Living Richly During a Pandemic

 

Doctor appointments, weeding, dental check-ups, cleaning the RV, removing spent flowers, maintenance on the RV, cataract surgery, pruning, sorting mail, mulching leaves; pandemic life has not been much different than any other time we return from a couple of months of traveling.

Sadly we were not able to safely host Tipsy Tuesday. But with the pleasant fall weather, we were able to catch-up with our local friends by inviting a few folks at a time for a socially distanced, bring your own dinner/lunch and support the local restaurants evening; we supplied the wine.  (Credit goes to our friends, Linda and John for that idea.) 

Social distancing on the patio and porch, we hosted 2-3 times a week in October and November. 

And we had travelers stop by!  Again, we kept our socializing outside.

Juanita and Greg stayed a couple of nights in our driveway as they were traveling from their home in Maryland to Texas. 

Heading home to Southern California, Ginny and Scott stopped by for a visit. As we sat on the porch, they shared stories from their 9-month, tour of the country in their 17ft. Casita. 

As always, when we are away from the garden in the summer, we come home to quite a mess.

This is how it looked when we left in August.

This is how we found it on our return in October.

The garden is ABN’s happy place and she was quite content to spend time getting it back in order. We saw our last monarch butterfly on Halloween; so ABN decided she could remove the zinnias, Mexican sunflowers and coreopsis. (We don’t usually have our guests work for a parking space, but ABN was grateful Juanita insisted on helping.)

Cuttings were taken from the geraniums, roses, lantana, lavender and succulents. Tender plants were moved into the greenhouse.

All is ready for a long winter’s sleep.

 

Okay, the blooms need to be removed so energy will go to the plant, but this is so hard to do!

Now that the garden has been put to bed, it is no longer warm enough to gather outside and it’s not safe to gather inside, how can we live richly during this pandemic winter? Fortunately Captain has a shop, ABN has a craft studio and we have plenty of wine! Seriously, we do have some plans for making the most of this time of isolation which we will share in future posts.

As we continue to live richly during the pandemic, we realize not everyone is as fortunate. We will wear our masks to do our part in supporting the health care providers working 12 hours a day wearing layers of PPEs. We will practice social distancing so our neighbor children can return to school. We will shop locally to help our community remain open. We will order take-out from our local restaurants so when the pandemic is over we will have a place to go and celebrate.

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