The 'rona got me + looking ahead to spring gardens

After an evening out with a friend on Friday night, I woke early on Saturday and left for a solo 30-hour getaway in WV. Life has not been, shall we say, easy of late, and I was joyful about some quiet time with my animals and land. Halfway there, I started coughing. My chest burned as if its linings had been doused with the shittiest whisky. By 10:20a, I’d texted Tom to say that I felt truly awful and must have caught the cold that felled Jack on Wednesday. Why I didn’t think to test either him or myself is beyond me, but whatever.

The congestion revved up, my skin and teeth started to hurt, and I felt totally enervated.

Was it the two gimlets + wine? I’m no spring chicken anymore, so maybe.

I woke up Sunday not much improved and grudgingly headed home in the early afternoon. On the drive, something kicked in. I called T and he had a test waiting for me.

After all this damn time. Jack tested- positive too, though definitely a good four days ahead of me. He has felt really awful, so his double line was not a surprise result. Masks were donned, I took to the guest room, and here we are. Jack tested negative yesterday so is finally back at school with mask firmly in place. He feels better, but not good.

I still feel like roadkill, y’all. I have zero sense of smell or taste beyond what I can only describe as feeling that I burned my tongue and then licked pennies for several hours; the congestion was EPIC though that has subsided; the cough has been so severe that I have aching stomach muscles (core work! #silverlining) and have coughed up not an insignificant amount of unsightly phlegm curds; my throat is unbelievably sore such that it hurts to swallow; and I just feel tired and vague.

The acute feeling of “I am really effing sick” is gone, but yesterday I took 89 steps. Today, my step counter hasn’t even registered. All this after two initial vaccines and two subsequent boosters. I don’t even want to contemplate getting this in the absence of those mitigating factors.

I’ve done some reading (harder than you might imagine) and some student work and managed to make a large and thrilling-to-me gardening spreadsheet of all the seeds, bare root, and potted seedlings I’ve bought or are on order for spring arrival; full of all relevant info like preferred sun exposure and soil, height, animals repelled and attracted, intended planting location, and so forth, it also enables me to input and track when I started what seeds, when I upgraded their pot sizes, and when I ultimately get them into the ground or container.

So far, my wallflower seeds, both English and Fair Lady, are winning the sprouting race. Slow the train, little buddies. After just eight days I had to move their peat pots into a larger, non-covered pot because they were hitting the plastic cover of my Jiffy tray. The snapdragons and Billy buttons are up too, and I spy the rock cress and creeping thyme making their way. Part of my basement looks like a weed lab, what with pots and grow lights wired up everywhere, but it all brings me great joy, and my family kindly (and with some lovely eye rolls) alerts me when “another package from Eden Brothers arrived.” Listen, they have great seeds.

Anyway, I have showered today but that’s it. Ruthie came for a quick visit, but as per Ruthie, she’s gone again. I’m gonna finish my coffee, send vibes of love and strength to Tyre Nichols’ family while also fully understanding if they can feel nothing but grief and rage over the murder of their boy, send evil thoughts to College Board for bowing to performative GOP pressure and stripping their AP African American history course of, well, African American history, and feel thankful for science and medicine and little peat pots and the always earnest determination of nature and life.

From left: wallflowers at 4 days; snapdragons at 6.

26 July 2020: Sobering shit + a bit more humor

Sobering shit.

Man, y’all. The world is just broken beyond belief. A friend sent me this article today, and it’s not wrong: America is Having the Mother of All Social Collapses. It’s hard to even know where to start. We’re 100 days out from the most consequential election in my lifetime, perhaps yours too, and while I feel paralyzed many days, today I registered to work at the polls in November and also reached out to several organizations re: writing postcards to and texting voters.

If you want to volunteer to staff the polls, PLEASE register here. I have heard that especially in light of Covid, we’re in desperate need of poll workers. If you’re healthy, please help.

If you want to get involved with voter registration, postcard writing, texting, or other politically-oriented work, consider these organizations, all of which offer virtual activism opportunities:

NOPE Neighbors

When We All Vote

Fair Fight

Resistance Labs

Postcards to Swing States

Swing Left

Otherwise, pick a race and volunteer directly for the campaign. Go big with Biden, or support the great down-ballot candidates who can send cowardly, trump-enabling GOPers packing. Click on my Political Resources tab and then click on Candidates to Support for some ideas of who to throw your energy behind and why.

By the time you receive this blog in your email tomorrow, America will have lost more than 150,000 citizens to Covid-19. trump still has no national plan besides letting people die. If that’s not reason enough to get busy, I don’t know what is.

(Admittedly slim) Laugh track.

Thank you, Anne. I will soon be joining this cat.

Thank you, Liz.

10 July 2020: Daily

As I know is true for so many of us right now, my feelings about coronavirus life come in waves.

Sometimes they are minimalist and gentle, little ripples of acceptance of the situation and gratitude for how well my family can forge ahead during it. These are the days during which I find it easy to float with the current, when I have reserve and patience and energy to seek out ways to help others and enrich the boys’ lives and experiences above and beyond the normal.

At other times, they sweep to shore with a rougher chop, churning up sand and spray, darkening in color, suggesting an undercurrent of power that might knock you sideways or wet the shorts you thought you could keep dry by only wading in to your ankles. The losses scratch at your legs, the reminiscences of Before tug at your limbs and hair.

On other occasions, the waves crash angrily against land, furious spittle arching up and over the forceful blow to the coast. Their tumult and torrent feel utterly wild, beyond all control; that, in and of itself, is nerve-racking, unmooring, never familiar even if it’s known.

To be in the midst of a pandemic without any functional leadership guiding us through with a steady hand and message of sobriety, fact, unity is to be in the more tremulous swells at all times.

I am reminded of the ways we would wait, in southern Louisiana, as hurricanes approached. Eyes, hands, hearts, hammers and boards glued to weather reports as the whirling eye stayed and jumped and resumed and altered course on its march through the Gulf. When was just the right time to board up? When would be too late? When should you leave? How could you ever really know until it was too late?

To wait in that netherworld of uncertainty is like standing eye to navel with the mightiest wave as it crests and begins falling in on itself, on you. It is difficult. Scary. Unsettling. Humans, generally speaking, don’t like unknowns, not least when their lives, families, livelihoods, and mental well-being are on the line.

A wave crashes and retreats, a hurricane meets land and loses power before dying out completely. Destruction remains in their wakes, but the attacks are over. Survivors can exhale, take stock. Sometimes, additional horrors await on the other side, but the event that wrought the mayhem is done.

This, now, Covid-19, is different, as pandemics are. The event persists, evades, mutates, and attacks quietly, quickly, forcibly. It takes great advantage of the unwitting, the nonbelievers, the thoroughly and often willfully misinformed, but it preys on us all with hungry whimsy. And in this divide of who believes and who doesn’t, community breaks as do poorly-built levees and earnest sand castles held together by the frame of a bucket long since gone.

Without good leadership and a collective sense of purpose and concern, things fall apart. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. The gyre turns and rages.

Amidst all this, I try to remain a steady foundation. Jack turns 14, and we celebrate with family and friends, in socially-distant and virtual fashion. Masks are as natural as blowing out lit candles with scrunched eyes and a wish after a song of good tidings ends. It’s funny how quickly you can adapt.

Amidst all this, Oliver’s sink plants reward us with a first bounty. Amused, we delight in picking the reddish-black ones and eating them warm from the sun, wondering how some spat-out seeds from another part of the world survived, grew!, in a sunless drain filled with toothpaste, hair, and who knows what. If these tomatoes aren’t a testament to the will to live, I don’t know what is.

Amidst all this, I begin work with a new slate of students, high schoolers who have worked so hard and are hoping that life might be normal again when finally it is their turn for college. I try to advise those who were to be freshman next month, who are being asked to choose between two forms of a freshman year, neither of which looks remotely like what they anticipated and deserve.

Amidst all this, so many are struggling and dying and new hot spots are emerging and decreases are turning back to increases, waves cresting again with the promise of more destruction and awfulness on the other side.

Amidst all this, we have the most pathetic and incapable and sociopathic of leaders, propped up by sycophantic cowards and the people who profit off all of it. We have Karens and voter suppression and proud racism and a politicized Court landscape, and all those who have so assiduously abided by the pleas to stay home, wear a mask, avoid others are looking despondently to the months ahead with zero hope.

The rage I have felt at times during these months home rivals my most furious moments since 2016. Justice seems like some sort of alien concept, some sort of pipe dream that many have never had enough of, many miss desperately, and many desperately hope to see and experience again. Competency, too. My god what I would give for a competent leader in this time.

I cook another dinner, start the kids on fish oil, build a foundry with them, go swimming, kiss them goodnight, plead with them to just do the fucking typing lesson and ride the fucking bikes. I steal a moment, begging for it be uninterrupted in any way, take another yoga class, try to breathe and watch the birds and play with my cats and check on the neighbors and make another meal. I maintain hope for a sustained low tide, the boring sort you can just listen and relax to, the loveliest white noise.