It’s March and I’ve been thinking about our gardens. We have a fairly big yard – 3+ acres – and quite a few large perennial beds. The perennial plants that were left for winter interest as well as food for the birds and hiding places for pollinators as well as moles, voles, and other hibernators,…
It was getting later and later. My watch told me it was now approaching five thirty! Club dismisses at 4:45 p.m.. It was early February and now dark outside. The school parking lot was empty and the outside lights were shining on the snow piles, reflecting with a glare. All but one of my garden…
Mid-January, I traveled to New York with my husband to see my parents. They are in their mid-80’s, still living in their own home. The day we arrived, New York had just opened vaccinations for group 1b – those 75 and older. Much of my time there was spent trying to secure vaccine appointments for…
Today I started working on a project for a local elementary school. Due to the pandemic, environmental day festivities – usually held on or around Earth day in April – are being planned as virtual festivities. My choice, as a presenter, was to do a live “Zoom” presentation on April 1st or to make a…
Birds Experiences in the Past My relationship with birds is not based on a great personal history. Growing up, I was afraid of the winged, flying creatures. I saw a red headed school girl about my age in the aviary at the Seneca Park Zoo in the late sixties be dive-bombed for strands of her…
Today, is my one thousandth, three hundredth, and twentieth blog post! That’s right I’ve made 1,320 posts to The Apples In My Orchard! It all started just before the Slice of Life Story Challenge in 2017. I opened my blog during the last week in February to test the waters and be ready to write…
Sometimes, the public is hard to work with. When I started making fabric face masks, I offered them free to those in my community, primarily through local contacts on my Facebook page. There were reasons I offered them free. 1) I was just getting back into sewing and 2) I was still perfecting the masks,…
Today is Poetry Friday. Yesterday, about this time, I glanced out my home office window and saw a flock of very active chickadees in our Norway spruce trees. They were flying from the evergreens to the bare limbed apple trees and back again to the needles for shelter. This flurry of spring activity inspired the…
For the last few days, I’ve been in a slump. It’s really the first slump I can recall during the pandemic. Mostly, my “slumpiness” revolved around feelings about my own self worth and feeling undervalued. But, today, several things have happened to restore my sense of being valued by others. I realized that I do…
Writing every day with substance and relevance is hard. Most days, the words flow from my mind on to the computer screen with minimal effort. Some days, it is a struggle to pull them out. Today is one such day. This is the post I probably should have written yesterday. I need to take my…