One of my favorite memories that I love doing every year, and this was more so as an adult, was going with my father, we have a very large tulip tree in our woods, down in the gully behind the farm. And we would jump on the four wheeler, and go back in the woods to check the tulip tree to see if it was blooming. And riding with him on the four wheeler and spending the time admiring this tree, it's I don't know, I keep -- I should probably try to find out, I think it may be one of the tallest tulip trees in the state of Michigan. It's on a slope, so it's kind of hard to tell how tall it actually is. And it's surrounded by other trees. It's quite a steep slope actually, but I guess I should get some geometry going maybe and try to figure out how tall it is. But we would go down there and try to -- I remember one year picking some of the flowers off and I brought them back to Minnesota with me. I was flying and we had wrapped them up in a tissue and a plastic bag to keep the stems or the branches wet and I had them in my backpack and I carried it on the plane. And so many people commented on the beautiful flowers and asked me what they were and I'm like, "well, they're not -- they're flowers, but they belong to a tree" and they could not believe they weren't an actual flower. And I guess the fact that it was just, y'know, going back there with my father and that was something that we would do together in the early spring. I think they bloom in early May, that we would get to have that to look forward to and do when I would be home in Michigan.

I'm thinking about the year of COVID and now that we're in 2021, and I think I had a very different experience with 2020 because whereas --prior to covid, I had spent a lot of time in my home writing books, so it was a pretty solitary life, sitting and writing and things like that. And the one thing I did was on Wednesdays I worked at our church's food pantry. That was my one day a week doing that. When COVID hit, many of our volunteers are elderly and so when things started locking down, they needed to do so as well. They either had health issues, or they were just at risk, so as the volunteers stayed home, we kind of -- a few of the other volunteers and I decided that we would pull together a very small skeleton team and work the pantry through COVID. We were not going --we weren't gonna shut the pantry because we knew people in our neighborhood were still going to be hungry, and probably more people. So it started with just about five of us and I started going in every day Monday through Thursday for the whole day, not just an afternoon a week, that I was doing. We had to change our entire protocol. Instead of allowing our clients to come in and kind of shop through the pantry, we would help them, we had to just pack boxes and then load them in the car, as they drove into the parking lot, we'd ask them to raise their trunks and then we would put the food in. Mask wearing of course immediately happened, and gloves so that we wouldn't contaminate anything. We would sterilize the tables that we would put the boxes of food on, and everything else in the area where we worked. And so the year of 2020 became a year where I was out almost every day and doing something that was so significant in a year that was so depressing and disabling of all of our brothers and sisters. So I had a year that was full of worth and value. I was excited to get up, and to get to work, and pack boxes.

My favorite tree? Wow, I like apple trees because you know, you can pick the fruit. You gotta an old crabapple tree out by some property I own, and it's probably been there forever since I've known it. I've been there-- my grandparents had bought the property, homesteaded property actually, in the early twentieth--late nineteenth early twentieth-century. I'm not sure that tree hasn't been there forever. But, right now I live in an apartment building in town, and there's some kind of an old -- and I don’t even know what it is, kind of an old raggedy straggly old tree out back. And the summer it shows up with leaves and it's gorgeous and it’s glorious. And I'm sure it has some kind of a name, but I don't know what it is, but it softens the landscape for me in the summer. It kinda blocks the sun from my windows and gives me some privacy from prying neighbors. And so I don't know what it's called, but that's my favorite tree.

Have you found or created any unexpected community or connections in the past year? I think Michigan Diaries is probably it, right? You know, why did I start participating? I was living in a hotel, you know just looking for a way to express myself, thought it was cool to contribute to science. I kind of found a little community it's kind of cool. Also the sea shanties a little bit, I haven't like talked to anyone except Michigan Diaries about that but and family a little bit but they're kind of like, oh cool. That's kind of just, kinda of weird to be part of an anonymous community online.