In early February, I had made the rounds of dropping food off at new neighbors homes; Pasta with Tomato-Fennel Sauce and Home made Italian Sausages, Beans with Smoked Ham Hocks and Rice, culminating with Baked Chicken and Brown Rice with Gravy Side. Comfort foods that any family, any ethnicity would enjoy in those chilly winter months. My new house in Gladstone, Ore. warranted that a savory outreach was the best calling card.
Then, COVID hit!
OK, I thought, it'll be a few weeks and life will resume. Maybe a month or two at the very worst.
As weeks turned into months and the end-game kept getting pushed out, we saw our jobs, our families, homes and neighborhoods retreat into storm-shelter mentality. It seemed this was a tornado siren that would never turn off. We became existents; people that lived from hour to hour, day to day in our government imposed shelters, devoid of human contact that required us to hunker-down until the extended tempest was determined to have passed.
It is October now and we're sick of it! We missed all our summer cook-outs. For the 1st time in God-knows-how-long, I didn't have a 4th of July BBQ. We didn't can and pickle vegetables as we always have. There is no jam made from Oregon marionberries, raspberries, apricots and peaches. Fear gripped us like no CNN news bulletin could. It has been a story worthy of a Netflix series of a Zombie Apocalypse.
Then, the corpse of existence began to breathe.
Sherri, my neighbor across half my back yard, was watering her garden one afternoon, behind the dense arbor vitae that separates us and I called out through the hedge. It's so thick, we can't see through to each other.
"Hey, Sherri! Long time, how's it goin'? I hollered, looking away from the hedge.
"Brian? Is that you? Oh my gosh, well, things is fine, but, dang I'm 'bout to go crazy with all this COVID nonsense! Cain't go anywhere and my apartment is only so bi-iig!" Sherri is from San Angelo, TX where I lived for period, chasing a wild-cat drilling, oil-rig dream.
We visited about our vegetable gardens, families and restrictions relating to "th'CO-vid."
"D'ya'll like peppers?" she asked, "Jalapenos and Sweet Peppers?"
"Well, heck yeah!" I promptly replied, "who doesn't ?!"
"Wait uh min-it, Ima bring ya some..." she replied. As Sherri took off to retrieve her garden bounty, I ran into the house, flipped open my pantry door and grabbed 2 qts of home made tomato-fennel sauce for trade.
Before she arrived, I found a thin area of our hedge to offer as a pass-through; digging away at branches and thicket to create a conduit for our garden sustenance. It was like a prison exchange with COVID as our jailers.
As I stood on my side of the hedge, a faceless arm extended to me through shrubbery, with a cardboard flat of cherry tomatoes, heirlooms and sweet peppers. I reciprocated with 2-one quart jars of Tomato-Fennel sauce.
Each of us felt we got the better of the deal.
"Thank you, Brian!"
"Thank YOU, Sherri!"
"God bless you, stay safe and say hey to Janice," she followed.
"Yes, ma'am," I concluded.
Walking back through the yard, admiring Sherri's harvest, I was warmed by the notion that a few kind words and some lovingly tended vegetables passed through a hedge can go a long way in keeping our friendships nurtured with the food we need most.
Love!
Take care, God bless and remember:
"Food, Faith, Family and Friends,
the Best Things in Life Aren't Things!"
