Take the time for some digital detox

I keep a mix of meetings, entertainment and sports.

And some days, especially in the winter, I come up with nothing.

At Christmas time, I came across a deck of cards called 100 Ways to Switch Off and Digital Detox. I bought it to use as a stocking stuffer.

A few weeks after Christmas, I noticed that the deck of cards was still sitting on the coffee table where it was placed after being removed from the stocking, unopened.

I opened it up and thumbed through a few cards.

Some of the suggestions were good. Some seemed impractical, and some I thought I might tuck away and use one day when the battery drained on my phone or some other catastrophe occurred.

Then, a few days later, I was curating the calendar when I got stumped. I could find nothing scheduled. There were no government meetings, games, clubs, dances or concerts.

I turned to the cards, flipped through a few and wrote an item. Digital Detox: Put your phone away and cuddle up with a good book.

I have since used Digital Detox as a calendar item three times. I think. Two came from the deck and one I made up myself.

On Monday, I decided my daughter and I should take a walk for lunch. We had a reasonably sedentary winter and needed to participate in some physical activity.

In our neighborhood, a walk around the block is almost exactly one mile.

We decided to walk a mile and leave our phones behind.

“We could talk to each other,” I said.

We walked out the door, turned left, walked three houses up the street and saw our neighbor Ron Aldous boiling off sap in a lot owned by Herb Bullock, another neighbor.

That’s a great photo for the newspaper, I thought. Only I didn’t have my phone.

We walked over to see the setup. Ron had a small evaporator pan on top of some cinder blocks and over a fire. Steam was rolling off the wildly boiling sap.

I asked Ron if he would be there long and if I could take a photo for the newspaper.

He said he would be there all afternoon, so we took off to complete our walk.

When we finished our mile, I ran into the house, grabbed my phone, a notebook and my camera, and headed back up the street only to see Watertown Daily Times photographer Christopher Lenney walking toward Ron with his camera in hand.

Chris stops by my house a lot because we have been friends for 30 years and because he uses my WiFi to send photos to editors at the Watertown Daily Times.

Chris had spotted the fire pit and the maple buckets a few days earlier and made a note to stop by regularly, hoping to catch somebody making syrup.

Ron told us that boiling the sap was Herb’s idea.

Herb has lived in our neighborhood as long as anybody, and the lot he owns across the street from his house is often used for neighborhood gatherings.

In 2021 during the pandemic, Ron said, that Herb approached him about harvesting the sap from the sugar maples that ring the lot and are abundant in the neighborhood and boiling it off so neighborhood kids could see how maple syrup is made.

Ron agreed, gathered up the equipment and now, when the sap is running, he is out there, tending the fire, billowing sweet maple steam into the neighborhood air and talking about the process to all who stop by.

I had never noticed because I work at home and rarely leave the house during the daytime. When I do leave the house, it is in my car and I am headed the other way into town. I wave to the neighbors I see when I pass them walking their dogs or working in their yards, but I rarely stop.

That deck of digital detox cards may have been the best Christmas present ever.

Tom Graser is the editor of the St. Lawrence Plaindealer. In 2001, he avoided his boss for three days to prevent getting assigned a cellphone. “What would I ever use that for?”