It's been a social marathon for me, and today, with luck, all these comings and goings will slow down enough to allow me to plant my potatoes.
Spuds and all, I wouldn't trade the past four days of enjoying my peeps for anything.
Friday night: Ma and Pa Love and the Young Love's sat along one side of a table and watched three treasured family friends on the other side get acquainted with each other.
Saturday night: Twas Luzianna crawfish, ready for a boil, shipped to Idaho which attracted a group of folks who mostly knew each other and did some catching up on life while standing around a decades' old weathered barn.
Those previously unacquainted had connected and become friends by the time the table cloth splattered with crawfish parts and empty corncobs was emptied and put away for next year's gathering.
Sunday: Four Love's, four dogs along with thoughts and messages from the fifth Love, in an outdoor setting next to beautiful Boundary Creek we all love, made for a memorable and pleasant Mother's Day.
Monday: high school classmates met at 11:30 a.m. or whenever they wanted to show up (some were there more than half an hour early this time) and gathered at our table at DiLuna's Restaurant.
As usual sweet Amy took care of us and saw that we all got fed and watered while we caught up on the latest month's events and shared some rich local history.
I love these lunch gatherings.
I could not have asked for any better blend of extended weekend fun, and now my mind is filled with happy memories.
Those memories and the smiles that go along with them will keep my mind occupied as I rake up the dirt along the west side of the barn and put those potato parts with their eyes in the ground.
It will be a hot day in May today, and tomorrow it's supposed to rain, so it's the perfect day for spud planting.
And, when I'm not cutting spuds or burying spuds, I'll be mowing down some fast-growing tall grass. Maybe the dandelions will give up this time around and allow me some extra days in between mowing.
Meanwhile, horses will be enjoying their two slots of time grazing in the front pasture, and Bill will probably be doing some work in his woods.
Should be a great day ahead.
We've enjoyed the pleasant sunshine and warmth of late, but it is time for a break and some pitter patter.
Two worries for the weeks ahead: will we get enough rain to sustain the pastures and will there be enough moisture to curb forest fire worries.
Seems like those two worries are an annual affair, and then, of course, comes the concern that too much rain will play havoc with the hay harvest.
Life is filled with these stressors, and somehow we get through them or we adjust to deal with their consequences.
For now, happily, no big needs for adjustments appear in the near future, and I hope it stays that way at least for a day.
Happy Tuesday.
We sure do have fun at our classmate lunch gatherings, and we'll always be happy to see more classmates join us.
Next lunch get together: June 8, DiLuna's at 11:30 a.m. Mark your calendar.
Seated: Sharon Clark Bayless, Mike Rosenberger. Standing: Ruthann Kiebert Nordgaarden, Susan Stark Tate, Marianne Brown Love, Judy Chronic Dabrowski and Karen Martin Rolf.
When ya get this old, ya start scratching your head and wondering about what you want to leave behind and who's gonna get to enjoy it.
I loved the latest mannequin theme in front of DiLuna's.
I read this piece last week on X and found it fascinating.
by Anish Moonka
Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.
He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.
Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands.
Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.
Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there.
Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.
Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to.
Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.
Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants.
For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.
Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression.
Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built.
No room left for the mental chewing.
The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper.
Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.
