Month: April 2020

The garden behind my house smells of lilacs and wisteria.

All the purples of spring carried through the air to where I sit.

The sky overhead has gone cloudy, perhaps it will rain later.

The sounds around me are a mix of human engines and the chirps of birds. A saw, a weed whacker, an air conditioner, a horn, and also a robin, some doves, a far-off crow. I glance over my back wall and laugh to see that the business on the other side has parked a mobile billboard where it can peer disapprovingly at me.

A distant rumble of thunder suggests that rain is coming sooner rather than later. I’m glad for the rumble and the rain. Summer rain is among my favorite things. My garden feels of summer though we’re barely mid-spring. The weather is spring, but I’m in the head space of summer where long days only have the structure that I give to them. The lawn has begun to have dry spots. I’ll need to readjust the sprinklers.

Our gargoyle Winston sits in one of the dry spots. He’s been a resident of our garden for the past twenty years. He acquired his solar light only last year. He has a lady bug rock painted by my mother to keep him company.

The red bistro table and chairs where I sit are also newer. I don’t use them nearly as often as I should. They lend brightness to my space and my heart.

The wind picks up and tiny maple flowers fall from the tree like rain. Rumbles grow louder and the first drops of real rain hit me. My old lady kitty informs me it is time to go inside now.

While my young gentleman kitty would very much like to join the outdoor adventures.

Still I sit as rain drops accumulate on my arms and my page. I’m prolonging this outdoor moment before I retreat to the safe interiors of my home. Distant lightning flashes and thunder rolls loud. The wind is lively around me, tossing loose strands of hair into my face and out of it again. Petals from pear blossoms land in my lap, carried across the length of the lawn.
Rain comes in earnest now and a sharp flash of lightning comes with a crack of thunder. Time to go inside.

Last night I wrote a very long journal entry where the subject changed every two sentences. My head is so very full of far too many thoughts. So today I switched off. I slept late thus causing my son to miss his video therapy appointment (we rescheduled) and I missed a phone call from my daughter who I would very much have enjoyed visiting with. I stayed off of the internet except to answer emails and a brief check-in on headlines to see if the world shifted again without notice. It didn’t this time, which is nice I suppose. I spent a little bit of time weeding then spent more time staining the cabinets which are destined to go into my kitchen.
Cabinets before:

Cabinets ready for varnish:

This evening I made risotto for the first time, which requires stirring constantly for 20-30 minutes. I didn’t feel particularly energetic or creative. Most of the things I did were hands-on work with very little thinking required.

My state has decided to begin relaxing restrictions starting this Friday. It changes nothing for me and my family. Our restrictions are mandated by the virus, not the government. Incidence of the virus is low in my area, but the consequences for catching it are potentially high.

For several days now I’ve been fighting a pervasive feeling of pointlessness. Every activity I do requires an act of willpower to get over the “why bother” roadblock. This morning as I contemplated going out for the week’s groceries, I found myself dreading the trip. In the past weeks getting groceries was an interesting challenge in resource acquisition, yet today I did not want to go. I went, of course, because we need food options for the next week. While I was out, a realization shook loose. The portion of my brain which likes to organize, predict, and plan has been functioning on overdrive. This is why grocery shopping has been so interesting to me for the past weeks. Sometime in the past week it became apparent to my subconscious that all my planning, organizing, bread making, and preparations have completely failed to conquer the pandemic. I don’t get to have a Mission Accomplished moment where all my preparations saved us all. Without that emotional reward for completion, a part of my mind did the equivalent of flouncing to her room to sulk. If I don’t get to triumph over pandemic, then why try at all?

Dragged out into the light, this particular brain loop is obviously ridiculous. Many emotional tangles are. Seeing it clearly has already helped make it begin to dissipate. I’m feeling better after having returned to my house. A phone call with a business partner about a potential project also helps. I am reminded that even while physically isolating, I should be expending effort in emotional connection. Collaborative projects help others as much as they help me. The answer to “why bother” is the same as it always has been. People and creations can exist for their own sake even if they never become triumphs. Even if they’re never “completed.” Even if they are clumsy at what they’re trying to accomplish. Things don’t have to have a point to be worthwhile.

Over the weekend I baked six loaves of bread in three batches. The first was begun on Friday, baked on Saturday. It ended up a sourdough and rye hockey puck. The second batch was plain white bread on Sunday. The third I began yesterday and is currently rising in loaf pans. I’ll bake it in the next hour to make two sourdough loaves. Over two days I did a total of an hour and a half of kneading. My arms are sore. I’ve been pondering why the restrictions of pandemic have prompted bread baking. I do find it reassuring to see that I can take raw ingredients and turn them into something edible. If food supply chains begin to break, easy to store and transport ingredients will be more available than complex pre-made foods. A successfully baked loaf of bread tells me I can survive whatever is coming. There are so many flaws in this causal connection it is laughable, yet this is what is happening on an instinctual level.

When the Israelites were in the wilderness wandering with Moses, there was a span of time where they consumed manna. This was a “bread” that “fell from heaven” each morning and the people collected only what they needed to eat that day. If they collected more than they needed it spoiled before the next morning. Except on the day before sabbath when two days of eating were collected. Many a scholar and scientist has tried to explain (or explain away) the phenomenon described in scripture. I’m less interested in the logistics of the manna showing up than I am in how this daily allotment of resources shaped the people. Scripture says they survived on manna for forty years. They spent all of that time learning to expect food to arrive, and learning not to try to gather and store. They had to take each day individually with no reserve against illness or disaster. I assume that when one person fell ill, others gathered to feed that person. For a people who were nomadic and had to carry everything with them as they moved, this focus on today makes sense. I’ve heard it posited that the Israelites needed this wilderness time to re-learn how to be free people. The generations who had been slaves needed to pass on. Yet I wonder, when they stopped wandering, when the manna stopped, were another forty years required for them to reshape their culture again?

I see the idea posted in a dozen different memes, tweets, blog posts, and articles. It is the idea that during this worldwide crisis we should, as individuals, not spend too much energy thinking very far ahead. I’ve even expressed this thought myself on more than one occasion. It is an important survival mode. Solve today’s problems with today’s resources and leave tomorrows problems for later. I’m in that mode. Each morning lands with its allotment of manna, its bundle of tasks for the day, emotions, energy, brain space, and physical resources in my house. Sometimes the tasks have me acquiring physical resources, other times expending them. Sometimes the emotions flood everything else and the whole day feels like a trip through the Swamps of Sadness. Sometimes I have space to think and wonder how this survival mode is shaping me, shaping my family, shaping the world at large. The longer survival mode lasts, the more it will permanently alter the people who lived through it.

There are advantages to living in the now. This is why it is often taught as a meditation practice. Control over our lives is always tenuous at best and people are happier when they make peace with that reality. Yet it is one thing to consciously choose to relinquish the attempt to control and a different thing to have control (or the illusion of it) ripped from one’s hands. I imagine an Israelite woman pausing in her morning gathering of manna for her day to look at the vast wilderness all around her. Does she open her heart and accept that wilderness, or does she hurry back to her tent to feel safe again? I know I’ve done both, depends on the day. Feelings of safety are definitely one of the things which are in short supply. Sometimes they’re available, other times not. This past weekend I felt like that woman staring out at the wilderness and wondering what happens if one morning the manna just isn’t there. The perilousness of existence loomed large. Which is probably why I focused my eyes on kneading bread.

Give us this day our daily bread. When Christ spoke those words in his sermon on the mount, he was deliberately reminding his Jewish audience of their Israelites-in-the-wilderness heritage. “Daily bread” had deep cultural significance. Daily bread is manna, the gift from heaven that arrives just when it is needed and vanishes when not. Give us this day the things we will need to conquer the challenges of this day.

Because my mind is incapable of seeing a single facet of any thought, as I’ve been writing all of the above I’ve had a running commentary about the importance of planning ahead and being prepared. I’m waxing philosophical about manna and the needs of each individual day, but I’ve been building up my food supplies deliberately so we can hard quarantine for weeks without going hungry. That is the opposite of manna philosophy. It is deliberately seeking a control lever on the world, something concrete I can do to increase my family’s chance of survival. I suppose it is the result of the culture I’ve been raised inside: Exercise faith, rely on God for all things, but also store a year’s worth of food. I’m nowhere near a year’s storage of food, and I’m in a similar state with my attempts to exercise faith and rely on God.

The bread is in the oven now. Hopefully this pair of loaves will be light and fluffy. If they are, some part of me will relax a little because I managed to supply a bit of daily bread. It is not rational, but it is real. As for the rest of this day, I’ve got my allotment of tasks and resources. Hopefully the latter is sufficient to meet the needs of the former.

On social media a friend of mine asked people to post what their lives are like right now. I thought it was an interesting snapshot of how life has changed for many people. So here is my snapshot.

We’ve been isolating since about March 11. There are five people in the house, all adults except the 17yo who might as well be one. Only two of them leave to go to places. My son (22yo) goes to his early morning custodial job five days per week. I go to the warehouse twice per week to mail packages and I go to grocery stores once per week to acquire food. There are also trips to the pharmacist, but I’m getting the prescriptions lined up so I can do that once per month (hopefully.)

We were eating take home food from local restaurants about once per week, but the frequency of that is slowing down now that we’re more used to cooking food when we want to eat. We don’t generally have a family meal time, but when a person decides to cook they generally make enough food for two or three people and then share. Howard tends to make large batches to feed everyone. My 17yo has been doing hamburgers and beef stroganoff. My 19yo is exploring pasta and sauce options. My 22yo mostly does frozen pizza. I’ve been baking breads, cookies, a spice cake, etc. Right now I’ve got a sourdough rye raising for 24 hours. I just signed up for a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture.) So starting in June I’ll get a bi-weekly bag of fresh local-grown produce. Hopefully I’ll put it to good use.

Howard has begun to find his work mojo now that all the set-up issues for staying at home are mostly resolved. He’s been focusing on the comic but frequently feeling guilty for not getting book work done. My work has been more scattered. I’m finding myself hopping from project to project a lot rather than settling in for hours. Thirty minutes weeding. Fifteen minutes playing Breath of the Wild. Twenty minutes answering email. Forty minutes revising a story and submitting it. Thirty minutes sanding cabinets. Fifteen minutes reading a book. Often I bounce through things more than once in a day. Each thing is useful and moves a project forward, so I’m just rolling with this scatterbrained approach rather than trying to force myself to focus. I’m still tracking news stories and pandemic numbers more frequently than I probably should.

Emotionally things seem to have stabilized. The two house residents in therapy both came out of their video sessions cheerful and saying “there wasn’t much to talk about.” Other than bouncing around between activities, I feel pretty stable. However I’ve noticed that I shy away from any sort of story or media that will pull on heartstrings. I actually noped out of a video which was a beautiful and meaningful commentary on pandemic life. I could tell that it was going to completely wreck me emotionally. Instead of shedding a few tears, it would unlock a deep well of feelings that would take me hours to re-contain. So, while feeling mostly okay, I can tell there are ways in which I’m not. At some point the emotional piper needs to be paid. But not this week. So strange to know those depths exist and yet to still be honestly and truthfully feeling happy and optimistic.

I miss my married daughter and son-in-law greatly. I don’t hear enough from them about how they’re doing because they’re too busy having their own lives to report on how their lives are going. This is a normal state of things for parents of adult children I think. Only, like everything else, it is not normal because I use to be able to catch up with them when we saw them in person and now no one knows when we’ll get to do that again. That is one of the chains of thought that threatens to unleash emotions, so think about something else. Send them pictures and updates via the family discord channel. Drop off baked goods on their porch. Love them sight unseen.

This week I picked up Pokemon Go again because it gives me a daily assignment to go for a walk. I’ve also been outside soaking up sunshine daily. I crave the sunshine, but like everything else I’m seeking it in short spurts. I’m noticing increases in vehicle traffic around town. There are more people out and about. I think that Utah County is going to see an increase in virus cases. Though perhaps that will be offset by increased sunshine. I’m still waiting for several large events on my calendar to officially cancel so that I can stop holding contingency plans for them in my head.

I think that’s my snapshot for now. It’s as scattered as my days have been lately.

We got the phone call yesterday evening. The pulmonologist had a cancellation, would Howard like to be seen at 8am today. We said yes. Howard needed to go in person so that the doctor could listen to his lungs. This was the first time breaking quarantine in a month. The result was mostly good news. Howard’s symptoms are classic for a severe case of asthma, which can very easily be caused by a viral illness such as the one Howard had in January. The doctor is confident that we can get Howard breathing better than he has been for the last three months. Learning you have severe asthma to treat for (probably) the rest of your life isn’t great, but it is so much better than the other explanations for what Howard has been experiencing (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease COPD, or heart failure.) We have new medicines for Howard to take daily and hopefully this will help him have more energy for creative things.

Until we have access to an antibody test for Covid-19, we need to continue being careful and self isolating. But at least now we have some answers and help.

Today the world felt peaceful and lovely. I am still aware of the pandemic, it still shapes many of my choices about how to spend my day, but I’m not mired in fear or anxiety. I’ll take it and appreciate today for what it is. Tomorrow, or next week’s problems can be dealt with later. In no particular order here are some nice things from today:
I found both toilet paper and yeast at the grocery store today.
I succeeded at making sourdough bread.
I dropped off a loaf on my daughter’s porch so she can have some too.
My adult son who lives with us spent some of his stimulus check on a VR headset, he and his brother have both been having a blast getting exercise and playing together.
My 17yo made homemade hamburgers for himself and his 19yo sibling.
When I took a walk I saw a lawn covered in bright yellow dandelion flowers and bright purple grape hyacinths.
On a different lawn there were dandelion puffs perfectly catching the light.
The weather is beautiful and invites me to step outside.
The first two cabinets arrived today and another batch will arrive tomorrow so then the project to finish cabinets can start in earnest.
I’m glad to have a day with a list of pleasant things in it.

I attempted to apply for a small business grant today. I was online and clicking the button one minute after applications opened. The site was overloaded and I couldn’t get in. An hour later they had a notice up saying please be patient as they had more people than expected. Within four hours the notice was changed to say that applications are closed. The level of fear scrambling for ways to keep afloat that small businesses are having to do is really high. I understand where the pressure to allow things to re-open is coming from. My timelines are longer, but many small businesses are basically hand to mouth on a monthly basis. From an epidemiological standpoint now is not the time to be opening things back up. Yet I think of the careful balance of radiation therapy or chemo, where the body is damaged with toxins intended to kill the errant cells before killing the person who has them. Sometimes the patient has to suffer the side effects, other times the treatments must be stopped because the patient needs time to build strength instead of being constantly drained. Some things need to be opened back up in areas of the country where cases are lower. Those areas can feed a little bit of strength back into the local and national economies while harder hit areas must stay shut down. This is one of the ways that we be brave and help each other. Just as another way is for individuals to stay home and work when they can. Then if case counts climb, areas close down again.

I currently live in an area with a lower case count. My state is already making moves to ease restrictions. They are doing so before we’ve even reached a definite infection peak. I fully expect this to result in a higher peak that is further out. Only time will tell if the peak is so high that hospitals are overwhelmed. Unfortunately the time delay means we can’t measure the results of yesterday’s decisions until two weeks from now. In those two weeks there are already plans to open up more things. We had a demonstration last Saturday which may result in an infection cluster, but again, we won’t know for weeks. I have mixed feelings about all of it. I understand the push to open and I fear the results of opening.

At the end of the year I go through my blog entries from the entire year and format them into a book which I have printed to put on my shelf. I often create the annual family photo book at the same time. The process of going through the posts and pictures becomes a year-in-review for me. I am then able to process the experiences of the year and ready myself for the next year. In the past month I’ve blogged as much as I did in the past five months of last year. I felt the weight of those accumulated posts and I knew that the job of assembling posts in December was getting bigger and bigger. I decided not to wait until December. I started putting together the books now. It relieves a possible future burden and gives me something concrete I can do while so many business tasks are in holding patterns.

The first thing I noticed was that January, February, and the first part of March all feel like they belong to a different year. My focus and concerns were valid and important, yet everything changed on a pivot point of March 11. There is a clear Before Pandemic to During Pandemic. I wonder if there will be a similarly clear transition to Post Pandemic. Somehow I doubt it. Even many of the posts I wrote at the beginning of pandemic feel long ago. I remember being in that emotional place, but I haven’t been there for a long time. As I read, there were five posts that stood out to me, they each had a reminder for me that was useful.
Grief as a Creative Process
Predictions, Realizations, Trolleys, and Metaphors
No Longer the Conductor
Filtering the Noise
Checking In

I put all the posts into place in the book, but then I ran out of posts to place. I wished I could keep going, in part to continue having a project that was sufficiently absorbing that I lost track of time. It was so lovely to get into creative flow for the first time in months. But I wanted additional posts even more because I would desperately like to read ahead, to skim read over the next several months and break the tension of not knowing what is coming. I think that not knowing what is coming is part of why I sat down to put the book together now. I’ve no idea what my emotional resources will be at the end of the year. I don’t know if I’ll be able to face a year-in-review. I don’t know what I’ll be grieving or if we’ll be able to rejoice instead. So, just as I’m doing for all our other resources, I’m stocking up now. I know I have the emotional energy to spend now. I don’t know what I’ll have later.

This morning the sun is shining, my flowers are gorgeous, and the world is still having a pandemic. The dissonance of this drives my choices in ways that I don’t understand. Perhaps at some future date I’ll be able to look back and make sense of it.

I’ve been thinking about the people in 1929 and the stock market crash. In all my history courses it was so clear: Stock market crash = beginning of the Great Depression. Yet now that I’m living through a rolling, unraveling crisis I wonder if it was that clear to the people who lived through it. I’ll bet that life felt mostly normal for a long time, months perhaps a year. I read today’s news and I see all the seeds for massive economic collapse. Yet my daily life is pretty close to the same except for a feeling of impending doom which comes and goes.

I’m also thinking about the radiation therapy I had twenty five years ago. The effects of a radiation treatment always took time to manifest. Taste buds shut down instantly, everything else took time. It was toward the end of therapy that the accumulated damage became visible burn marks on my neck until the final week when the top layer of skin gave up and sloughed off. When the treatments stopped things still got worse for a few days afterward. Getting better was a slow process. A year before I felt normal. Five years before I began to lose the fear that the tumor would return. Ten years before the irradiated skin stopped being drier than the skin around it. Damage has already been done we just haven’t seen the full ongoing effects of the damage yet.

This morning I don’t have any additional information about the world that I didn’t have yesterday, but everything is feeling heavier today. I’m worried about supply chain problems. I worry that the longer it takes us to ready Big Dumb Objects for printing, the harder it will be to physically get it printed even though I’ve held the money necessary to pay for the work. I wish that the events I’ve got scheduled for August and September would officially cancel so I can let go of the contingency planning for them.

I think that I need to go do something useful to occupy my brain in a positive way rather than letting it continue thinking.