Like holidays, Halloween for instance, or Christmas, the garden hype starts earlier and earlier every year. Thanksgiving’s turkey carcass isn’t even picked clean when the first seed catalogs start to arrive. Burpee, Johnny’s, Gurney, Fedco ….they.
This Week in Lincolnville: Bearing Down on Eighty
. . . counting, counting, counting Mon, 05/03/2021 - 11:30am
Steve Hardy boning the pork shoulders that will become delicious pulled pork.
Photos by Char Dickens
A Mimosa helped with the baked beans.
A couple of old-timers waiting for the ribs to be done.
. . .5, 6, 7 . . .
Counting starts early these days, first thing, after letting Fritz out to pee. Back to the bedroom where the exercise stuff is set up. Don’t be thinking Peloton or free weights; more like a rolled-up towel, a rubber beach ball, a leather belt, a green stretch strap. It’s the last week of my physical therapy program before knee surgery.
I remember as if it were yesterday, thinking that 28 was impossibly old. Today I sleep with my cane nearby, handy for those middle-of-the-night trips to the bathroom. What just happened? Well, for starters, fifty years beyond that dreadful age of 28.
Got that? It’s only my own latest bump against change; most likely to many of you this is old stuff. But the changes are accelerating at a pace that’s hard to keep up with. Gas lights were replaced with electric lights. Big deal. It was still the same function, just a different delivery. Cars replaced horses. Stuff still got moved.
But computers and the web have pushed us to previously unimagined places, places we didn’t know we wanted to be. Those tiny “phones” we all carry in our back pockets can do way more than the systems that took man to the moon in 1969. People vacuum their houses with little robots, answer their own doorbell from thousands of miles away, turn on the lights, turn on the heat, turn on the car with a voice command.
That’s it. I’ve got to get a cat. This was the longest stretch my house had been cat-less, more than a year since our last cat, toothless, lovely Smitten, hadn’t returned from her wanderings one morning as she’d done like clock-work for many years.
She was Wally’s cat, a Christmas gift from another D-I-L. He loved that cat. So much that when our vet, Justin Blake, told us she had severe gum disease which was affecting her health and should have all her teeth out, Wally didn’t hesitate. “Let’s do it,” he said to me.