Thanks, everyone, for your cheerful wishes yesterday. The day was miserably hot, but pretty good nonetheless. I made shrimp salad and potato salad and nectarine ice cream for dinner; we played cards outside; James texted to say he'd gotten back to Chicago safely.
Today will be slightly cooler, but not much. I'm trying to decide if I have the heat-stamina for a yoga class this morning. And Paul has a job interview, an exciting new development. He's been in kind of a frozen funk since his classes ended, but now that the city is slowly reopening, he's beginning to sort out next steps: a basic job, thoughts of an apartment. Small steps toward a semblance of normality.
Yesterday my friend Teresa and I talked about Blake over the phone. I've been reading Ulrich's Good Wives and thinking a lot about the pressures and disconnects between communal and individual values, a situation that Ulrich plumbs in her study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England women, and that also, I think, comes up in Blake's poems.
Certainly we continue to struggle with that pressure now: what is best for me? what is best for us?
2 comments:
That struggle is the core of what is right --and what is dysfunctional-- in the country, as well. We blithely parrot "we are all in this together" until someone isn't. That's the critical tipping point, right? And interestingly, it seems that, at least historically, women have been expected to make those concessions (sacrifice for the family, the greater good, etc.)--but now, we see an up-tick in the number of privileged individuals asserting their "rights" in pretty vile ways. (The "Karen" problem.) I wonder what your reading suggests about the intensity of the dynamic in stressful times.
Chicago has not been bad (so far as I can judge from my enclave), but with the anticipation of federal agents coming to stir havoc (as recently in Portland) there's an ominous feeling overhanging the bright day.
I've heard we are supposed to get hot now, and heat influences things. We almost feel like an epicenter.
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