After 13 hours on the road, WAY too many miles of Missouri, and a few desperate hours of sleep on deflated air mattress, the CASA girls began our work in the CASA Community Garden of Huntsville, Alabama at 7:30am this morning.
CASA stands for Care Assurance Systems for the Aging and Homebound. It's a program in Madison County, Alabama that provides services for the elderly and homebound, who are unable or unwilling to leave their homes for hospitals and/or assisted living facilities and retirement homes. These are people who have aged and find nursing homes outside their price range, or people who need a little help, but refuse to give up their independence. CASA helps them all by delivering meals, installing wheel chair ramps and fall prevention systems, and doing household chores, among other things. I chose to volunteer here as a crash course in working with/for the elderly as a part of my senior thesis project (more to come later!).
Today was a bit different than we were expecting...This week we won't be working much with the elderly. We'll be cleaning up and dressing up the CASA Community Garden for their garden party fundraiser. Noble work, but a bit removed from social interaction, and VERY difficult.
This garden is not your typical flower garden. Located near the Huntsville Botanical Gardens, the CASA Community Garden is an organic plot built on top of an old parking lot. You wouldn't know it by looking at it, but not too far underneath that fertile soil is a gravel pavement. The garden is completely run and funded by volunteers, and there is no government money involved. Yet despire its lack of resources, the garden produces 8,000 pounds of organic produce a year to supplement seniors' grocery bills and get them healthy food for free.
We worked with Lee and Karen today, both volunteers and avid gardeners. Lee is a landscaper who specializes in edible landscapes, and Karen just likes to garden. Lee had us moving metal cages, composting, fertilizing potato plants, putting down wood chips, pulling weeds, and picking up trash all morning. Karen got us planting peppers, harvesting onions, pulling more weeds in the afternoon. All of this in the Alabama heat...from 8am to 5pm.
It was about the point that I was standing alone on a pile of moldy wood chips with a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow that I thought to myself, "What the heck does this have to do with aging?" and I thought of cop-out answers like, "I'm helping them indirectly," "Exercise and vegetables are good for everyone to age better," and "This is how people get leathery skin and hunched backs." But hours later, when I was using a leaf blower to clear woodchips off the path and Karen said to me with a twinkle in her eye, "There's something beautiful about a woman with blower," that I realized, I wasn't just helping old people, they were helping me. Did I mention Karen's 70? She's 70. And Larry is in 60s at least. Both were roaming about the garden doing hard labor like they were pros. And they thought we were the disabled ones, being city girls who didn't know how to cut the green ends off of onions, let alone compost or grow vegetables organically. And both were so funny and upbeat, you'd neverknow they were at the later end of life. In fact, Karen spoke of visiting "old people" at the nursing home like they were decades older than she was. Neither seem to have noticed that they, too, could be CASA clients.
I look forward to working more with Lee and Karen. They defy all aging stereotypes, both psychologically and physically. I want to know about their lifestyles and how they came to be thriving at this later moment in their lives. I want to know about their plans for the future, and how they view their less abled peers. But mostly, I'm just excited to hang out with them. When we're working together for a good cause, the age gap really doesn't matter.
Ciao for now.
CASA stands for Care Assurance Systems for the Aging and Homebound. It's a program in Madison County, Alabama that provides services for the elderly and homebound, who are unable or unwilling to leave their homes for hospitals and/or assisted living facilities and retirement homes. These are people who have aged and find nursing homes outside their price range, or people who need a little help, but refuse to give up their independence. CASA helps them all by delivering meals, installing wheel chair ramps and fall prevention systems, and doing household chores, among other things. I chose to volunteer here as a crash course in working with/for the elderly as a part of my senior thesis project (more to come later!).
Today was a bit different than we were expecting...This week we won't be working much with the elderly. We'll be cleaning up and dressing up the CASA Community Garden for their garden party fundraiser. Noble work, but a bit removed from social interaction, and VERY difficult.
This garden is not your typical flower garden. Located near the Huntsville Botanical Gardens, the CASA Community Garden is an organic plot built on top of an old parking lot. You wouldn't know it by looking at it, but not too far underneath that fertile soil is a gravel pavement. The garden is completely run and funded by volunteers, and there is no government money involved. Yet despire its lack of resources, the garden produces 8,000 pounds of organic produce a year to supplement seniors' grocery bills and get them healthy food for free.
We worked with Lee and Karen today, both volunteers and avid gardeners. Lee is a landscaper who specializes in edible landscapes, and Karen just likes to garden. Lee had us moving metal cages, composting, fertilizing potato plants, putting down wood chips, pulling weeds, and picking up trash all morning. Karen got us planting peppers, harvesting onions, pulling more weeds in the afternoon. All of this in the Alabama heat...from 8am to 5pm.
It was about the point that I was standing alone on a pile of moldy wood chips with a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow that I thought to myself, "What the heck does this have to do with aging?" and I thought of cop-out answers like, "I'm helping them indirectly," "Exercise and vegetables are good for everyone to age better," and "This is how people get leathery skin and hunched backs." But hours later, when I was using a leaf blower to clear woodchips off the path and Karen said to me with a twinkle in her eye, "There's something beautiful about a woman with blower," that I realized, I wasn't just helping old people, they were helping me. Did I mention Karen's 70? She's 70. And Larry is in 60s at least. Both were roaming about the garden doing hard labor like they were pros. And they thought we were the disabled ones, being city girls who didn't know how to cut the green ends off of onions, let alone compost or grow vegetables organically. And both were so funny and upbeat, you'd neverknow they were at the later end of life. In fact, Karen spoke of visiting "old people" at the nursing home like they were decades older than she was. Neither seem to have noticed that they, too, could be CASA clients.
I look forward to working more with Lee and Karen. They defy all aging stereotypes, both psychologically and physically. I want to know about their lifestyles and how they came to be thriving at this later moment in their lives. I want to know about their plans for the future, and how they view their less abled peers. But mostly, I'm just excited to hang out with them. When we're working together for a good cause, the age gap really doesn't matter.
Ciao for now.
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