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…
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…
All of the photographs featured in my Silent Sunday posts are taken by me, Carol Labuzzetta, author of The Apples in My Orchard blog. There is no permission to reproduce the photos in any form, digital or otherwise, whether watermarked or not. They are purely for your online visual enjoyment, once a week. Thank you!
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…
The seed catalogs have been pouring in since January, and lately, I’ve been spending some time going through them looking for favorites and maybe a couple of new varieties to try. This is what gardeners do in the depth of winter, when it is sub-zero outside. The colors always stimulate me as well. I tend…
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…