Keeping Track

 

I wait until after Christmas to buy my new appointment book, waiting for the half-price sale. Some years, the shelves, either at the Barnes and Noble or the shelves of the virtual kind, are still well-stocked. Other years, I have to settle for a book that's either too small to receive all my scrawled notes or too big to fit on the old dry sink that holds my old fashioned telephone with the wires that disappear into the wall.

Like the telephone, the appointment book is old fashioned. I could choose to download an app on my cell phone or use one of the many suggestions that pop up every time I log into Zoom. But I don't. I instead choose to continue my old fashioned ways.

I record many things in these books - certainly appointments if I happen to be near enough the book when the appointment is made. But then again, most appointments come complete with either telephone or text or email reminders these days. When it's relevant to remembering, the temperature gets recorded - mostly in the spring when I'm in the early stages of growing things, or to track the string of hot summer days that have become more common these days. Other weather, like the 14+ inches of snow we woke up to yesterday morning also finds a place on the calendar.

It also serves as a recordkeeping space for the farm. I once spent a great deal of time entering all the farm records into a beautiful web-based farm management application, only to revert back to my appointment book when it seemed impossible to find the time to log it all into the program. 

A look back at 2020 is different. There among records of the first lettuce harvest, the first ripe tomato, the 23-degree night that took out the tomatoes in the high tunnel are these kinds of notes "Jane to town: post office, grocery store (for Mom too)" "Arthur to Close's" "A & J to Wegman's in Corning" "S.D. visit with Aucotts on deck"

"You know there's an app you can set on your phone to track everywhere you go," I can hear a much-younger person tell me. But, the app couldn't tell me that I arrived on back Crandall Hill on a warm sunny March 18 after a drive across the country, just as pandemic was becoming a common word.