Soon

June 5,  2020

Day 76

This morning I set up a ladder outside the kitchen bay window and climbed up to inspect the roof tarp where it is secured to the main house roof overhang. I brought with me a homemade rake made from a long, thin strip of plywood with four wood screws set in the end like the tines of a fork and bent at ninety degrees. Using this impromptu tool, I patiently raked out a couple of pounds of leaves and debris. The little implement worked perfectly and when I had cleared as far as I could reach, I swept the troublesome pile off the tarp and down to add its component parts to the ever growing humous layer of the forest floor. To the extent that I could, I eyeballed the tarp surface for cracks and then climbed down to wait for the next rain so that I could check to see what puddles appeared.

For the entire two-month span of lockdown the dumping of refuse at the council-run tip was governed by constraints that made trash runs a real pain. I took some bags down  there in the beginning to see how it worked, but when I discovered the hoops I had to jump through I elected to store my full trash bags along the eastern wall of the shop container. Then I watched the numbers fall and waited for the end of lockdown. Now that we’re at level 2, my personal collection of rubbish bags has assumed an elevated priority. I decided to consolidate bags by packing them tightly before loading them into the car for the trip down the mountain. I built a frame to hold open the bags so that I could transfer the contents from other bags into them and set about turning twelve bags of garbage to eight.

While doing that I did a load of laundry only to find that the mysterious leak beneath the washer is back. Threw a towel down to soak up the small puddle that crept from beneath the whiteware. Roseanne Roseannadana came to mind as I thought about the one-step forward and two-steps back dance I’d been doing around the homestead during the last few days. If it’s not one thing, it’s another… Sometimes it’s like that. You just have to put your head down and drive on.

After lunch Valerie and I drove over to a friend’s lot about three-quarters of a kilometre down the valley. We’d been invited to inspect a pile of timber scraps her builders had amassed during the construction of her new home. We pulled in the curved and muddy drive to find our friend Rosie getting out of the car after the long drive from Auckland. She’d come up with a friend to spend the weekend kitting out her new digs with books and planters and the usual home furnishings.  We sorted out social distancing while commenting that it was strange how we still clung to routine despite there being only one active case in all of New Zealand.

Rosie bought her lot about two years ago with the idea of it being an off-grid hideaway far from the madding crowd where she would be able to put down roots, grow a garden and commune with nature on  weekends or holidays. She has a caravan and has spent a long time on site planning her home. The design she came up with makes the most of a small building area perched at the edge of a precipice that affords a wide-open view down the valley toward Whitianga and the sea beyond.

Working with an innovative construction firm, she’d opted for five twenty-foot shipping containers to be placed on huge wooden piles driven into the clay and arranged in a wide ‘U’ shape with the open end facing the view. The builders had cut out walls and installed huge sliding glass, double paned doors and combined two of the units into a large and open kitchen/living room with bedrooms forming the legs on either side. The fifth container was tacked on in back to form a mudroom/entrance and an enclosed storage room. The site was chewed up and muddy but will recover and blossom and her house is going to be divine.

Rosie had pulled the trigger on construction a month before Covid-19 showed up and seen most of the work finished just as lockdown started. She then had to endure the uncertainty and frustration of two-and-a-half months of everything being shut down. No work could be done and even traveling to the site was impossible. Mice took up residence in her caravan and the shell of her new house was exposed to the full brunt of the onset of winter. Since lockdown ended almost a month ago the majority of the work has been completed and the open lines and sweeping vistas are a testament to her imagination and patience.

Rosie showed us around and then offered us the off-cuts of the piles that were used for the corner posts of each container. There were fourteen in all, twelve inches in diameter and ranging from four to eight feet long. I asked her if she was sure, because if I had to buy them at the timber yard it would cost a great deal. She was adamant she wanted them gone and that I could have them. I accepted gladly, but only after showing her how she could use two of them split long ways to make a nice temporary set of steps up and into her house. Her eyes lit up when I showed her how to do it and she said she’d ask her builders to knock it together. I can’t wait to see how it works out.

In the meantime I’ve got twelve huge posts to move to our lot. Looks like two at a time in the back of our station wagon. Lots of levers and work and straps and tarps and fun, and then I’ve got to find a place to stow them neatly until I can use them in the construction of the upcoming new bathroom/storage room and kitchen expansion. I don’t want to mess up the forecourt but at the same time I want to store them as close to where I’ll be using them as possible. I decided on the way home to make Rosie a bell for her driveway as a house warming gift. Luckily, I’ve got an extra SCUBA bottle around somewhere so that will be easy. Another adventure underway.

Checking in with the numbers I found that there has been no change in twenty-four hours…

Zero New cases. Zero recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases and probable cases (plus 22 deaths) is 99.93%.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/cant-quite-believe-it-new-zealand-tiptoes-towards-elimination-of-coronavirus

 

 

Soon.

 

 

Do Not Rejoice

May 30,  2020

Day 70

First the good news…

The Zeroes say it all on this day. For the first time ever we are one zero away from there being nine out of nine total zeroes on the board. 1 Active case. Zero recovered cases. Ratio of recovered (or otherwise) cases to confirmed and probable cases is 99.93%

 

 

Now for the bad news…

 

 

So, you tell me. Are we as a species doomed to repeat the same tired, tragic and timeworn tales generation after generation? Is it impossible to stop the cycle of the rise of totalitarian governments and the wars necessary to ensure they do not take over the world with their poisonous ideologies?

If you would like to know what the peoples of the world thought and felt while Hitler and the cancer of Nazism was growing in Europe, look around you as China takes over Hong Kong and destroys a tiny remnant of freedom clinging to the shore of Asia’s mainland. Eighty some years ago it was Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, the Anschluss, Norway, Belgium, France, Italy….

Now it’s Tibet, Nepal, the South China Sea and Taiwan. The concentration camps have already been built and the Uighurs, an ethnic minority, are imprisoned there by the millions for the simple crime of being ‘other’. They have no champions and no hope. Those not yet in the camps live under mass surveillance and the threat of imminent arrest. Once inside, the inmates are subject to re-education, torture and possible organ harvesting. Outside, systematic oppression includes the destruction of graveyards and the disappearance of entire communities from the land, maps and eventually, memory. It is happening now and we tolerate it.

 

Toasters are cheap here because life is cheaper there.

 

It is not only lives in the balance, but judgement of history as well. Just as Hitler had a plan for South and North America, the Chinese Communist Party has a plan for you. When all is said and done they’ll rewrite the curriculum of all schools, dismantle statues, destroy landmarks and erase history all while rebuilding the world as they imagine it should be. To the victor go the spoils.

Watch Hong Kong in the coming weeks. There is a reason the CCP placed their boot on the neck of the island two weeks before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. When the former Hong Kong is a couple of news cycles in the past, watch Taiwan. Watch Australia, the South China Sea and Africa. Read your history books and learn, because if all you do is watch, there will come a time when you will see your children march off to a war that you let happen because you could not be bothered to stop it.

Bring manufacturing home to your own land or to countries that do not support totalitarian dictators. Stop, by whatever means, the conducting of business with China. Stop listening to their wolf diplomats scolding the west for interfering in their sovereign right to whatever they like. Stop thinking you can do nothing. Do a little bit each day. Open your eyes. Study your enemy. Speak out. Speak up. One battle is over. The next is well underway.

 

Progress

May 23,  2020

Day 63

The weather forecast calls for six days of rain starting tomorrow so today I collected two shovels, four new large pavers and a few smaller, older ones, some bricks, two bags of setting sand, two levels, a brick layer’s trowel, a pry bar and a rake, and proceeded to make a walkway that would allow us to approach the steps to the forest porch without slipping in the slick yellow clay that is the foundation of the forest floor. It took about four hours with a break for lunch around three in the afternoon. Levelling the path base took the most physical work because our garden used to be the lower part of the drive the original developers put in twenty years ago. They used a type of rock infused fill that resists traditional shovelling and the pry bar came in handy for levering up recalcitrant rocks about the size and shape of clenched fists. Once I had what seemed like a level area I confirmed this with the levels, then spread a bag of bedding sand and raked it smooth.

 

 

The large pavers followed, two abreast, checked and tamped until they were solid and as perfect as they were going to be, given the temporary nature of the walkway. (It’s going to be removed sometime before spring, but that’s another story.)

 

 

The smaller pavers were easier to lay, still using the same method, and then the bricks went down until I ran out of them. Another bag of bedding sand was spread on top and swept into all the joints. I’m hoping the rain will compact the sand deep into each joint and lock everything together. This may involve a little work in the rain tomorrow to add more sand but that’s not an issue as I have to go that way to get to the shop.

 

 

I finished just as the sun set and then used the last light to reroute the water supply hose to the washing machine so that it runs under the shipping container instead of on the garden grass. The new arrangement looked so clean I decided to hide the hose as best I could all the way to the faucet some eighty feet away at the back of the house. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Now the hose is tucked away and hidden for the most part and having done so I cannot help but think there is no better way to bring back the drought. For now though, and until it is needed elsewhere, the hose stays where it is.

 

Tools put away, workshop closed up for the night, I went inside to have dinner and check today’s numbers…

Zero New cases. Zero Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to confirmed and probable cases remains unchanged from yesterday because there are 7 Zeroes on the board. No change in anything, which is a good thing. The more the merrier.

 

All day as I worked there was a huge wood pigeon sitting and feeding in a tree just on the other side of the windbreak to the left of the forest porch. In the morning Valerie and I sat for a few minutes in the sun and listened to a Tui high in the branches singing his wild discordant song. Just before lunch Mr. Lonely, a single quail we’ve seen here for four years, came and waited patiently while I spread some seed for him. After lunch three more showed up a received the same treatment. Their count today was a fraction of their usual numbers and I wonder whether the coming days of rain will keep them away. The chaffinches and sparrows kept a vigil in the grove and thundered into the air by the dozens every time I banged a rock with the shovel or scraped the rake on the growing path of pavers. One by two they return unnoticed to perch in the ponga and scan the steps for any new seed, then take flight again and again as I progressed*.

As I type these last sentences for today’s entry, the rain begins to fall outside, tapping lightly on the roof, slowly building. Soon it will be drumming steadily, running off the roof, into the gutters and downspouts, filling our water tank and our dreams.

 

Goodnight.

 

 

 

 

 

*Speaking of progress, here’s a handy link for you all to help you gauge yours. Enjoy.

https://neal.fun/progress/

 

Reversing Entropy

May 14,  2020

Day 54

Steadily colder, minutely shorter, punctuated by fitful stretches of grey and misty rain, the day swung past low on the northern horizon. I rose late and took stock of supplies and of Valerie’s health and demeanour. We are going to Thames tomorrow to take care of business that was going to have been done about five weeks ago but which will now have to be attempted in this brave new world.

 

 

The list of things we’ll look for in the largest town on the Coromandel Peninsula is not long, but it is comprehensive. Our cache of vitamins must be replenished and the health food store in Thames may be open and functioning better than the one in Whitianga. Government offices for paperwork, two large hardware stores for essentials, an optometrist for a new pair of glasses. No more, no less. In and out, with luck, because Valerie’s back will not fare well on the hour plus drive in and less so after having spent an hour in town. I wonder about traffic and queues and whether the people we need to be working will be in their proper places. Restarting a country that only recently ground to a halt is not going to happen like throwing a switch.

In the workshop after lunch I tackled the organisation of fasteners. It is a task I’ve left until last because I needed the room and there was a lot to be organised. Turned on Venetian Vespers and as it merged with the sound of rain on the roof I went to work. Fasteners are on the list of things people take for granted in life, but not me. If you are conscious of them then they are probably stored with some type of plan. If you are only aware of them when the moment comes that you need one, you probably have them in a jar in your garage. I live closer to the organised end of things but every few months, constant use and shifting priorities leave one’s fasteners in need of separation, replacement, reorganisation and re-stowing. If you’ve done it, you know how the next four hours went. If you haven’t, stop reading this and go visit your fasteners drawer. There’s a universe of infinite possibilities waiting to have its entropy reversed.

Toward evening I heard a knock on the door and there was Valerie come to visit and inspect. I placed a chair for her to sit on and tried to explain what I’d been doing but it was easier to point to where everything was, neat and tidy and perfectly ordered in identical plastic boxes. She smiled and nodded but her mind was elsewhere, her eyes taking in other sights. Things like the new white shelves above the washer and dryer or the bits of china and other treasures poking above rims of boxes lining the opposite wall. We talked about how the shipping container had morphed into a real room at long last. Twenty-feet long by seven-and-half-feet wide and high, lined with shelves and tools, books and benches, it was a far cry from the metal box filled with possessions and plopped down with one day’s notice onto a clearing in the middle of a forest. How had it happened?

I walked Valerie back to the house and returned to wrap up and shut the container. Rain had made everything slick and wet and shiny under the soft light of the lantern I carried. Up the steps to the forest porch, out of the rain, looking in through the tall windows set in double doors, to the golden light within, I shook my head in amazement. It had happened slowly, patiently, painstakingly, one moment at a time, just like today.

 

 

I remember every second of it.

 

 

 

Another good set of numbers for today…

Zero New cases. 9 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 94.6%. Five Zeroes on the board.

 

 

Thanks for looking in on us. Hope you are well and seeing each day with the eyes of a child.

Dancing in the Moonlight

May 13,  2020

Day 53

Rain on and off again today. Winter is officially here and the drought is broken for sure and at last. What is also official is that for the first time in five years the quail have not left to winter down in the blackberry cane thicket near the community vegetable garden. It seems about thirty in three groups of fat and happy and thoroughly friendly birds have decided that the pickings are easy and the company nice here at Lot #18. Where once we could back off the feeding for a few months and rest and relax, we now have a new paradigm of our own making. It’s a happy challenge and the quail are worth it. Seeing them standing patiently on the steps outside our bedroom window, looking in at us, calling ‘Good morning! What’s up? We’re here!’ is so beautiful it melts our hearts. We walk outside and they come down the steps and skitter and dash into the grove and out again and set to with a will when we scatter their seed on the pavers. Life is good, life is good, life is good!

I am finally healed. My lungs are clear as they ever get and that’s a good feeling. Valerie’s back is slowly mending and her stomach, which has suffered terribly from the cocktail of medicines she had to take, is slowly recovering. Yogurt is now on the menu and things are looking up. We spent most of the morning in bed listening to wind buffeting the trees and rain drumming on the metal roof. Inside we are snug and warm and though I never got to replace the roof this summer, it will probably last until next year.

After a late lunch of sausage sandwiches and soup I went out to the workshop and made headway on projects. I finished fabricating a new and better mount for my homemade laser sight and flashlight attachment for my crossbow. Tested it until it was spot on, then made seven new bolts using epoxy, nails and knitting needles. I built a magnetic calendar from some small tile squares, magnets and glue. Found the parts for the lamp repair and got them ready for tomorrow. Organised the shelves and the spare parts and hardware bins. Lots of tiny steps, each taken at the right moment, contributing to the greater whole, all while the river of time rolls majestically past.

Wrapped up at dusk and found that one of our neighbours dropped off a mother’s day package for Valerie that her daughter had couriered to the estate gate. They also left some groceries for us from a trip they’d made into town. There is a buzz in the estate, in town and even countrywide, that you can feel deep down. We are moving to Level 2, stage one, tomorrow. The country is going to open up internally, climb back onto the saddle and ride. Whether we can figure out a way for external visitors to join us in our rodeo is another story, but for now, we’re going to see whether we can stay on top of the numbers and emerge into the sunshine of a new day.

Checking the figures before dinner I see that we have gone another day without a new case and there are still five Zeroes on the board.

Zero New cases. 4 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 93.6%.

For 53 days we’ve felt like this…

 

 

Now we feel like this…

 

 

 

Lots to do yet. Many questions to answer, but for now, for a day or two while we shift down another level, we’re going to have to be excused for smiling just a little.

Thank you all. Stay safe and good luck.

 

 

 

 

Our What?

May 3,  2020

Day 43

2 New cases. 3 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 85%. Two Zeroes on the board.

Two weeks from now will be the time to watch for new cases numbers to rise as the ‘freedom’ of Level 3 facilitates a higher level of transmission. Until then we’re living on Level 4’s dime.

 

Toady it rained off and on as I worked my way through parts of several projects in the workshop. I made more progress on the ‘grouting’, did another load of laundry and cleaned off the old workbench. This allowed me to move all the parts and pieces of the ‘in progress’ from various horizontal surfaces to the newly swept wide open table top that has been the ‘go to’ workbench in the shipping container for four years. Returning to the space after a lunch of homemade tomato soup and hot roll and butter I discovered there is a small leak from somewhere behind the washing machine. Add another project to the list. Will tackle that on first thing tomorrow as the plumbing needs to be bullet proof. Still and all, there was slow progress on a number of fronts and I am happy.

During lunch Valerie read to me an entry from a fascinating blog she discovered (the author had ‘liked’ one of her posts and she visited his blog as a courtesy and found an intriguing and thoroughly well researched site that I am sharing here.

WORLD WAR 3 IS GETTING UGLIER

I have yet to read any of his work, but on the strength of what I listened to and what Valerie has related to me of some of his earlier posts, I think you may find yourself surprised and also more ‘in the picture’ as to where the west stands with regard to China, and vice versa.

 

 

In the illustration above the west is represented by the guy and China is the girl. (I mention this only because it can be looked at either way.) It is my contention that the west must work hard to reverse this. In order to stave off disaster and economic, if not actual, subjugation, we must create a world in which the west is the one asking, “What relationship?” Failure to do so will condemn our children and our children’s children to a future so bleak that I balk at even trying to imagine it.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe/mercedes-benz-apologizes-to-chinese-for-quoting-dalai-lama-idUSKBN1FQ1FJ

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/21/china-says-dalai-lama-reincarnation-must-comply-chinese-laws/

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/when-china-rules-the-world

 

This is the reality we face and the peril we ignore. It isn’t coming, it’s already here.

 

 

 

I keep saying that I won’t be around to see the worst and Valerie smiles and says, “unless you are reborn into it.” So I’m going to do what I can, where I am, with what I have…to change the future. (Which, at present, isn’t what it used to be.) Wish me luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sink or Swim

April 30, 2020

Day 40

Skies getting bluer, water clearer. Too good to last? The gains made by nature will not be lost quickly. Air travel will rebound one day, but the question is when? New Zealand used to be able to count on 10% of it’s revenue coming from tourism. That was then… It’s all in the wind now to the extent that Queenstown, an utterly beautiful, formerly prosperous tourist destination on the South Island is now one of the poorest cities in the country. ‘Jafa!’ is a commonly used epithet here that means ‘Just another F#$%ing Aucklander. Now that New Zealand has basically quarantined itself, the city fathers of Queenstown are trying to lure locals to visit by rebranding Jafa to mean ‘Just another Fabulous Aucklander’. Kind of desperate, but these are desperate times so good luck with that.

Optimism of another sort is evinced by TWG, one of the major retailing groups in the country as they made a plea today for everyone to buy local by supporting their stores. This despite having a reputation for importing nearly their entire stock from China. Can they make a profit without China? Hope springs eternal, and it’s hard not to applaud a good try, but maybe people will be less gullible now.

 

 

The old saying that ‘the bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price fades’ should be changed to ‘the cratering of the worldwide economy should not be forgotten just because a toaster from The Warehouse costs seven dollars’. If people don’t wake up and vote with their wallets, they might as well start learning Mandarin. A realist would.

https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/thisweek/2008/06/02_made_in_china.asp

 

The road ahead will have these numbers as mileposts…

2 New cases. 12 recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 84%. 16% to go. One Zero on the board today and it’s a good one for somebody. More power to them. 235 people still have it. An unknown number don’t know they have it and are in for a rude awakening in a few days time.

 

 

 

 

It will Fluctuate

April 26, 2020

Day 34

 

 

During the previous month members of our tight-knit community have taken it upon themselves to do the easement road maintenance while the workers normally contracted for this job are locked down. Grass is weed-whacked and gorse rooted out. Cracks in the road have been marked for future attention and safety barriers are in the process of being water blasted and re-painted. One project undertaken by the Mahakirau Forest Estate Society Incorporated (MFESI) is the construction of a research ‘hub’ near the picnic area that will serve to house visiting biologists and guest workers. This week individual volunteers, working from an online schedule so that only one person is on site at a time, began staking out and clearing the land for this facility. Life goes on and despite us all being constrained by the challenges of this contagion, our work continues.

Today I started dismantling an old, out of disused outhouse that was knocked over by a falling tree a few years back. I’m using the thin plywood from the walls to make small storage boxes that will sit on the new shelves in the workshop shipping container. Internal framing is coming from scrap wood, fasteners are being culled from a box of screws collected over time from various other building modifications. I throw very little away and am glad I have this habit because all of the hardware stores are closed. Like the whelk, I must live in my home while I build it. The storage boxes will replace the hodgepodge of cardboard ones that contain all of the things that won’t yet fit into our small (but growing) house. I will build one a week while working on other projects higher on the priority list, but eventually they’ll all be done and I can cross them off and move on down the line.

With one piece of outhouse wall to work with, I set up a temporary workbench on the deck of the forest porch and hummed Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning as the sun poured in like butterscotch. The days are getting shorter and colder, but there are still a few warm and pleasant hours on either side of noon. The swallows are active in this interlude, their scratchy chirps filling the sky as they swoop and wheel around the clearing below the house. A few quail come to the steps and call and are fed by their humans. After their meal they sit in the warm sun in the grass at the edge of the grove and dream of summer. Chaffinches have returned from wherever it is they go during the summer and the moreporks are calling earlier in the afternoon. In this tail end of Indian Summer two of the rose bushes are putting out buds and the climbing rata are blooming in orange brush strokes all over the valley.

For a few minutes, Valerie walked in the garden, breathing in the outside air for the first time in three weeks. A smile wreathed her face as she contemplated what must be done to return the place to order. For now that is all she can do, but it is enough.

Other jobs done included two loads of laundry in the newly painted ‘laundry room’. I figured out how to clean the antique Chinese white ceramic lamp whose close spaced decorative lattices have been collecting dust for years. Counting the holes in four square inches and multiplying by the total surface area told me that there are over a thousand tiny, irregularly shaped triangles to clean. I put the lamp base in a bucket of soapy water collected from the outflow of the washing machine where I will let it soak for a few days. Should take about a week to finish that tedious task by doing a little bit here, a little there, in between other endeavours.

Fading light and lowering temperatures told me to stop and wrap up. Shut down, tools down…lockdown. I walked to the verandah and scanned the sky above the ridge to the northwest. It took me a while, but I found the thin sliver of the new moon hiding in plain sight, chasing the sun. So beautiful. So absolutely, amazingly beautiful. I linger there for a time and marvel, then go inside to check the numbers.

When asked by a brash young reporter what he thought the stock market would do that week, financier James Pierpont Morgan famously replied, “It will fluctuate”. I think that holds true for pandemics as well.

9 New cases, up from the day before. 24 Recovered cases. Ratio of recovered cases to active cases is 77%. Two Zeroes on the board today but again they are just place holders. 328 people are still infected.

Thus far I am not aware of anyone of note in New Zealand weighing in on the question of  whether previously infected people develop immunity or not. Can you catch Covid-19 again and again? Other questions are percolating to the surface as time goes on. Massive strokes are being reported in young patients currently hospitalised with active infections and a great deal of the at home deaths in New York City during the past month were from strokes. I will wait for further developments as April draws to a close and reflect on how fortunate I am to have been to be able to self-isolate in such a wonderful, peaceful spot.

 

 

 

On On Off

100 words for Friday Fictioneers based on the photo prompt supplied by Ted Strutz and selected for this week’s round of stories by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.

 

(Copyright Ted Strutz)

The switch positions and the cord wound clockwise said the drop was compromised. The scorch mark told him to burn everything and run. The hole was new and sure to have a camera inside.

<–>

He walked by with measured steps, eyes on the ground. Another wage slave drone headed to a dead-end job. Mindless. Hopeless.

But they were wrong.

He would remove the RFID chip in his forearm and follow protocol for reintegration into the network. Different city. Change of identity. Same goal.

One man’s terrorist. Another man’s freedom fighter.

The victor writes the history books.

There is always hope.

 

 

Yank Thou

100 words for Friday Fictioneers based on the photo prompt below.

 

 (Copyright Melanie Greenwood)

Early Wednesday morning. The courtyard was empty. Queen Elise, in Tyrian purple, sat poised on her throne. Her kingdom spanned the known world and many imaginary ones but she had no staff save for some reprobate jesters and old Reverend Spooner, her herald. Another week was about to start.

The hour arrived. The courtyard filled. Reverend Spooner quieted the room and spoke to the assembled throng.

“On this, the second anniversary of her coronation, please join me in offering a heartfelt three chairs for our queer old Dean!”

Elise sighed, then smiled. At least Russell hadn’t called her that yet.

 

 

Queen Elise and the Reverend Spooner