The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

With garden planting already under way, I’ve been searching for seeds. Usually I roll into the nearest hardware or grocery or garden supply store and load up on whatever seeds I need, plenty to choose from, some organic, some not. This year I found the display racks pretty much empty. So I did what any modern gardener worth his manure would do, I went online. I found some of what I was searching for, not all by any means, and the price was at least double what it would be ordinarily. After a few days of letting my fingers do the walking, I let my credit card to the talking.

I recalled back in those early plague days long ago when not just toilet paper was being hoarded, but yeast and flour too. I’m a bread maker so it was more than marginally disconcerting to discover some of the basic ingredients were unavailable, although I already had a large supply of wheat berries, seeds, grains, molasses and flour stored up. The other day a friend who sells us beefalo called to let me know he’s swamped with calls from desperate people wanting him to sell them meat. Another buddy mentioned that freezers were selling out all over. You could order one, but hell might freeze over before your meat got frozen in a new cooler.

The latest tactic to avoid food shortages in these End Times seems to be the purchasing of baby chicks. Wait a few weeks and you got eggs by the dozens and even fricassee once you’re sick of omelettes. You can use the chicken droppings on the garden, double your lettuce production. E-I-E-I Oh! We’re all going back to the land, maybe buy a couple calves, build a barn behind the garage.

What are we to think? Are folks expecting the plague zombies to surge into their grocery stores and clean out the shelves to the last loaf of white dead bread? Are they planting gardens, growing food, storing meat and pizzas, baking bread and fermenting homebrew? If the internet goes offline suddenly, you can bet your crop of zucchinis that panic will ensue within minutes, gun safes unlocked, doors bolted, a siege mentality spreading across the Home of the Brave. Only those with guns and cans of pork and beans will survive. Looters will decimate the sad little backyard gardens and no freezer without a kryptonite lock will keep the hordes from emptying their booty.

I give it a month before the rabbits munch down the lettuce and the carrots and the neighbor dogs feast on the chickens out in the crummy pen thrown up by the sandbox. Maybe two before the bread making experiments and the brick-like loaves stop seeming worth the trouble. Three before the bathtub gin starts poisoning entire neighborhoods. Believe me, we’ll clamor for an end to the quarantine. Death by virus might seem a welcome relief.

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