ice storm that stripped them or just from old age – that they needed to be cut down. He hired a tree removal company and a crew of young and agile men arrived, complete with bucket truck and chipper. In only a bit over two hours they limbed and chipped the trees and removed the trunks. The sound wood will make fine firewood. No tree around here is ever wasted. Inspired by the way they were whipping the chainsaws around, I did some research and found that there are machines called ‘arborists’’ chainsaws, lighter than the ordinary kind. There was a lightbulb over the head moment, and I go one for JG for Christmas. 

He seems to be pleased.

 Christmas now has come and gone and a good turkey dinner was had by all. New Year’s Eve has also come and gone and I am writing this on New Year’s Day. We had a fine Christmas, those of us who could gather. But we did miss the absent family members, especially the YD whose job is too intensely busy to allow her to quarantine for two weeks both ways just to spend a few days at home. She does seem to be getting the best out of her posting, though, getting in lots of hiking in amazing territory and just slogging away, getting the job done.

So, that was Hindsight is 2020. Hoping for a better 2021.