Perspective and Peeps in the time of Pandemic (In the Category of Want What You Have)

Tragic news. Coronavirus has halted the production of Easter Peeps®, the sugar-covered marshmallow cavities-in-waiting that adorn Easter baskets and trendy dinner party table centerpieces that obstruct line-of-sight conversations.

Is this a waste or a proper use of bunny-shaped Peeps? (Photo Source)

Depending on your perspective, this news is either a prayer answered or the Devil's work. In my experience, no sugary treat causes greater debate among us sweet-tooth inclined than the eternally resurrected spring candy question: Peeps — Crap or Crave-able? (Unless it's — maybe — Chocolate and Mint — Ambrosia or Trash?)

As coronavirus spreads, our world diminishes, and all the places, people and opportunities we once took for granted are made precious by their absence now. It makes me sad even though I was not going to buy any Peeps in the first place.

Don't misunderstand me; I am team Peeps all the way. Their stretchy sweet (cloying, really) presence in my childhood Easter basket is a happy, distant memory. Emphasis on the word distant. The Easter Bunny who packed my baskets would take the yellow or pink Peeps out of their large cardboard sleeve, break down the long rows of chicks (you couldn't buy three-packs back then; such nonsense did not exist), and arrange them around the basket intermingled with hand-dyed hard-boiled Easter eggs, jellybeans, foil-wrapped chocolate eggs and a hollow chocolate bunny. The plastic "grass" that lined the basket inevitably became stuck in the gooey marshmallow spot, a sort of oozing wound where the Peeps had been pulled apart. Eating the Peeps required pulling the grass off, which created marshmallow-covered strands of Easter basket grass, which stuck to my hands until I managed to spread it to the carpets of every room in the house before we had even left for church.

I hate that children might be deprived of that happy memory in their own lives.

While the article regarding the cessation of Peep hatching concludes that the Just Born Candy Company feels pretty confident that they have a sufficient stock of Easter Peeps, I cannot help but wonder if this news will trigger a panic-buying spree causing cardboard sleeves of Peeps in all sizes to disappear from store shelves, the next toilet paper of our age.

Stay At Home order or rational and healthy fear of catching COVID-19 keeping you out of the stores? No worries. The Just Born Candy Company ships from their on-line store. I confess, the chocolate pudding Bunny Peeps tempt me.

Wash your hands. Prevent the spread of sticky Easter basket grass.

Interesting Times — Blogging My Way Through the Pandemic

(In the category of Be Where You Are.)

I get it now, why the ancients cursed their adversaries with, "May you live in interesting times."

Times are a little too interesting these days, if you ask me. Not in the usual way of interesting, the "hey let's go check out this new___" type of interesting. (Insert favorite new thing to check out. For me it would be a new restaurant or a new movie or a new art installation or a new winery or microbrewery...)

No, it's "will I ever be able to buy toilet paper again" interesting, and "will all my friends in the food and beverage service sector survive the complete closure of their entire industry" interesting.

It's "will all my friends in healthcare — God bless them, and I have a fair few  — stay safe" interesting, and "will my family, my friends or my co-workers get sick" interesting.

Will I or my husband get sick?

Will any of us die?

I could go down a dark rabbit hole of apocalyptic hellscape hand-wringing, screw myself into a state of panic so severe I cripple myself, and obsess over the minute-by-minute news reporting about the mushroom cloud of increased cases, deaths, and the utter collapse of a once robust global economy.

So could you. As it turns out, that is easy to do in a pandemic. Who knew?

Let's not.

Let's look for the silver lining instead. Let's make metaphorical lemonade from the giant lemon known as the Novel Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020 (because three years under Comrade Cheeto's corrupt and inept leadership has not been interesting enough).

Instead, let's start blogging again!

Let's ask ourselves: What would the great humor columnists of our (well, my) generation write if they had been cursed to live in interesting times? (Think Erma Bombeck and Dave Barry.) They would take the mundane tedium of Shelter In Place and transform it into hilarity accessible to all on some level or another.

(As paid writers, they would also be used to working from home every day, alone in their study, typing their essays or conducting phone meetings with editors. The isolation would be normal for them. They could still go out to check out a new movie or restaurant, or whatever.)

I lack their perspective and their success. I am not Erma Bombeck (may she rest in peace). I am not Dave Barry (may he live forever). I'm just a writer who wishes I was either of them or their bastard love child.

I live in the paradoxical world where I now have to use 100% of my own toilet paper having no idea of when I can restock. Details such as this never mattered to me before. I feel for my coffee-drinking co-workers also working from home for the foreseeable. Our company provides coffee for free. What they are now saving in gasoline without the commute, they are probably making up for having to finance their own coffee habits. For a few of them, this is significant. I bring my own green tea, so no changes here on the caffeine front.

On the other hand, my employer is progressive enough to send us home to work and do whatever is needed to help slow the spread of COVID-19, and in all honesty, I am grateful for this opportunity to experience the "writer's life" of staying at home all day working from my new writer's desk (that took me 3.5 hours to build, and I only cried twice).

I am an extrovert by nature, and all this "me" time is a new challenge to work through and learn from.

Seems like the perfect time to start blogging again. We should all be journaling our thoughts during this period of history that we happen to have been cursed enough to experience in real time. It's not every day you get to live in interesting times.

I hope it all goes back to boring soon. In the meantime, I need to login for my Zoom Friday Happy Hour that one of my friends organized...should be fun. I'll let you know how it goes in my next post. This is the New Normal, kids...here we go.

Stay home. Wash your hands. Meet you back here at a safe social distance soon.

Farmville IRL: The Final Game

I always wanted to plant a vegetable garden when I became a grown-up. My parents planted a garden every spring in the backyard at our house in Virginia Beach. Baby boomers both, Victory Gardens had been a thing in their childhood, a way to feed the family when rations were scarce that they had learned from their parents. My mother’s father, my Daddy Mac, planted acres of vegetables and fruits – asparagus and sugar snaps came in first, in time for Easter dinners that Grandmother would prepare for the family. Strawberries arrived next; Grandmother jammed those.

When we returned to Maryland for our annual, two-week, summer visit with my grandparents, tomatoes and cukes would be ready to pick, along with summer squash, green beans, and shelling peas (hardier than their sugary cousins in the hotter summer months). Blueberries, cherries, and blackberries – my favorite – hung ready for the picking. Sis and I ate as much as we harvested. Grandmother thumped cantaloupe on the vine, selecting the next morning’s breakfast. Corn usually tassled in time for us to pick several paper grocery bags of Silver Queen to take back home at the end of our visit, along with a Farmer’s Market worth of fresh tomatoes and squash (Mom’s favorites), and a dozen pints of strawberry jam.

I have wonderful memories of everything I ate that was harvested from that garden.

I attempted my first in-ground vegetable garden while I was still in grad school in the early 1990’s. (I had been gardening in pots on the patio with mixed success.) My Daddy Mac bought me a cultivator and showed me how to use it when he and my Grandmother visited. “You have to cultivate,” he demonstrated with short chopping motions of the long-handled, narrow digging blade. The plot I had selected for my salad patch lacked two essentials for success, though, good soil and ready access to a water source. That garden yielded nothing, but I held on to the cultivator.

Fast forward to 2009 when I opened my Facebook account. I also played my first game of Farmville. I liked the premise of the game, and I quickly planted a virtual garden that, now that I reflect on it, greatly resembled the garden my Daddy Mac used to plant. This garden thrived, and before long, the bounty of my virtual fields had allowed me to afford a fairy princess castle, which was guarded by frolicking doggies, strolling kitties, and a collection of Chinese ornaments that adorned the grounds of my guest pagoda. I played steadily for about ten months, amassing more virtual crap than I had free storage to house. Then I walked away. What a time suck! And I couldn’t eat any of it...

(I feel a bit guilty about all the virtual pets I quit feeding.)

My success in Farmville, and my more settled status as a home owner, emboldened me to try my hand once more at an in-ground vegetable garden, which I planted in the spring of 2010. I borrowed a friend’s tiller, augmented my already fertile loam with high-test garden soil, and planted two rows of tomatoes in several varieties. To my astonishment, the garden thrived. I weighed the yield each time I brought in a basket load of vine-ripened tomatoes, and the number hit the high 100’s before the first frost killed it all that October. I sauced and froze a winter’s worth of tomatoes. It was glorious.

This one was delicious.

Then, reality set in.

Farmville doesn’t address two critical realities about farming, and neither did my first season as a home gardener. The first is weather. Farmville doesn’t have droughts, hail, or late May frosts. The plant-to-harvest cycle in the virtual world is pretty straight-forward: you plant, you wait the allotted amount of time, and then you harvest, clicking with satisfaction on each square, or deploying the tractor (as any successful farmer does) and harvesting four contiguous fields with a single click. Miraculously, my first season, the weather didn’t mess with my IRL garden either.

The second reality, unaddressed by Farmville, is critters: varmints, rodents, mammals, and birds, slugs and stink bugs. The virtuality of Farmville has none of these creatures. Neither does a home garden—the first season – word takes time to get out on the critter telegraph, but one season appears to be sufficient.

My second season, the garden yield went down. Half of my hot house tomato plants failed to thrive in the unseasonably cool spring, and the local rabbits discovered the row of sugar snap seedlings before much growth could occur. I persisted, and eventually, I harvested enough tomatoes to sauce and freeze another winter’s worth (my spaghetti with fresh sauce is a signature dish).

My third season, the stink bugs hit. They bite the ripe tomatoes just once, but the result doesn’t look delicious. Stink bug bites turn the fruit a dark, diseased color, like bruises from an abuser, that extends to the tomato's core. Lovely slices of fresh tomato are not possible when stink bugs have infested your garden.

Farmville never tells you that.

In 2016, I had to rearrange the salad patch layout to account for the fact that my trees have gotten taller, shading the original garden plot. Maple, pine, dogwood, and crab apple trees do not appeal to stink bugs as a food source, so they thrive. Later that year, some developer broke ground on a new neighborhood of town houses in the field across the street that once sheltered deer, ground hogs, and bunnies. As a result, the critters have moved into the field behind my house.

They found my vegetable garden.

The Critters Did This to the Squash and Cukes

The Pot at the Bottom Once Had a Tomato Plant Larger Than the Pot at the Top 

I don’t mind feeding critters if the cost is a bag of bird seed and five minutes of my time. My salad patch exacts so much more from me, in both time and dollars, and as with Farmville, I don’t get to eat any of it.

It’s okay, though, in two more seasons, the trees will have thrown shade across my entire yard. I’m going back to pots on the patio.

Game over.