Pandemic Garden Sign

Date2020

Dimensions109.2 × 74.9 cm (43 × 29 1/2 in.)

Credit LineGift of Catherine Hunter, London, Ontario, 2021.

Object number2021.003.001

Label TextCatherine Hunter made this sign to show her support for essential workers in April 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic. It stayed on her yard for many weeks. Her motivation for making the sign sprang from seeing her neighbour cleaning his taxi late one night. She realized how much essential workers were risking as they did their jobs, jobs they couldn’t do from home. She wanted to demonstrate her support for them and recognize their critical contributions. At the beginning of the pandemic, Catherine felt the same as most people about the pandemic, “We knew about COVID but never in our wildest dreams anticipated that ‘this something out there’ would change our lives so profoundly, so dramatically.” But, again, like most Londoners, Catherine realized how this was having a much greater impact than originally thought – “About the middle of April, it became apparent that my holiday from the world was in fact not a ‘holiday’ but I was being cut off from the world because I had to, not because I wanted to. It’s one thing to choose to isolate; quite another to have that isolation imposed. Fear and angst started to creep into my day. The weather was grey; the world was grey. Somewhere about this time, I went to the grocery store, not because I really needed anything but because I just wanted to see if all this was really as bad as the news was making it out to be… Until this time, I sensed I was living in a sort of time warp. The world had stopped but in fact, it was still going on. My grandson just celebrated his first birthday; there was the mass shooting in Nova Scotia; my friend’s dog got really sick; my teacher friends were trying to teach kids on line; my custodian friends were still flushing water every day, bodies were piling up in Italy but the dandelions were still coming up. I could only sense that for people life was going on ... some way, some how. But I really had no way of knowing. Somewhere in the insanity of it all, there had to be some humanity. There were only two things that I could be sure of each day ... the first was that the sun would come up and the second, was that at some point it would set.” The isolation was the toughest part of the early stay-at-home orders from the government. Catherine describes no cars to be seen driving along Oxford, only going into stores when it was late at night or when no one else was being served. Catherine was inspired to do what they could to “fill other people’s tanks” by a little girl on her street that had written a small walking game in chalk along the sidewalk. “One day a little girl on my street chalked a ‘Happy Walk’ on the pavement blocks of the sidewalk outside my house. Every other block was decorated with flowers, and butterflies and pictures of happy kids with smiles. But the blocks in between bore extraordinary instructions: jump for joy, wave at a passing car, bow to the bus driver, do a happy dance, skip backwards, make a funny face, say ‘hi’ to someone passing by, do three jumping jacks. When I went to thank her ... her mom said, ‘We just had to do something other than on-line school’. ‘Well’, I said. ‘You made my day. I did the Happy Walk all the way to the corner. It was the funnest thing I’ve ever done. Thank you!’ The little girl beamed. Then I knew that’s how you fill people’s tanks ... Simply by saying ‘Thank you’. By acknowledging their importance. By appreciating not just what they do but who they are.”

NameSign