Filling a Day of Social Distancing - 5/2/2020 – 60 years ago

Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….

Here are the unique activities for yesterday:

Catching up on a Charles Cockell’s Life in the Universe Pandemic Series:

Making Zentangle tiles while listening to astrobiology videos. I made tiles that start with curvy strings that create spaces to fill with color…the coloring using the ‘pattern’ of connecting spaces via corners. I made two tiles while I listened to the 6 videos.

**Celebrating a new low weight for the year with dark chocolate.** Being at a new low weight for the year is s great metric to start the day. I enjoyed the dark chocolate right away - for ‘breakfast.’

Beginning of sycamore seed balls. The light was good in the afternoon to observe the newly forming sycamore balls through the skylight in the master bathroom. I turned the screen on my camera so that I could point the camera straight up and brought in a chair to sit on (help me hold the camera steady). I was surprised at how red the tiny balls looked.

A wary downy. I was looking through pictures I had taken recently and found some of a downy woodpecker on our deck railing. It sat there relatively still for longer than I expected. As I reviewed the pictures, I realized that maybe it was being still to escape a predator from above.

The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts here.

Thinking about 60 years ago this spring…..

I was in kindergarten…walking home with a bean seedling I’d sprouted in a paper cup. It was a warmish spring day in Texas, and I was excited to show the small plant to my mother. She met me when I was about halfway home but didn’t seem interested in my plant which surprised me. She told me that my grandfather had been hurt and was in the hospital.

Those moments became my most vivid memory of my kindergarten year. The details around the moments are missing. Did I usually walk home by myself? Where were my little sisters when my mother came to walk with me? Had the accident just happened, and she was still assimilating the news herself? What happened to the bean plant?

I was at the age where memories start to become more plentiful. By the time my grandfather came home of the hospital – a leg amputated and much thinner - I remember the first time we saw him at his home (my sisters and I were not allowed at the hospital) and thinking how different he looked. He lived another 16 years – helping me and my sisters all along the way…showing us life well lived. Today I am feeling how fortunate we were that he survived 1960.