Even, or maybe especially, during strange and doleful times, the whimsical comes into its own.
Yes, we have our daily work, our responsibilities. A book of class lists here, a book of hymns there.
As the late afternoon shadows fall, we know what the evening news will say, how the numbers are mounting up; we watch it anyway, feeling ineffective on our sofas in comparison to those on the front lines, battling it out. We may not be the ones who most urgently need to keep our spirits up, and yet yes, we — all of us– in fact do, too.
One evening a couple of weeks ago, taking Rocky out for a last walk, I spotted a string of colorful lights at the end of a neighbor family’s driveway. Hmm, I thought, not Christmas anymore, is it? Maybe they just forgot to bring them down. Or maybe, what with everyone staying home all the time, they wanted to add a little flair to our street. No longer just a route taking us from here to there every day, it has become where we are and where we stay, except for brief forays to the Great Beyond.
Then I heard from a neighborhood text, activated mostly when bears or coyotes are spotted, that the ten year old girl who lives up the driveway from those lights, with more pockets of time now that she isn’t getting on the school bus each day, had created something called “Gnome Town” on the grass near her mailbox.
Perfect — an excellent reason to leave the computer! But first, let’s see, when I think of a gnome, am I thinking more of a dwarf? A little research clarified that gnomes are known for guarding treasures under the earth, while dwarfs like staying in thatched cottages and singing when they go off to work in the morning. But honestly, when you see a picture like this, can you confidently say which is which?
Sure enough, when I made the short walk, I found several little men in their mostly red hats, looking to be following social distancing rules, too. A large frog stands guard.
Yesterday when I returned, someone had added a cow, once part of a weathervane , way in the back, behind a wire fence. The welcoming sign in front invites any passers-by to contribute new items in keeping with the theme. I haven’t yet but am confident I’ll find something in our basement (in dire need of sorting through) soon.
In the meantime, the immediate effect was to take me back almost 20 years ago, when our daughter threw herself into creating a sprawling place called “Kid Town” in our back woods. She and her friends made separate “houses” using old chairs and scraps of rugs and whatever they could find in the tool shed (or kitchen, darting in and out). “No Grownups Allowed!” she yelled, hands on hips, if we dared to walk back there to investigate. Looking at the current sweet scene down the road, with open admission for all, I saw the differences but felt the similarities. If there were such a thing as a “Girls At Play” sign, I’d keep it forever.
In the days when Gnome Town was first under construction, my husband was hatching his own idea for performance art. He had a dream, apparently, that told him he must resume doing something he hadn’t done (except for maybe twice, ever-so-briefly, just to demonstrate he could) in about forty years: ride a unicycle. I won’t go into the details of the dream, partly because I don’t understand them myself and partly because it might not be ethical. By the way, though, he claims that this Covid-19 time we’re in is causing a worldwide explosion in dramatic dreaming. Imagine the book that someone could put together! Better a book, probably, than everyone actually carrying out whatever they believe they were instructed to do in their unconscious states.
Anyway, this is how the front page of the newspaper captured the bishop, wearing his funny hat, riding around the Capitol building, partly to raise funds for the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation’s Community Crisis Action Fund. If you’re interested in the link, here it is.
No easy feat, to be sure. Getting on, he tells us, is the hardest part. Back when he was a teenager determined to learn, the mailbox was essential for that. And he also needed a sharp-edged tool to chip away at the ice on the road so that he could practice making just one rotation.
Not having any handy figurine of a guy on a unicycle, I think I’ve found something else to bring down to Gnome Town. As the sign indicates, it would be just for a short-term spring loan. Taking a clue from the cow, I remember we too have a kind of wooden contraption that could be a weathervane (the wind would make the gizmo on the bottom go back and forth) but is in need of some repair and also really too cumbersome to get way up on a roof. He’s a kind of a lumberjack, or actually, more like a regular guy sawing wood out behind his house.
Once I get him down there near the gnomes, he’ll look mighty hefty. Those sweet eyes of theirs will widen, for sure. But I think everyone will get along just fine. “Take care of one another and stay safe!” I’ll say when I depart.