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My emotions are all over the place today.

Howard got the results from his Covid 19 antibody test: negative. He has not had the current pandemic illness and has no antibodies to defend against it. This means that whatever is going on with his lungs is a separate issue and him catching Covid on top of it is dangerous. So our level of alertness has gone back up right when the rest of my communities seem ready to breathe easier.

We got a wearable oxygen tracker for Howard. We finally have visible data for why he’s constantly out of breath. This graph represents an hour of measurements. Orange is not good. Red is bad. The little triangles at the bottom represent points where Howard’s O2 levels dropped into the range where the device sounds an alarm.

This is what we expected to see, and in some ways it is validating to see. Howard isn’t malingering or making this up. Something is really happening. Interesting that while neither of us for a minute thought he was making this up, yet both of us had a relieved “something is really going on here” moment. Mine was followed by grief and fear for what this means for the future. I’m working to pull back from too much contingency planning. Right now I need to make moves that provide a solid foundation for a number of possible futures. Moves like paying down debt and being conservative about spending.

Gen Con officially canceled for 2020. I knew it was coming and mostly felt relief because if they chose to continue we would have had a tangled mess for our booth. Howard and I can’t get on a plane at any point this year. So Gen Con is canceled, our booth is rolled over into next year’s Gen Con, the hotel reservations are canceled without penalty, and further information is coming about a virtual Gen Con event and virtual Gen Con Dealer’s Hall. I do have some sadness about friends I won’t get to see this year, but I’ve already emotionally processed a lot relating to Gen Con. This only leaves us with two more events in 2020 where decisions will need to be made. In November and December we’ll start having decisions about 2021 to make.

My church just released instructions for how in-person meetings can resume. The instructions are in stages with clear instructions and diagrams. It is up to individual congregations to decide which steps they are ready to take. In the instructions is an acknowledgement that there will be some members who will need to continue holding services in their homes instead of in a congregation. That’s us. Howard’s negative antibody test and his breathing graphs mean that we won’t be sending anyone from our house to any large group meetings any time soon. I discovered that the email announcement made me sad and afraid. My parents have been good about isolating, but if in-person church resumes they’ll be tempted to go. I miss being in a congregation singing, but I’ve grown to love our family-only Sunday meetings and I would be very sad to lose them. Responsibility landing on local leaders means they have to make tough decisions and no matter what they decide someone will be angry with them. The local leaders will be under pressure both to open up and to stay closed. This is all so complicated with layers of community, social obligation, connection, loneliness, faith, fear, and a host of other factors physical, social, and emotional. I have a lot of emotion and not many answers.

For my household, we already have our status quo. We’re not opening up any further than we already have. My son who works put his hours back to normal, but I’m picking him up from work rather than having him ride public transit. My daughter and her husband can visit, but no one else (who doesn’t live here) comes into my house. Grocery shopping is limited to once per week. Shipping happens twice per week. Other than that, we stay home. This will be our normal for the next three months. August will bring a follow up doctor’s appointment for Howard and school decisions for my 17 year old. I don’t have to deal with those yet, but I know they are coming. Also coming are the decisions where people around me are comfortable meeting in person for things and I’ll have to say no. At every step I’ll wonder if we are over reacting or if I’m risking too much.

It’s probably time to find something useful to do while all these emotions settle a bit.

Yesterday I was feeling calm and accepting. I had a whole set of thoughts about normality and creativity. Those thoughts are still true, and I’ll get to them in a moment. First I want to acknowledge that today I don’t feel calm and accepting. Today I keep bumping into ways that the world is different than I’d like. I’m mired in concerns about how my young adults can build independent adulthoods in the current social and economic climate. There are road blocks across many of the paths forward. I’m not sure if we can pursue driver’s license because the DMV may not be open for permit testing. School petered out to a close, which isn’t technically closed yet, might as well be though. The venue where one of my kids was volunteering pre-pandemic has begun to re-open. When they decide to re-launch their volunteer program we’ll have to navigate pandemic anxieties on top of the social anxieties that were already a problem. My head is full of “what if” and contingency plans. I know I need to bring myself back to today and what today needs. But that can be hard when I’m feeling the physiological effects of anxiety. Doing some physical chores helped, but I’m still feeling a bit wobbly.

The calmer thoughts start with all those memes about how great creations came out of their creators being isolated and bored. Naturally there are counter memes telling people not to feel pressured to write the next Great American Novel while they are dealing with a pandemic. Yet we might get a huge creative surge out of the pandemic social shifts. If we do, it won’t be because someone shifted their busy-ness and productivity from what they were doing before into creative work instead. It will be because the enforced pause changes the creators internal landscape and new creativity rises from that.

We have to let the changed society begin to transform us without expectation about the result. The scraping away of non-essentials, and then the return of some of them in different modes, will alter how we view our lives and what we need from them. We will emerge different. Perhaps with more creative pursuits, perhaps with less, perhaps with different ones. Trying to keep ourselves the same, clinging to who we were, is maladaptive and a source of stress. I can feel shifts in my thinking already. I’m changing how I relate to time and to tasks. I’m prioritizing differently. I can’t tell yet what the changes in me will become. It is too soon, but I’m trying to accept it rather than fight it.

In the larger world, most states are showing steady numbers of cases or a decline in cases. This is true even for states that have loosened restrictions. Even for the ones that loosened restrictions weeks ago. I think this means that most people are exercising some level of personal responsibility in not spreading disease. I also think that the warmer weather is having an effect. We may be able to breathe easier for a few months. I just hope that we remember to be careful again in the fall.

“This is how we re-open” the headlines proclaim and all the words that follow are a reasoned and cautious plan with steps and diagrams to show how to be safe. I’ve read multiple articles and multiple plans. In my state the recommendations are color coded: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green. Toward the end of each plan is the caveat. If you’re high risk, or live with someone high risk, then you should always operate with red-level precautions even if the rest of your community is green. That is where I see that re-opening is a mirage, mere wishful thinking. Howard is high risk because of his asthma. That means that all five people at my house have to stay at red, lives maximally paused, until things are truly safe, not “new normal” safe. That’s one young adult working reduced hours, one young adult whose life is on pause, and one teen who can’t go back to a classroom even if schools re-convene. Relaxing community restrictions forces us into hard decisions. We’re far from the only ones. Almost everyone I know is connected to a vulnerable person whom they either need to be careful for or isolate themselves from. “New normal” isn’t ahead of me somewhere. I’m in it. This is my normal until there is a vaccine.

I understand the need to loosen restrictions. I know that we need life to function with supply chains and economic flow. I know that economic collapse hurts and kills people as surely as the pandemic does. There are no easy choices here for anyone. I actually think the plans are the best that they can be under the circumstances. We have to try to navigate the gap between Scylla and Charybdis, The monster pandemic on one side and the monster economic collapse on the other. It just stings a little when I see articles saying “Yay! we get to have indoor restaurant dining back!” when every article then turns to me and says “But not for your family. You stay home.”

My mother’s mother died when my mother was ten. I knew the woman who stepped into her role and finished raising her children, including my mother. She was a good woman, a good grandmother. Yet there is this other grandmother whom I never knew.

My husband’s mother died when he was eighteen. I never had the chance to meet her. Never got to have a mother-in-law. Never got to have her input into our lives. I know it wouldn’t have been all sunshine and roses, but we would have benefited from the increased complexity. I’ve been thinking of her more lately. Wishing I could talk to her and ask her questions.

My son-in-law’s mother died when he was a baby. I thought of her often as I carefully tried to find my place in her son’s life. Stepping up to be a mother for a person who wasn’t accustomed to having one, without displacing her. Standing beside her empty shoes, not stepping into them.

Three women I never knew, yet their choices and sacrifices shaped three people who I love dearly. The absence of their mother defined each of them in different ways. I would have liked a chance to know each of these women, to hear their thoughts on mothering. Mothering is such a complicated role and I so often fear I’m doing it badly. Yet sometimes it feels like these absent mothers aren’t so far away and that they’re rooting for me from where they sit. Sending me support as I try to help take care of their children. I like that thought, the one where I always have a support nearby, only a soul’s breath away. The network of mothering not interrupted by so small a problem as death.

In a world where people can easily share the photos of their fantastic trips, it is easy to forget the beauty of ordinary things. One of the gifts of staying home so much right now is that when I’m seeking for peace of spirit, I need to look for it right where I am instead of seeking it at a destination. This is when I recognize the deep beauty of sitting in a garden shaded by trees I planted twenty years ago, scented by flowers I planted, and carpeted by lawn I have mowed. Any peacefulness this place possesses, I earned through tending. This is one of the reasons I bought a new hammock.

The view from my hammock is tree leaves, fences that are in need of repair, and a lawn with many bare patches.

Yet there is peace to be had here if I’m willing to hold still long enough for it to show up. Holding still can be hard for me. I have to put aside the feeling that surely I could be doing something more useful with my time. As if the process of untangling my thoughts, of just being, had no intrinsic value. I spent more than an hour out there today. Not thinking about anything in particular. Not reading the book I brought outside with me. Not trying to solve anything. When I cam back inside, the words for this blog post flowed instead of needing to be extracted from tangles. It is a subtle, but significant change.

Having the hammock makes this process easier because it is new and comfortable. But I always had the option to throw a blanket on the lawn, or to sit on my concrete steps, or to just stand under the sky. It isn’t the hammock that brings me calmness, it is sitting still and breathing without doing.

All of the days feel very long, so you’d think I’d get more done with them. Instead I feel badly that I’m not doing more work that is directly tied to bringing in money and feeling like the work I’m doing to tend and repair house is me not carrying my share. It is a strange mental twist, a mobius loop where I travel around and around without giving myself a break. It is the “I should be doing more” loop. I get caught in it often. The truth is that I’m occupied pretty much all day every day. Only a sliver of that time is on purely recreational things like a video game. Everything else is connected to maintenance or creation in some way. Cooking, sweeping, planning a grocery list, answering emails, maintaining contacts with loved ones, time for small kindnesses, driving, picking up mail, answering messages: it is easy to feel like none of these things count as work. They all are, of course. They all take a measure of attention and energy.

One of the messages I’m seeing on social media is about the brokenness of the Cult of Productivity. I know that I tend to tie self worth to the things I do rather than believing it is intrinsic. (Everyone else’s worth is obviously intrinsic, just mine that isn’t.) But I’m starting to readjust my thinking. This enforced slow down has shown me that the world doesn’t fall apart if everyone slows down. I confess to a hope that we will collectively decide that some of the slower pace is good. That it won’t harm us to wait a week for packages rather than being angry if they don’t show up in two days.

On social media I see a lot of people vehemently refuting positions or posts. These refutations aren’t aimed at a particular person or source, they are just a scattershot argument to a person that the refuter has imagined. I’m not sure that these refutations really do much good. It’s like we’re all standing in the cafeteria shouting on our soap boxes, hearing only fragments of what others have to say and then responding angrily to those fragments. I’ve decided that if I see a friend or loved one spreading information that I believe to be harmful, I have a responsibility to choose a private avenue to take it up with that person. If I don’t have access to a private mode of communication with that person, then I’m not close enough for them to disarm and listen to me.

Locally there is a group trying to determine if Covid-19 was transmitting locally earlier than March. They’re using antibody tests and patient histories. Howard’s January illness fit their parameters, so he went and had a blood draw today. Not sure when the results will come back, hopefully in a couple of days. Howard’s case is a useful study since he came down sick about five days after a wedding reception, had fever, body aches, coughing, and shortness of breath. He even landed in the ER one night because the coughing was so bad. They did a nasal swab which ruled out influenza. And Howard has had troubles with asthma and breathing ever since. A positive result won’t change many of our behaviors, antibodies =/= immunity. But it is information. We like having information.

The weather has been beautiful the past few days. It is my perfect weather. Comfortable to sit outside with the sun feeling pleasantly warm on me.

I wonder how much all this reopening will do to save businesses. Consumer behavior remains changed and regulations have changed. Some businesses simply can’t thrive in the current circumstances. I know that my purchasing and living behaviors have changed. Some of the changes I’d like to keep for a long time to come. I suspect others will also have permanent shifts. Perspective and priorities are different now.

I tried to bring these thoughts together into a coherent post, but I guess today is just scattered.

It continues to be fascinating to me what things are available at the grocery stores and which are in short supply. For some reason this week the case full of fancy cheeses was half empty. After two weeks of warnings in the news about disruptions to the meat supply chain, I’m beginning to see the meat cases empty out. Flour and yeast are back in stock, though not fully stocked. I’ve seen reports in the news about altercations between store staff who ask people to wear masks and people who refuse them. I’ve never witnessed any such thing. About half of the customers are wearing masks and everyone is polite about giving each other space. Most of the stores I frequent have added plastic shields at the check out counter. Combined with my mask and the employee’s mask, I’m having to repeat myself more often or to ask for the clerk to repeat something. Lip reading to augment hearing is no longer a thing I can do. It hasn’t been much of a problem, but it could be if I were tired and having trouble with auditory processing that day.

I have a neighbor who’s job is involved with tools for hospital administration. He says he’s seen significant shifts in how hospitals are run. He has trouble getting in touch with his New York contacts because they’re all busy, yet in other areas there are hospitals which are slowly going bankrupt because all non-critical services have been canceled. High end hospitals which mostly catered to plastic surgery are facing dire financial situations. I don’t feel badly for the celebrities who have to wait for their beauty treatments, but I do feel badly for the hospital staff who are just regular people trying to make a living.

I asked my bishop (who is also my neighbor) if he’s seen a change in charitable needs within our ward. He didn’t give me any details, but told me yes he’s seeing big pattern shifts in who needs to rely on the social safety net provided by our church. It’s probably time for me to increase fast offerings since those funds never leave the neighborhood. They’re re-distributed right here and some of my neighbors need help. Then the bishop looked me in the eye and asked if we need help. I told him we’re okay for now, which we are. He nodded, but said be sure to speak up if things get hard down the line.

That’s the part I need to remember. For all the angry people in the news and on social media, all the people vehemently shouting for staying home or opening up. My town and neighborhood is full of people who are quietly trying to make the best decisions they can for their families, and who are quietly helping and supporting each other. Everyone I talk to acknowledges the strangeness of our situation. Know one knows what the long term outcomes will be for any of us. So we try to be kind. That is all we can do really while we watch the world shift around us and try to keep our balance as the shifts continue.

I remember my great-grandmother’s hands. The woman herself I hardly knew because by the time I was aware of her, she was simply a quiet presence in the corner of the trailer home where we would stop by and visit. For the most part my job as a child was to greet her when we arrived and then to occupy myself, quietly, elsewhere while the adults visited. Yet her skin fascinated me. She was the only person I knew who had that many wrinkles. There was one day when I was left un-attended near her and I touched the skin on her hands. It slid across the bones and tendons underneath. I discovered that if I gently pinched it and pulled it upward, the pinched portion would stay put as a miniature ridge on the back of her hand. That was the point at which some other adult realized what I was doing and began to scold me into stopping. Great-grandma told that other adult it was fine, she didn’t mind. So sometimes when I visited, touched the skin on her hands and was amazed at how translucent it was and how loosely it was attached to the rest of her.

The other day the skin on the back of my hands was so dry from all the frequent hand washing, that when I pinched it, a small ridge stayed put for several seconds before sliding back into place. I noticed this, and the increasing accumulation of wrinkles. Some day it will be my skin which slides loosely across my bones. I put lotion on my hands and the skin sprang back into place for now. The skin on my hands has adapted to the increased washing. Redness, cracking, and wrinkling have subsided. Yet there is still a texture difference between the skin on my hands and the skin on my arms. Each portion of skin adapted to its regular use. The older I get, the more my body bears the marks of how I’ve used it.

When I studied art history in college, the teacher devoted a portion of lecture to discussing negative space. When we are looking at an image, it is the human tendency to look at what is being depicted. In Hokusai’s Great Wave, our eye takes in the wave and the distant mountain.

Yet we’re only able to focus on the wave because of what isn’t in the painting. Instead of filling the image with trees, more waves, a few birds, the artist instead gives us a void. It is the space around the focal points which give the painting it’s tension and meaning. Because of the space, we feel that the wave is going to come crashing down. This is the negative space.

One of the places where negative space is most apparent to me is in love story lines in television or movies. There is often a moment when the two people are close, sometimes looking at each other, sometimes not. But I become very aware of the space in between these two people and of my desire for them to close the gap. When they touch, or kiss, I feel a relief. The tension is gone and I can relax with the connection complete. This, of course, is why so many romantic story lines end up oscillating in “Will they or won’t they.” The desire to watch people connect keeps the audience showing up, waiting for that moment when everything is okay again.

Any time I venture out into the world right now, I am very aware of the spaces between me and other people. We are all like magnets with similar poles, pushed away from each other by an invisible force. I change my path through the store so that I do not impinge on another person’s six foot space. I appreciate the space with strangers, but with those I love, the ones I want to connect with, the space has become painful. I’m not sure whether talking on the phone with people I miss makes missing them easier or harder. I suspect that being socially distanced in the same place would just make us more aware of the space that should be maintained. The space definitely feels negative. We’re all trapped in that moment of not-quite-connecting. The moment of highest tension. And there is no relief in sight.

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.