In Friendship

I reached out to my former teammates about repeating last fall's volunteer gig with the California Climate Action Corps. This year's event was more modest: just volunteer, without the speeches, t-shirts, and party.

Given two options, they chose to return to San José's Japanese Friendship Garden.

In addition to weeding (by hand, regrettably without the proper tools), we cleared debris from the still-empty koi ponds.

Before:

Work in progress (debris piled on burlap, for removal):

Last year they seemed to have more volunteers than they knew what to do with; this year, there were just a handful of us. And the spiral wishing well that delighted us last year had since been vandalized, and apparently set on fire.

My disappointment in my fellow human beings is evidently unbounded. But today, some of us gave our time and energy to make this little pocket of the world a nicer place.