After sleeping in late, we have breakfast, then I head to the shed and do my floor boards while Connie practices her music. I come back inside for lunch then she heads to the shed to do her trick at the sander. Later, after dinner, Connie turns to her task of constructing a new chequere, a large beaded gourd. Her goal for the evening is to add another row of beads. There are 40 beads per row, all needed to be tied, Macramé style. I busy myself at the computer. We might watch a movie or show on the laptop, read and go to sleep. Like the movie Groundhog Day, we get up and do the exact same thing the next day. It seems like we've been doing this forever. We don't see friends. We don't go anywhere. We construct our day so as to get it done.
Our days have been like this for about nine months. To keep from going crazy, we've been conjuring up plans of action, marking up the steps involved and proceeding with it. In the spring and throughout the summer it was us hacking a big garden out of an overgrown plot of land behind the house. Then later, scrounging canning jars and putting all that produce away for the winter. Alongside that task was the building of a small structure that is to be a music studio. We can't just build a shed, or an outbuilding. It has to be a full blown mini-house, built to standards with insulation, electricity, studs and beams, tongue and groove paneling, and soon, a clear fir floor salvaged from a 40 year old addition. Who knows, someday we might have to live in that little space.
Last year we gutted the back third of our house that had housed a garage and loft bedroom and created a small apartment for ourselves. In that process we removed a lot of material, mostly wood product, which we saved and now are using for the music studio. While buying new material for the project would certainly save time, cleaning up the old material not only saves us money but gives us something to do during these long Covid days. We must stay busy.
We were lucky to have bought this old house just before the Covid hit. And we were fortunate to have remodeled and rented out our main house in time to weather the pandemic without going broke. We're thinking that this is a time to retrench, economize, and make plans for the future. This is a time to go it alone, keep friends at a distance, to stash cash and canned goods. Under the house, in a cold concrete half-height cellar we built shelves and filled them with the bounty from the garden and other purchased items that would get us through an extended time of need.
This pandemic has us thinking like preppers, survivalists, those people who stock up in anticipation of hard times. I think this pandemic has brought out the best in people and the worst in people. It's been a wake up call reminding us of the extreme levels of kindness and cruelty that we are capable of.
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| Connie's sketch of Scott |
When I was younger, I thought the population explosion was going to bring our society down. After that, I thought the concept of Peak Oil was going to be the death knell of our society. Now it seems like both of those have spawned a larger threat that is climate change. Even while we see that train wreck approaching, the people in power do next to nothing to slow it down, and others deny that there is anything to be concerned about. This pandemic gives us a taste of our future and tells us that we cannot depend on anyone else to do the right thing.
And so we continue our Groundhog days. I toss shelled peanuts out the door for the squirrels and watch them run off and hide them in the dirt. They watch me building away, adding another structure, planning an acquisition, and stashing food and booze in the cellar. We're getting back to basics, fortifying for our future, waiting out the pandemic.
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