Stay at Home Time

This week I worked on knitting my blanket. Obviously I didn't finish by the end of March, but I am half way there. I got to use my new swift to wind up the second ball of this particular yarn which signals that the blanket is indeed half done! Very exciting!  I am happy to be this far along and enjoying the near effortlessness of the pattern. (Aren't cakes of yarn like this just so pleasing?)

I also got my garden planted. I had to go with what the garden center had on hand that I could order online and pick up curb side. It made it a little weird, but it worked in the end and I am glad I could do it.

This is where we grew vegetables with some success last year, so we are going ahead with this again although with a few alterations.

And this is a new spot I am trying this year, particularly for cucumbers which didn't grow successfully last year. Look at the little peas starting to climb the edge of the compost fence! There are also pumpkin seeds sprouting in that compost heap. It would be so cool if they grow to be pumpkins!

During this stay at home time, I've been using my popcorn popper a lot. It makes me think of when I was a kid on Sunday night mom would make bowls of popcorn for us to eat for dinner (! I know, but we ate a huge late lunch, so who was really all that hungry anyway?). We used to take our bowls in descending sizes--big bowls for the bigger kids, small bowls for the smaller kids--and watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and the Wonderful World of Disney. Mom would take her bowl (the biggest one, of course--like the one I use for myself now!) and go lie down and read a book.

This got me thinking about how Mom used to pop up a bunch of popcorn and put it in a bag and we'd bring it along to the drive-in movie, or in the summer, to the dollar movie. At the summer matinee's we had to smuggle in the popcorn and Mom would hand around the bags after the lights went out.

So, I guess popcorn is a kind of comfort food really. It takes me back to easier times. I hadn't thought of that until I started typing this. It's what I try to tell my students about writing--in the act of doing it you discover things.

I hope you are all well.