I'll Take an Evening Like That: Backyard, Burgers, Cutting Up Firewood, and Butterflies on the Butterfly Bush

Like most K-12 educators and college faculty, a summer typically spent outdoors, gardening, appreciating the warmer weather, and letting the brain chill-out was somewhat superseded by the insanity of Covid-19, the up and down meetings, the constant changes, the numerous calls to help out colleagues across the nation, the sharing of information, the practicing of online tools, and the data-gathering from numerous resources updating numbers, probabilities, science, and political decisions.

Yes, I'm heading to sabbatical, and on August 21st, 2020, I can attest the pace has not ceased since last March. It has been non-stop thinking, creating, planning, re-planning, writing, dreaming, hoping, revising, revisiting, and fact-checking.

Perhaps that is why after I spent 9 hours on ZOOM calls yesterday, I decided I'd complain a little (about cooking) but headed outside to barbecue nonetheless. I talked to the elderly woman next door who lost her husband this past year and the teacher to the other side (all over the fence and at a distance). Each has different wonders and fears.

I grilled my hamburgers (delicious, by the way, because for two years my lil' sister has sent me spices that are perfect for fish, chicken, and beef), then ate outside with the potato salad (that required me to boil actual eggs successfully...as posted a couple of days ago).

Afterwards, I took time to chop up firewood for the fall from trees that came down with the last tropical storm and I also just sat and looked at my butterfly bush that was loaded with customers. In other words, I enjoyed a summer evening, even as the cicadas are singing their back-to-school songs.

The dinner was delicious, and for a second it almost felt somewhat normal, except we typically have a backyard full of friends to enjoy such an evening with us....

...that has subsided temporarily.

It will return.

The hamburger was delicious, my potato salad-making abilities that passed my mom within the Ripley gene-pool is definitely with me, and I'm heading into this Friday extremely proud of my CWP teachers who work so hard, my colleagues at Fairfield University who have not given up evert second during the summer for whatever happens this Fall, and for everyone who is doing their best to be kind to their neighbors, this nation, one another, and a potential tomorrow.

I feel as if I'm still running on adrenalin mode (which will make sense, I believe, when NWP makes some announcements today) and I look forward to this beautiful Friday ahead.

Life is simple, really. Follow nature. Look to what is good. And when you lift the cover of the cooler on the back porch and find there's a housefly-orgy, just let them screw and reproduce (with hopes the maggots don't land themselves in your trash cans any time soon).

Like most, I'm tired of the maggots. I know they wipe away the dung and have a biological purpose, so I'll let them be.

TGIF.