Thinking of You

Despite the fact that I got snowed on while bird watching earlier this week and it's an as-warm-as-it-gets-in-April high 50s, it feels like summer here. The kind of summer no one has experienced since circa 1982, where days unspool one after the other with no real demarcation between one and the next. I can almost hear a housefly buzzing halfheartedly against the screen and taste Country Time Lemonade mixed with tapwater in a tall glass of translucent red plastic.

My job has ended for the season, as it would have without the pandemic, and my life's not that much different than it would have otherwise been, except my kids are home and I don't ever go anywhere. M works afternoons at the farm store, boxing up curbside pickup orders. In the morning he challenges his brothers to endless two-square tournaments. E has been pulling up the roots of weeds and small trees in the yard, expanding the lawn and making a duck-friendly copse of carefully thinned sumcac trees. Z is building a sailboat out of an old canoe. Both are energetically avoiding any acknowledgement that school is, indeed, still in session. They may have reached that "useful boredom" stage, the absense of which has been lamented by so many child phsychologists and educators. 

I, meanwhile, cycle between extreme anxiety and relaxed acceptance, while my two volunteer "jobs" help me keep a toehold in civilization via zoom meetings and reams of emails. It is, I know, outrageously unfair how unevenly the burden of this disease has been distributed, not only between those who are getting sick and dying and those who are merely bored at home, but also between those whose work load has been catapulted into the stratosphere—health care workers and teachers especially—and those toward whom endless articles about how to keep busy and stay sane while home with nothing to do are geared. Which adds another stage to my cycle—guilt, because I'm one of those, not bored, not in need of someone to tell me what to do, but not on the terrible front lines or trying to wranle 30 students from afar (having mostly failed to wrangle the two students who live with me, I know how hard their job is). 

So I seek a balance—don't lose sight of those who are facing extrememe hardships, but don't dwell on things outside your control. Stay home, wear a mask, try to make the best of it, and hold dear ones tight, even if it's from six feet, or six hundred miles, away.


This post went out last week to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. You can subscribe here.

Finish It Friday ~ Face Masks

I made up a bunch of masks for a friend's medical practice a few weeks ago, and though by now everyone has probably made all the face masks, I thought I'd share my process, just in case you feel inclined to produce a few more.

I started with this tutorial, using fabric and narrow elastic from my stash. I used anywhere from two to four pleats, and it didn't seem to make much difference in terms of how much they gathered up on the sides, because the more pleast I used, the smaller they were. I also just eyeballed the pleat width and did freehanded them (that is, I didn't use a ruler or pins) as I sewed. I don't think they'd win a 4-H sewing contest or anything, but they do the job.

When I ran out of narrow elastic, I made ties using 1" strips cut from old t-shirts. At first I sewed these strips in half lenthwise in 40" lenghts and made sleeves along the outside of the (slightly wider) masks to thread them through.

There were several things I didn't like about this design, not the least of which was the hassle of threading the strips through the sleeves, so instead I took strips about 27" (or half the circumfrence of an XL t-shirt), folded them over each side of the mask at the center and sewed it in half along the whole length.

I got smart after the first whole bunch and used a narrow zig-zag so that the strips can stretch without snapping the threads of the seam. After washing, the eges of the t-shirt fabric curl over nicely and you don't have to worry about them unraveling, which makes them so much handier than trying to make your own bias tape.

I ended up making about 30 masks, and I'm not gonna pretend it was a fun project. There were jammed bobbins and broken needles and lots of swearing involved. at one point I thought my machine went kaput until through a vigorous internet search I figured out the right place to oil it (under the bobbin casing). If it hadn't been for a good cause, I'd have thrown in the towel.

Most of them went to the medical residents at the local hospital. I kept one each for C and me for when we go grocery shopping and made several for M, who has to wear them at work at the farm store where he's boxing up curbside pickup grocery orders.

 

Faith in a Seed

"Deep within the arboretum across the street from my office, along the edge of a field of raggedy wildflowers, sixty American chestnut trees grow in four neat rows. The trees were planted fourteen years ago, on a sunny but cool morning in June. My husband worked at the arboretum at the time and invited teams of draft horses to plow the furrows into which he planted the knee-high whippets just dug from their nursery beds. I took our infant son, Milo, to the arboretum that day, to watch the enormous horses draw plows that peeled back wide strips of sod, to see his father lower tiny trees into the ground. Milo, two weeks old at the time, snuggled deep in a front pack, his still-wobbly head asleep against my chest. Neither horse nor tree made an impression on his newborn mind. I might have forgotten the day myself, if not for the momentousness of it being our first big outing after his birth, the connection of his father to the event, and the proximity of the arboretum to my workplace, allowing me to return and visit the chestnuts years later."


So begins my essay, "Faith in a Seed," which took me years to write and even longer to get published (this is, unfortunately, my process—slow writing). Still, I'm thrilled that it's found a home in a very local publication, the 2020 issue of Sprire: The Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability. You can read it now, here, if you're so inclined, and while you're there, check out the other offerings in the issue. And please do come back and let me know what you think in the comments.

Enjoy the Little Things

A few weeks ago, in the Before Times, an old guy had set up a table down the hallway from my office and was giving out small dishes of Ben & Jerry's ice cream—free. I waited for my turn, watching him as he reached elbow-deep in a big cardboard carton of American Dream, dipping an ice cream scoop held in his bare hand, thinking that this was maybe not regulation food-service hygeine, but it was Ben & Jerry's and it was free. Another old guy joined the first at the table, wearing a denim ball cap emblazoned with "Ben," and began dipping ice cream out of a second carton.

"Here's Ben!" the first guy cheered. And then it hit me. These weren't any old guys serving free Ben & Jerry's ice cream; these were the actual Ben and Jerry. Any qualms I had (slight as they were) about the bare hand in the carton evaporated. After all they probably stirred every batch in the factory themselves, right? And besides, it was Ben & Jerry's served by Ben and Jerry.

I think now how strange that moment was, standing in queue in a crowded hallway waiting for ice cream served by bare-handed old men. How strange it was to be jostled by strangers, to open doorknobs without resorting immediately to hand sanitizer, to shake hands, to sit cheek by jowl on a bus or airplane. How strange that all of the things that were perfectly normal parts of everyday life until a couple of weeks ago are the stuff of nightmares (I've moved on from zombie nightmares to ones about people standing too close together in workplaces).

I wonder too what it will be like in the After Times. Will we continue to maintain six feet of distance between ourselves and the next person? Will we always be just a little bit afraid of each other?

I've been trying to reign in these and other terrifying thoughts this week. I've cut back on my news consumption. I go on long walks around my property or up and down my driveway (even when it's raining, which it always seems to be doing these days). I make things by hand. I order things online, like used books, yarn, and vingate dishes. Everyone needs to define for themselves what is essential, and I guess that about sums up my list. I was made unreasonably happy this week when I found something online I've wanted for a long while—a two-cup Pristine England teapot in chartreuse. I was made even happier when it arrived three days later, in time for my afternoon tea.

Is it frivilous? Yes. Is it materialistic? Yes. Is that so wrong? I hope not. Because if we can't have little things that make us happy in the face of calamity, well then what's the point?

This post went out last week to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. You can subscribe here.

Mindfulness Monday ~ It's Okay to Feel Weird

It's been a while since I've done a Mindfulness Monday post, and now feels like a good time to revisit those past practices and refocus on being mindful in the midst of pandemic pandemonium (or very long days at home with the whole entire family).



My first MM was to Make My Bed. Believe it or not, I've stuck with this practice—mostly. I'd say nine out of ten days I make the bed. If ever I leave the house before C gets up or if I'm really in a rush or feeling extra lazy, it doesn't get made.

The second was Self Care, which I defined pretty broadly (once I stopped being self-pitying). My self-care routines currently include walking, spending time in nature, making afternoon tea, reading, hot baths, watching TV with my peeps, crafting, painting.

The third MM was keeping track of a Favorite Moment each day. I have not been as good at keeping up with this one, but I restarted a couple of days ago. I think this will be an especially useful practice now that the days are starting to blur together.

Well, I didn't do as many mindfulness posts as I'd thought. Hmm…what does that say?

My newest practice has been to cut way back on news consumption. Sometime last year I'd gone cold turkey on news after three years of obsessively reading and freaking out about all the terrible things the administration was doing, without changing one damn thing. When I went back to work in December and had a free half hour in the morning between dropping the twins off at the bus and needing to start work I resumed reading a little bit of news. But once COVID-19 hit, I'd become obsessed again, again to no good end. What purpose does it serve to read six different analyses of the same terrible press conference? None. So now I'm limiting myself to one hour in the morning and no peeking the rest of the day. It's a lot harder than it sounds, but I felt better the very first day I started.

I've also made it a point to accept my feelings, which seems like it should be obvious, but how often do we try to talk ourselves out of feeling a certain way? It's okay to feel weird, because the times now are very weird. It's okay to feel sad. There are people dying all over the world. People I know are likely to become very sick if not worse. I had plans and expectations for the coming months (years?) that now will not come to pass. My kids are missing out on big chunks of their freshmen years (in HS and college). These are all sad things. And it's okay to be grumpy, especially when it rains for days on end. It's also okay to feel good when the sun's shining and the daffodills are blooming and the phoebe has come home, because even though there are sad things going on, you don't have to feel sad all of the time. That's not good for you.

Finish It Friday ~ Saucy Table Runner

I feel better when I create something tangible with my hands—something that doesn't need to be made again (and again and again), like dinner. I've known this about myself for a long time, but I don't always remember it when I need to. Fortunately, sometimes my unconscious mind steps in, as it did earlier this week, when I sat down to make some face masks and instead put on my own oxygen mask and picked up a stack of fabric that had been waiting in the queue for me to get around to making it into a table runner.

Now I don't need another table runner. Nobody needs a table runner.  But making something pretty, that is something I needed. And I'd had this idea of putting some scraps of red, blue, yellow, and turquoise together with a half-yard printed with talavera plate designs to go with a Mexican pottery dish I bought at the thrift store in the Before Times. (The talavera fabric I'd bought a few years ago, intending to replace the valance in my kitchen but was vetoed by my friends who like the dish towel curtain just fine.) So I cut strips and sewed them together and cut those into strips, which I tacked together to make longer strips (hoping to save myself a little bit of the tedium of assembling tiny squares individually). Then I sewed it all together directly onto the batting and backing, so I wouldn't have to quilt it later.

It came out a little wonky, the corners not exaclty square, but it would have come out that way even if I'd cut out indifidual squares. I'm just a wonky quilter. I ran out of blue thread most of the way through and switched to white, then I whip-stitched the binding on with teal. I always wondered how much thread Ma Ingalls brought along in the wagon in Little House on the Prairie. It must have been miles and miles, because what would she do if she ran out, there in Kansas Territory with no stores anywhere and every stitch of clothing needing to be made by her own hand? I wish that when everyone was out panic buying toilet paper I'd panic bought a few spools of thread. By the time this is all over, I'll have used it all up, right down to the lavender.

There it is, just a table runner, one which will be made dirty by my husband and children, then  unceremonously shoved aside when they need the table space for something else. It hasn't changed the world, nor will it. But it made a gray day a little brighter, and that's something.

Seeking Refuge

I once read a book about a man who spent a winter alone on a sailboat frozen into the sea somewhere off the coast of Canada. Every day of the long Arctic winter he would walk out into the darkness, as far away as he could go, out beyond where he could no longer see the boat, where the footprints of hungry polar bears marked the snow. He did this to ensure that his tiny, musty boat would feel like a refuge and not a prison.

I think of this story every day when, around noon, I hoist myself off the sofa, take a shower, get dressed in the most brightly colored outfit I can fashion, and go for a walk. I don't walk away from our house but rather circumnavigate it, making one, two, three loops on the woods trail that runs around our property. One week into social distancing, I don't yet feel confined in our house (I'm pretty good at staying home, despite what my family members might think). But the idea of refuge is very much on my mind.

I think, too, of people in literal prisons and those in the concentration camps at our southern border, for whom social distancing is impossible and for whom COVID-19 will spell disaster. I think of people trapped in homes with dangerous people or just too many people for health and sanity. I feel fortunate that I have so much room to roam, both indoors and out, and yet at the same time I feel unbearably anxious—that every sneeze or tickle in my throat means I've got the virus, that all those people in all those unsafe situations are suffering, that our government is failing us catastrophically.

I walk that loop of trail until my brain derails from the loops of negative thoughts, when I nearly step on a woodcock, blending so perfectly with the dead leaves of the trail, or when I hear the high-pitched tsssp-tsssp sound of kinglets in the trees or a wood frog chuckling in the swamp. There are no deadly polar bears or sub-zero temperatures out there to drive me to the safety of home. On the contrary, spring's slow reveal is a reassurance that nature hasn't changed, that everything is going to be okay, if only for a little while.

This post went out last week to subscribers of my newsletter, along with some bonus material. You can subscribe here.