Mike Morin

Thank you to the New Hampshire National Guard, local community and safety personnel who continue doing their parts in batting down the COVID crisis. After four visits for vaccine injections, (two for Lady Baba, two for me), I am grateful not only for their service but impressed by their upbeat and pleasant demeanors as the endless parade of cars stream through the parking lot at Nashua South every day.

From our first visit in February when the process took over an hour, to the second trip 10 days ago, the process lasted half as long as February’s experience. Those in charge figured out how to expedite the process.

It was also refreshing to encounter politeness and professionalism from check-in to departure. The men and women are doing their jobs with smiles and kindness. The pandemic, though a horrible world event, brought some positivity to light. Borrowing an expression from George H.W. Bush, a ‘thousand points of light’ shine brightly every day at these mass vaccination sites. Science prevails and the destination of herd immunity is within reach. While Barbie experienced some well-publicized side effects of the vaccination process, I escaped relatively unscathed.

I’ve concluded that recommendations of self-quarantine following the second shot is to prevent injuries from grandchildren. The hug deprivation on both ends is palpable. If grandkids were to run to meme and pepe immediately after the second injection instead of the two-week wait, the sheer force of collision could send the elder recipients to the hospital for hip replacement surgery. That would be self-defeating. More Zoom. More anxiety.

Speaking of anxiety, I finally got around to raking last autumn’s fallen leaves from the lawn. The snows came and obscured my laziness until a couple weeks ago when 60-degree temperatures melted the snow and again reminded everyone of my delinquent yard work. But I was smart about it this time.

Instead of killing myself with a one-day rake-a-thon, I chipped away at them as the snowpack slowly receded. Each day that week, I removed the newly-exposed leaves until all had been raked away. My newly-found yard work mojo inspired me to chop away at all the tree-choking vines that invaded my yard from adjacent yards. Some were so thick, they actually had a bark covering. So with leaves raked and invasive vines removed, what’s next? I probably should clean out the potted herbs that expired with the first frost in November. Only the rosemary survived winter. Barely.

What did survive winter was all the stuff in my garage. With a fully-finished lower level in our house, there is literally no storage space. So, our cars live outside while college textbooks, excess kitchen gadgets and unopened boxes of unidentified objects remain in place, two years after moving in.

I can’t hide all that stuff with snow like I did the leaves. Maybe I need to hire that junk removal company where when you point to a pile of stuff, it disappears. I wonder if they’d make autumn leaves disappear, too.

Contact Mike Morin at mike morinmedia@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @MikeMorinMedia. His column runs the first, third and fifth Sundays of the month.

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