These days I feel more like a groan up than a grown up. You know what I mean. Our times are tough. Very tough politically and environmentally for sure, even before the pandemic hit us. Now in my part of the world we are grappling with heat and wild fires as well. So many burdens to carry, and so little chance to talk it over, face to face, since we have been social distancing for months; especially those of us who are older. No spur of the moment coffee hours, or lunches. No family entertaining. If we have a visitor or two, it's from a distance and always outside. They bring their own food and drink. It's a bizarre way to host our guests. When we do connect, we have to spend a certain amount of time saying how bad things are, how impossible everything seems to be. How powerless we feel. 

Vegetable soup is simmering in the crock pot. It's a summer day, and it's hot outside. But I am in an air conditioned house, where I have been sheltering since March. I do go outside, but not when it's too hot or too windy. I'm lucky. I have a wonderful garden where I can putter, or walk, or sit. Occasionally a few family members come to visit my husband and me there and we keep a safe distance from them. I used to venture out for a walk around the block, but I have stopped doing that. Too many people are out without masks, and with no care for keeping safe. So I stay home. Everyone who can, should stay home to stay safe.

And, perhaps simmer some vegetable soup. Do you have a good recipe?

There is in interesting pheomenon that can happen at night, just before sleep, when you close your eyes. You may be treated to a kind of behind-your-eyes light show, with patterns and colors. I've had this happen to me on and off for many years. But lately I find my brain making actual pictures out of what it 'sees' there. It's like looking at the patterns in marble, where you see a definite outline of something that shifts, suddenly, and then disappears if you move your gaze or turn your head. You might not find it again. Sometimes if I've had a particularly busy day, or used my eyes for more screen time than is healthy, the effect of this light show can be quite detailed. Maybe it's a brain that's aging, sorting through other remembered scenes, and projecting what it finds for my entertainment or attention. The first time I saw actual pictures of people, or vivid cartoon characters, I told myself I had better cut down on the chocolate, or the wine, or the combination thereof.

Sometimes, when I can't get to sleep, I tell myself to count things in my mind's eye. Like the trees in my yard, twenty of them. Then I might try to remember their names: two fern pines, silver maple, juniper, apple, blood orange, fig, Meyer lemon, lemon, other lemon (sorry you two lemons, can't remember your real names), navel orange, grapefruit, two albezia, pomegranate, magnolia, two tulip magnolias, crepe myrtle, bottle brush. And then, if I still can't sleep I could think about the roses. But I'd have to get up to count them, so I could estimate there are about twenty of those too. I could try to see each one in my mind's eye, but at this point, hopefully, I might be drifting off. 

When the stay-at-home requirement was given, I was pretty sure we were covered. We had enough toilet paper to last weeks. Well, and that never would have been my first thought anyway. What is that well-known Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs? Physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization, from the bottom up. Physiological means, as I understand it, that you are a functioning person. Then you need safety -- water, food, shelter, warmth. I thought we had all of those pretty well covered. Toilet paper was incidental. Because we had water and soap, that was not any basic or foundational need. Even with Covid-19 water and soap were basic. Nothing was said about toilet paper.

Day 13 

Yesterday was like stepping into a different plane of existence. I don’t know why it didn’t hit me until Day 13, but that’s what happened. I barely had the energy to make the bed, let alone get dressed. It takes me awhile to respond to crisis. My way of coping is to knuckle down and get through it. I keep myself very busy. I cook. I clean. Neither of which interested me yesterday. I read. That wasn’t cutting it either. Writing, my go-to for restoration and my outlet for creative energy, had no appeal whatsoever.

When I was a kid, we used to run away from each other yelling "You've got cooties!" It was a fun game, and also  a cruel taunt, and a whispered slur "Oooo she's got cooties!" Nobody knew exactly what cooties were. I imagined them as some kind of creepy crawly. And it seems that the etymology is that they referred to lice. Then in 1948 a guy named William Schaper created the game. It was launched in 1949 and sold millions. It was still popular with my grandkids when they were little. Remember it? You were given a colorful plastic body shaped kind of like a beehive, and the object was to add arms and legs, head and proboscis, with numbers on the dice corresponding to the body parts. The first one to complete theirs was the winner. And then you really did have a cootie!  

We do it all the time. Of course we do. We travel in time. If we use past and future tense, if we say "I had a pony," or "one day we will get a pony," we are travelling back and forward in time. In our minds. It's useful to have this capability, especially if you can tap into some positive feelings while you are on that journey.  

For me, that's a kind of meditation. When I am feeling stressed or upset, I put myself in a place in my past where I felt safe, where I felt loved, where I felt secure. That tiny little 'ping' of recognition of a feeling generates a dose of positivity that can go a long way toward soothing the present and smoothing the way to the future. 

Today I've been mending dramatic play costumes for preschoolers. This is something I do about twice a year, when our daughter's preschool is on hiatus and she is sorting and cleaning and all the other thousand things that go with creating a place for children to imagine and learn. The costumes get washed much oftener, of course, but about every six months decisions have to be made about what can stay, what can be refurbished, and what just has to be discarded. There are only so many times you can stitch the silver trim on a lace bodice for a princess dress, for instance. And there are only so many layers of torn netting you can elminate from a ballerina skirt before it just won't twirl.

Here’s my Christmas confession: I am a Dabbler. I begin a lot of projects with a great deal of enthusiasm, but as they demand more patience and attention, I wander off. You can see this with all the many, many, many knitting projects I’ve started every year when the temperatures drop below 70. And those little projects to create your own ornaments for your tree – so enticing EVERY year – they are subject to the same kind of treatment as my knitting projects. As a consequence, my Christmas décor has always been what I like to think of as eclectic. But I’m sure to many it simply seems bizarre. And then there are all the decorations I have inherited from family who are, shall we say, no longer physically present in this world.