Lockdown Landmarks

After months spent being confined to our own homes to help stop the spread of Covid-19, many of us are finding it hard to think clearly. You walk into a room and forget what you were intending to do. Recalling tasks is challenging, words remain on the tip of the tongue and your mind starts wandering off as you jump from one online meeting to the next.

While scouring the web to try and understand this thickening ‘brain fog’, I stumbled across an interesting article. Living a sort of repetitive 'Groundhog Day', where one day blends into the next with no change of scene and a lack of visual cues, could be having an important impact on the way our brains process memories.

But how to improve short-term memory when life is contracted and social distancing? According to research, it is much easier to record memories when the background is changing, as we move around and visit different places at different times each day. So we decided to get out of the city and visit the Hochleithenwald in Lower Austria, which is also home to a rather special landmark.

The Hochleithenwald is the largest oak-hornbeam forest in the Weinviertel and is located around 15 kilometers north of Vienna. Within the forest are several 1,000 year old trees, like the BildEiche, pictured above which is a protected natural monument.

While on our search to find this special tree we picked some wild branches. Once home again, we carefully arranged the the branches in our simple Aito wall vase. Every time we look at the leaves with their black berries we are reminded of our trip outside to the BildEiche, the smell of the forest, the cold air on our faces - our own lockdown landmark.