May 12th, or as I call it fifteen weeks until my family can sit inside together at the dinner table. Everyone is now vaccinated and the sense of relief is great. I actually cried when I heard the last of my family had been able to get an appointment last week.
It was pouring rain when we woke up this morning so the plan was to have an indoor chore day with some cooking and a lot of cleaning. Our house looks, not surprisingly, like we have been working in the garden for five weeks while completely ignoring the basic needs of the interior of a home where two dogs live.
The water catchment system is still closed for pollen season so, although the rain is good for the garden, it is useless to the rain storage system. Hopefully June will bring big rains to top up the tanks for the summer.
Up at six, I put some pasta sauce on the stove to simmer, then fed my sourdough starter and baked two loaves of bread and a few cookies. It has been three weeks since we have been off island so I am deep into my pantry supplies. The 2020 canned tomatoes are almost finished. We had the first salad grown in the 2021 garden, last night. Sure there was not a lot of variety of ingredients but still it was a salad grown by me from seed and picked fresh from our garden.
As the bread was rising I considered sitting down with a coffee and maybe a cookie. I needed to think about cleaning and then choose a book to read for the first time this year but the rain stopped and the sun came out. We went back up to the garden. E had a tree he wanted to murder. It was really tall and although not particularly wide people kept hitting it on the driveway. I had tons of plants which needed to be potted up and lots I could do.
My sister in law grabbed me a couple of watermelon and cantaloupe plants, yesterday, which I am going to try growing for the first time. They are planted in huge containers in the greenhouse, as an experiment, which I can move outside as the summer progresses. The flowers will probably need some help with fertilization. When the time comes, I can show you how Anne taught me to do it.
By the time we got back to the house it was 3:30 and we hadn’t eaten since 6 am. Spaghetti with sauce from our 2020 garden served with a slice of warm bread became not so much an early bird dinner special as a fashionably late lunch.
Honestly, since we moved here, I never know what time it is. I rarely know what month it is and only know it is the weekend because of increased boat traffic. We design our timetable based on the job of the day. We start when the coffee pot is empty and finish when we get tired, whether it’s noon or 3:00. We do, however, always know when it is 4:00 pm. Work is always finished by 4:00 pm cause that wine isn’t going to drink itself or as we now refer to it, calling the whales.
The house cleaning is just going to
have to wait
Off the Grid Islander 