Why a garden? Why long covid? Why a blog? Why, indeed.
Quite frankly, I’d rather be writing about anything but long Covid. I’m not a medical professional, I have no credentials, but here I am. Stuck. With Long Covid. They tell me I’m not stuck — those people that love me. But I feel stuck. But stuck where? At home with these people that love me? That’s not much to complain about. Stuck with a disease that has turned me into someone other than what I thought was myself. Yep. That starts to break the surface tension on the amount of water my eyeballs can hold. I hate Covid.
To answer a few questions…
- Why a garden? To be clear, I’m not a gardener. I never planted more than a few radish seeds as kid and I have regularly killed patio plants since. But cue the pandemic job loss situation and I turned my “who-can-I-bother-now” attention to the yard of our rental house. There wasn’t much out there: One boxwood trimmed within an inch of its life, and one unidentified green glossy bush that gets pretty white flowers in late Spring. For the warmer months, we did indeed get a few extra visitors challenging the presumed vacancy:
- Two small, barely there hostas that had been ridden roughshod by the previous three-year-old and his truck,
- One giant, conquering hosta, as our daughter calls “the asshole”, and
- One haphazard, although, very happy, fern that still throws its fronds in aimless, ecstatic directions.
So like any good pandemically unemployed soul, I dug up that blank, boring yard in April 2020–it was either that or join the bread-making craze; so I dug. The first garden by about 6′ x 8′; the add-on was another 3′ x 30′. Still under-employed a month later, the garden became 6′ wide. It continues to grow in size, and that’s why we have a garden. Fucking Covid.
The garden began with two small, “barely there” hostas that had been ridden roughshod by the previous three-year-old and his truck.
- Why Long Covid? The hardest question of all. I’m sure we’ll visit this in another blog. I’ve had all the vaccines, I have no pre-existing conditions. So why Long Covid? I guess that call that dumb luck. Yay. Lucky me.
- Why a blog? Oh, that’s because YOU are lucky. Seriously, you don’t have to read. And how did you find this site anyway? There are so many other things you can be doing. But if you intend to stick around. Don’t be a stranger; leave a comment. Tell us your story. You are very welcome here among the flowers and the fucking Covid.
Today in the garden
A pink astilbe and brown-eyed Susan.
Soft fairy dust waiting to burst from its fairy wand. Next to it, the bolder, sturdy Susan. It’s like a marshmallow between graham crackers. Scrumptious.