Coronavirus Time

While I was still teaching at Université Paris 8, located outside of Paris in the suburban town of Saint-Denis, at the end of class I’d day, “See you next week.” And I’d often add, “Inch Allah.”

In a town where today about 40% of the population is Muslim, this would make students smile. Yes, we’d see each other next week, God willing, but so much could happen between now and then! We could step into the street and get hit by a car, hop on a flight to Tahiti, or come down with the flu. But then, one week later, we were all back again.

That was 2019. In 2020, who knows what’s next? Since the beginning of this year, how many plans out the window, how many trips cancelled, how many tragedies, how many deaths?

Decidedly, the future is no longer the future, at least not in the pat way we used to think about it: We did the planning; the future conformed to us.

In France, we are gradually moving out of confinement. A week ago hotels reopened. On June 2nd, the French will once again be sitting at sidewalk cafés. Most businesses are open. Masks and dispensers of hand sanitizer are everywhere.

Yet—and this is a big yet—the future remains uncertain. Somehow we’ve been humbled, deprived of that illusory mastery of future events we took almost for granted when we used to look a day, a week, a year down the road.

Confinement has given me a lot of time to think about this and as it comes to an end, rather than rush out for a haircut or a new pair of shoes, I head to my garden. That’s where my new future is taking place.

At the end of March, when greenhouses and garden stores were closed, I went to the local supermarket and stocked up on seeds: tomato, cucumber, watermelon, zucchini, radish, pumpkin, eggplant, hot pepper, lettuce and red beet. I had a plan. I was going to take all the little plastic pots I’d saved from previous years when I bought young plants in a greenhouse and this year start my own.

I’d never done this before and I planted my seeds with great care, taking my time, doing things as best I knew how. Soon I had dozens of small pots, each one carefully marked with the name of the plant I hoped would grow.

The dining area in my kitchen, bright and warm, became my green house. The little courtyard outside, the daytime home to my pots. Each evening, after watering, I carried them back inside. And I watched and waited, ardently hoping for future plants I could put into the earth.

Lettuce came quickly, almost too quickly. I had sown the seeds in a planter and the young sprouts were battling for space and light. As temperatures rose in mid-April, I went ahead and separated the plants, transplanting nine of them to my strawberry bed. On a gardening site on-line, I’d read that strawberries and lettuce enjoy each other’s company. I also seeded rows of radishes to form a border around the strawberry plants.

Soon, they were covered with white flowers, future red sweet strawberries. Yes, the presence of lettuce did them good, and in a matter of days, the radishes were sprouting! Much sooner than I imagined, I’d be savoring the rewards of my hard work.

Then one morning I went outside and the lettuce plants were either wilted or gone, all nine of them. The radishes that had so quickly grown plump and red, were reduced to a thin strip of white. Gone, all gone, my plans for an early harvest down the drain.

At first I blamed slugs and snails, major enemies, but stepping gingerly among the strawberry plants, my foot sunk into the ground. A hole opened, an underground gallery. The enemy was neither snail nor slug. It was something else.

I know about moles. I live with them. My garden is mined by them and I’ve come to appreciate the soil they turn up while burrowing. Every time I see a molehill, I attack it with a trowel, removing the topsoil and transferring it to my vegetable patch. I know those moles are destructive, but I let them work for me. And I know how to distinguish between a molehill and…something else.

Then one evening, looking from my bedroom window into the courtyard where, because of a nighttime rise in temperatures, my plants were “sleeping” outside, everything having sprouted according to plan, all doing well, I saw a little creature, brown, furry, and cute. It looked like a cross between a mouse and a hamster. It was a campagnol. I looked up its name in English: a vole. The word meant nothing to me, but the definition sent chills down my spine: a field mouse, highly destructive to crops.

Nine heads of lettuce, my radishes, not bad for one night’s work.

I next set about trying to find means to combat it. Mine is an organic garden. I wanted no poison and I feel queasy about traps. I found a solution, on-line once again. I put long metal poles in the ground each time I came across a hole. On top of the pole, I placed an empty bottle of mineral water. The critters have very sensitive ears. The wind shakes the bottles and the clatter resonates in the ground. This is enough to make them move somewhere else.

They also can’t stand the smell of elder. I scoured the countryside for elderberry bushes and brought some branches home, along with bags of ferns—to keep away the snails.

Today the pots are no longer in my courtyard. The plants are in the ground! All those seeds I bought two months ago have “grown up.” I have 17 tomato plants and for the moment, they are doing very well.

The eggplant and hot peppers are in wooden planters in the courtyard—they would not appreciate the east wind that sweeps across the garden. Only one (so far) of my potimarron, a French pumpkin with a chestnut taste, has been eaten by a campagnol. And my strawberries are red and delicious—the fern branches spread around the plants seem to keep snails and slugs away.

At the end of summer, will I have a harvest? Inch Allah! Coronavirus and my garden have humbled me. I’ll keep working hard. As for the future, who knows?