Random Saturday Thoughts

  • I wouldn’t have thought that there was anything that could make me love jewelweed more, but then there it was–a hummingbird feeding on the bright flowers. My husband doesn’t see the beauty in the jewelweed, just its wild untidiness, which is too bad. There are other plants in that area that I do not love so much, though, and I have been waging my little wars against them. This week I ripped out all the ragweed. I also pulled out some briars and a rather stunning number of birch saplings. This week my goal is to remove more birch saplings, a ton of baby oaks (they are everywhere!), a few massive pokeweed “trees,” and at least some of the bittersweet, which is a very pesky, invasive vine that only recently arrived here but is already trying the choke the life out of everything else. But I will leave the jewelweed, asters, and goldenrod to grow WAF.
  • Today Twitter asked, “If you could live in any state, which one would it be?” It’s an odd question, in a way. There is nothing forcing me to live in Rhode Island. I could live in any state. So I guess the answer is, for the moment, “Rhode Island.” That will not always be the answer, though. When the answer changes, I’ll move. I can already feel that day approaching. I moved a lot during my 20s and 30s, and I became accustomed to it. Now I miss it. I have been in the same place for such a long, long time.
  • To answer my own question from earlier today, I am a little lazy, but I am also suffering from stress and depression caused by a combination of factors, one of the most pressing of which is that my kids are supposed to return on school on the 30th. The Pandemic is worse for children right now than it was last year, when we kept them home, but distance learning is not being offered this year. So I’m supposed to send them daily to poorly-ventilated buildings where hundreds of unvaccinated children gather in confined spaces, tra-la-la, while a significant proportion of their parents refuse to be vaccinated, tra-la-la, as if everything’s back to normal. But I don’t know that I can. And what if I can’t? What then?
  • As of a few days ago, the school board had not decided yet whether students and staff would be required to wear masks in the schools. Many parents were advocating loudly for “parent’s choice,” which is, as one pro-mask parent commented, “like having a peeing section in the pool.” We never got to see which way the debate would go, though, because the governor issued an executive order mandating masks in schools. So at least that question has been answered. It’s not much, but it’s something.
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