Week 5 - Day 28. Easter Monday Musings

Yesterday was Easter Sunday.  Our family celebrated the holiday pretty much in the same way they would have before the pandemic.  On Saturday, we received texted photos of the grandchildren dyeing eggs.  On Sunday morning, we got texted photos of them hunting for Easter eggs.  I made a special breakfast—-Huevos Rancheros and cinnamon rolls which we enjoyed at our leisure.  We viewed the Virtual Easter Service of our little church.  It had lots of special music and art work by the children and a sermon that skipped the Resurrection altogether and focused on sightings of Jesus on the road back home.  After lunch, we went on a really long walk pushing ourselves beyond what we’d done in the past.  It seems we walk further each day.  After we came home, I cooked a really nice Easter meal.  In recent years, it’s just been Bob and me so that wasn’t different for us.   Our children had nice meals too.  The Palo Alto family went over to their other grandmother’s house for waffles and a second egg hunt, while the E. Lansing folks had a special meal of soup and bread prepared by Paul.  We chatted with both families on FaceTime.  For me, it felt like what we’d do on any other Easter Sunday, except of course not going to church.

Life isn’t normal, though.  The pandemic roars on, over 22,000 people have died of it so far in the United States.  We will likely be sheltered in place for another month, even though there is quiet talk in the news about beginning to ramp up the economy and return slowly back to normal in some parts of the economy.  But there was a cautionary article this morning’s SF Chronicle about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.  It told how too soon removal of restrictions caused a second wave of the disease that killed twice as many people as the first.  I struggle to understand the meaning of Easter in light of the current pandemic.

Out in our patio, there is a dwarf peach tree I stood before this morning..  It was a gift from our neighbor Kate many years ago probably in the mid-1980’s.  She got it from the Botanical Garden where she volunteered as a propagator.  It was a seedling from a peach tree that was originally brought back as a peach pit in the pocket of a soldier from China in World War II.  My tree has flourished and blossoms profusely each Spring with gorgeous magenta flowers now made even more beautiful in contrast to the blue-gray lichens covering it’s limbs.  After the flowers fade and the leaves come out, one sees it’s diseased.  It has a terrible cases of peach leaf curl.  After I remove all the badly infected deformed leaves and it leafs out again later in May.  But it also suffers a bad infection of scale too.  The little insects swell with the sap they suck.  I try to pick all their sticky round bodies off as well.  And the tree survives year after year.   I take off the many peaches it sets as I think they take energy from the poor little tree.  And if those plights aren’t enough, there is a family of moles that live amongst it’s woody roots. This year I sprayed the barren stems with a copper solution to try and kill the leaf curl fungus.  It mostly worked.  Today plucking off the little peaches and scale,  I thought how amazing this tree is.  Each year after enduring

it’s Spring diseases, it thrives.  It’s new leaves grow long and deep green.  It’s deep roots provide enough nourishment for it to recover and thrive.  So it will be for us.