Covid 19- Gardening and The Lore

By YaseminB

Wed, 01 Apr 2020
  • 364 reads
1 comments
 

Covid 19- Gardening and The Lore

 

My son points at an avid news piece: all BA flights to Gatwick cancelled. Husband’s contract with BA has just been extended, working on a reward application on android; his face is closed.  All my work as a private tutor has dried up, not permanently I hope as I settle down to a session with my daughter teaching her past participant tense. Though she is unparticipant on the task in hand. She flicks through pictures from yesterday, “we have been to Mexico!” she beams, “It has been a ten hour flight! And the hostesses had been very nice to me, giving me an extra ice-cream!” She adds, attempting to use past participant tense in a sentence.

“It was a ten hour flight!” I correct her and “And the hostesses were very nice!”

I can’t think of a sentence beginning with a past participant tense now; the most useless of all the tenses. Only useful in an ancient lore! Presently we are in a lore! A dark and destructive one! I hear my inner voice.

My phone beep; it is my friend who has a plant nursery! They had a stall in an open air market to showcase their crops only a couple weeks earlier.  It is nearly April; the exact calendar to plant fruit and vegetables and ornamental plants plentiful, a few weeks earlier. “Everything is online now!” She laments, “Though no one buys anything anymore!”

I buy some seeds on their gardening website for our edible garden my daughter created a few days earlier! Then serendipity! I discover a few more sunflower seeds lurking in nooks and crannies.

My daughter plants them in your own garden! It is another sunny day! Wren and parakeets abound. My husband thinks he even spotted a bat last night! We live opposite of an ancient cemetery! The scavengers! The bringers of plague!” I wouldn’t mind it if they disappeared from the face the earth!” my son is mournful! He is missing his grans and friends!

 Eagerly awaiting our tomato seeds now! When this lockdown is over, when this dark lore ends, the life as we know it will begin!

 

 

Certificate U
Biography
Surreal

Comments

Submitted by Di_Hard on

Another lovely installment! Don't be down on the bats, though? My brother (whose job is to do with protecting environment) told me the trouble started because the bats have been put under so much stress because of destruction of the areas where they live, that it has effected their immune system. Bats have a very very strong immune system usually, but because they are  under so much pressure these days (just think about how city noise must effect a creature with such sensitive hearing!) and hungry and losing the places they roost,  they are getting sick. Because in the past viruses had to be super tough to survive in bats (because bats used to be super tough) now the virus is beating them and when they are sick and dying the virus looks for some other creature to infect. So when people capture bats to sell in markets the poor bats are even more stressed and sick and it does not take a hungry virus long to find lots and lots of new hosts - the people who brought it out of the forest and into the city.

Sorry to give you such a big rant! Your children might like being able to hear the bats calling? It is a special thing because when you get older (like me) you can't hear such high noise any more