Thursday, October 31, 2024 (Samhain/Hallowe’en); from Jinny in San Diego, CA to Sally in Taneytown, MD
Dear Sal,
Happy Hallowe’en! This is the first, and possibly only, Hallowe’en when we can decorate with home-grown pumpkins. By late August, all dozen pumpkins at my giving garden plot had matured to slightly smaller than basketball size. About half were “pumpkin-colored” on the outside. The other half had cream-colored skin, but orange flesh when cut open. I donated three to the drop-in center, set aside one indoors for later use at son Jason and Kelly’s place, cooked one as part of a spicy Indian-style stew, and put the rest into “cool storage”—layered with newspapers inside two of the coolers we keep in our storage shed. I hoped that would shelter them from any remaining heat waves. Maybe not the most elegant solution, but it seems to have worked.
I’m generally happy with the cooler weather and shorter days, but am keeping busy. During the early part of August, we watched a good bit of television—the latter parts of the Paris Olympics, with some events in venues we remembered from our springtime visit; the Democratic National Convention, always quite a visual spectacle, regardless of who’s running. The latter part of the month, I kept busy working at the giving garden and also doing my part in a “postcard campaign” to encourage intermittent voters of both parties in battleground states to make the effort to show up at the polls in 2024.
On August 29, we flew east for a brief visit with Scott and family, including deferred auxiliary birthday celebrations for Scott and stepson Brooks, who’s just turned 11 and is very sports minded. One day while the younger generations were at work or at school, we had a pleasant restaurant lunch with Morgan’s parents, getting to know each other a bit better while assiduously avoiding talking politics. All four of us had to chuckle that we’d received nearly identical texts from Morgan (cautioning her parents) and Scott (cautioning us) to avoid any potentially inflammatory subjects. We ate at one of the down-home-style restaurants in the quaint, well-preserved downtown of Wapakoneta, enjoying delicious hamburgers from what was most likely a locally bred steer.
At the very start of September, we drove our rental car from Scott’s place a couple of hours north to a state park and conference center just outside Toledo, OH. We settled in at Maumee Bay, along the shore of Lake Erie, for yet another year of Consultants’ Camp. Thinking that covid was behind us, we relaxed any restrictions on masking or testing during our first ever stay at this multi-group conference locale.
A couple of days before the end of camp, I started feeling a little “off,” but chalked it up to seasonal allergies in a climate quite different from San Diego. I continued to participate, if sometimes from the fringes of the group. I spent a lot of time outdoors. I composed and helped rehearse a comical camp song for our camp’s closing. I chose to spoof the barbershop style song “Lida Rose,” in honor of new camper Dan, who was part of a barbershop quartet back at his home town in Washington state. Each year since the 1990’s, fellow camper Judah and I had taken turns doing a camp-themed song parody. This year Judah had to leave early, so I sharpened my Mom-legacy parodic wits, then taught the song’s tune from “Music Man” to the younger campers who formed part of our “choir.” Judah wrote me later that the song got added to the “camp song book” he’s been keeping.
Just before camp was set to close, I was chatting with another camper at lunch at an open-air picnic enclosure when I started feeling woozy. The next few minutes are a blank to me. The next thing I remember, a couple of the heftier campers were hoisting me away from the table and stretching me out face up on the lawn outside the picnic enclosure. A set of EMTs had been practicing nearby. A camper waved them over. They arrived in next to no time to check my vital signs and to try to make a preliminary determination of what was wrong. Someone else who observed the episode later explained to me that my head and torso had tipped forward slowly, my head eventually coming to rest on the picnic table’s surface, atop a paper plate loaded with the generous portion of apple pie I’d chosen for dessert.
After my first-ever ambulance ride and several hours in a nearby emergency room, I was discharged as a surprise covid-positive older woman pumped full of IV fluids. No evidence of concussion (thanks, apple pie!). Our covid laxity had caught up with us—by the end of our weeklong “unconference,” about a third of our contingent of thirty campers were testing positive for the virus. We’re not sure if a camper brought the infection, or if we picked it up from a center employee or a different set of conference center visitors. Jim and I made it back home to San Diego the following day, masking on the plane ride to reduce our chances of infecting anyone else. It took a couple of weeks before we felt “normal” again. Son Jason helped us a lot, delivering groceries and supplies to our back patio until we were virus-free and could do our own shopping again.
Not sure how closely you’ve followed the presidential campaign. I’m slightly hopeful that we’ll avoid another Trump presidency and the worst of his previous excesses. At the same time, I’m somewhat discouraged that we’re not likely to move as quickly as needed to rein in our over dependence on fossil fuels, with their negative impacts on environment and health, regardless of who wins the election. When I tried to do my own post-mortem on the one presidential debate in mid-September, I journaled that “Both candidates seemed, either directly or indirectly, to acknowledge the outsized role that fossil fuels (and fossil fuel industry campaign contributions) play in our national politics. As evidence, I’m reminded of the extended discussion of fracking in Pennsylvania, one of our so-called ‘battleground states.’” Ah, well.
Heard from brother Jim V. that the fall trip he and Chris often take to the mountains of western North Carolina was hampered by the passage of Hurricane Helene, but that the town where they like to stay, appropriately named Highlands, was above most of the damage. From what we’ve heard on the news, substantial parts of Asheville were wiped out. A couple of my older women friends live in a retirement community at Asheville’s edge—by now I’ve heard from both that they’re all right, if saddened by the widespread destruction closer to the rivers.
Tomorrow I’ll start work at one of our area’s late-opening voting centers—in the auditorium of a Catholic school nearby. I worked the primary there in the spring. I’ll have a short set-up day tomorrow, then four days of increasingly long shifts, including about 15 hours next Tuesday on Election Day itself. Our work crew is diverse and generally congenial. Hope we’ll have good turnout and few problem voters.
Time for me to get some rest—the alarm will go off early. Please take good care. Lots of virtual hugs!
Love, Jin
