Snow like sticky sugar-paste: a shock of white in the black morning, dragging at limbs and twigs, tumbling into boulders as the plow scrapes past.
Having just spent the past hour texting back and forth with a friend who's in emotional extremis, I'm already feeling like I need a vacation day, even before the day's begun. But I can't take one, as I wasted a chunk of yesterday at the grocery store, which was hellish and stressful and felt actively dangerous. Yes, I bought toilet paper, but there was no white flour of any sort; shortages of butter and cheese; people shopping in masks and rubber gloves; exhausted staff; an overall miasma of doom. One good thing: I was able to order freezer meat from the local butcher shop: a couple of whole chickens, chuck roast, stew--which will be ready for curbside pickup on Thursday morning. So that was a relief.
I could have lasted at home much longer without going to the store, but I was beginning to worry: What if we get the virus? Now, when we're not sick, is the moment when I should be padding out our supplies.
I came home, jangled and distracted, to learn that my friend Teresa had to cancel our Rilke phone chat because her husband wasn't feeling well. Anxiety everywhere. It's only just beginning, dear ones.
Anyway: good news. I video-conferenced with my poetry group last night, and that went well, though of course there was also much sadness and a fair amount of Internet freezing and stuttering. I shared a poem that is pretty chaotic: a wild-ride, crazy-youth piece that was veering off the road in a few places. They were helpful with identifying those points, and I'm ready to play around with revisions. We've got a date to meet again in three weeks, so that is something to look forward to.
Monson Arts has posted one of my students' group poems, along with a recording of me reading it. If you're interested but can't access this link to the Facebook page, let me know and I'll send the poem to you directly.
Tonight, at Cafe Quarantine: salmon risotto, broiled grapefruit, salad greens, root beer floats. In mending updates: I've got the new casing ironed and pinned and ready to sew onto the the torn edge of the comforter. In editing updates: Jeez, get some work done, Dawn. In reading updates: Le Carre is the limit of what I've been able to read for pleasure. Surely that in itself is a sign of the apocalypse.
Love to you.
5 comments:
8 inches of wet, heavy snow here! I finally heard from a former student who is living in New Jersey and teaches in Manhattan; he is safe and sound. I have another who is a doctor in Cambridge -- helped him edit a piece for the Wall Street Journal. We are sharing Wordsworth poems. So many invisible, but palpable connections. My grandparents were living in China during the Spanish flu -- perhaps that is why I am able to sit here now?
I'm trying to write my way through this crisis. Already I have too many friends ill (one already hospitalized more than 17 days); I used that opening in a poem I put on my blog; I doubt many who read it could figure I was talking about myself. My generation's already had so many "defining moments", and I hope, if I get through this, it is my last. I wrote today I not afraid of dying; it's a thought of the loss of my beautiful son that keeps me awake at night. I don't go out all; age, blood type, and a health issue prevent that. That line about poetry helping us survive: it's true, it's saving me.
Keep well. I send love.
We last shopped a week ago tomorrow. The store was pretty well stocked except oddly an absence of Wonder Bread-type breads. (Sourdough from a local bakery was aplenty.) "Dangerous" is a good word. We aren't showing symptoms but it's been less than a week, so there's a lingering uneasiness. It felt (and still feels, though less so now) that people aren't taking sufficient precautions. Yesterday and Saturday both I saw my mail carrier having face to face convos with neighbors, neither party masked.
One thing I've come to realize is how fortunate my partner and I do most of our own cooking (now, all). Next trip to the grocery I'm not sure what shortages we'll find but I'm sure we can work around it. But one woman I follow on Twitter has been subsisting on a diet of canned soup and Ensure, which sounds awful to me, and she's running out. A FB friend in Georgia some while back noted the store was completely depleted of instant Ramen packages, also not the best either culinarily or nutritionally.
More and more the stories like of of people hospitalized. A friend has been in hospice for about six months and word is the end is imminent. Her husband can't get in to see her because the place is on lockdown. (No words of a Covid-19 outbreak there.) Children and grandchildren saw her two months ago, but now everybody will only come up again after she passes, and I imagine funerals will cease here as in Italy. These enforced separations are terrible.
That should have been "pile up" not "like of" but I don't see an edit function.
It means a lot to hear your voices here. I'm glad to have a picture into your individual worlds: a way to get outside of my own life, but also to focus on the vibrating links among us. Thanks so much for talking.
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