Blink – ten years gone

In the never ending quest to Tidy Things Up I was updating my website binder.  I’m old school so things are printed out as I post them (not the social media stuff – too many dead trees!) and popped into a binder.

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated the blasted thing.  Lots of major life events – so many dead, plague, job loss (and there went the color printer) so I spent a bit of time the other day, leafing through things and punching a lot of holes in paper.

I didn’t realize my first post was at the tail end of 2013.  It covered the misadventures of a family of 5 and navigating the holidays. Never would have imagined then that I’d be where I am today.  Down to 1 part time housemate.  Single and thanking the gods for that. Otherwise he would have met an untimely death during lock down.  I’m on the firmest financial footing of my life thanks to a combination of luck (strange to call my mother dying some of the best luck in my life) and being willing to sacrifice immediate pleasures for future good – whatever that entails.

How very strange and varied the changes that can happen in a decade, personal and otherwise. It’s been an interesting life and an interesting time in history to live it. It would have been nice if things had been a bit more boring all the way around but one finds peace where you can.

So what will the next ten years hold? 

Hopefully a lot less pain, suffering and death.

Here’s to more creating.

To more options.

More life.

One binder full and the next ready to go.

Project Housewife

house·wife

/ˈhousˌwīf/

noun

noun: housewife; plural noun: housewives

  1. a woman whose main occupation is caring for her family, managing household affairs, and doing housework, while her husband or partner goes out to work.
  2. a small case for needles, thread, and other small sewing items.

A while ago I realized that there’s an awful lot of sewing that should be happening in this household. Things that need repair, small sewn items that would make daily life easier, so on and so forth. The main issue that’s keeping me from this necessary work is that I generally do such work parked on the couch with the tv running and the sewing supplies are two flights of stairs away. Who wants to trudge up two flights of stairs and then down again when you’re warm and comfy on the couch?

I’ve tried keeping supplies in a Ziploc bag but they’re ugly and plastic should be used only when absolutely necessary. Save the planet and all. But I can’t just leave a needle and thread out or it’ll disappear and someone will get hurt. It’s not a baby or small child anymore I’m keeping sharp, pointy things away from but a not-so-small furry creature. Gregory specifically. He loves to steal sewing supplies. He can unwind a spool of thread faster than a sewing machine.

I thought about the options beyond a plastic bag. There are sewing baskets but none of them really struck my fancy and I really didn’t feel like laying money out for one. There’s the classic Schrodinger’s cookie tin option. Does it contain cookies? Buttons? Sewing supplies? That would be a free option and there are appropriately sized tins in the house but it would all just be thrown in and I wanted a bit of organization if possible.

So I stepped back into history a bit and decided to make a housewife. I’ve dealt with them in collections before. They were usually quickly made for a specific purpose, generally sending a soldier off to war and on the small size. I wanted something a bit bigger, a bit more customized. And if I was going to spend time making something from scratch, the materials used might as well have some sort of meaning behind them beyond being scraps that I pulled from the crafting horde.

Creative projects get jotted down in my big red blank book so I started there with ideas and what I wanted the housewife to actually hold. That led to a paper pattern and playing with the tools that would go in it and how big pockets needed to be to hold them. The next step was digging through the bins and drawers of fabric scraps to find bits and bobs that were the right size and would go together in a colorful, pattern filled way. I had a large enough piece of fabric to do the outside of the housewife and spent many nights doing French knots and beading to make it a bit more interesting and colorful.

Please excuse the cat hair. It’s everywhere.

Fabric was purchased second hand for the interior lining and binding edge (LOVE YOU ECOWORKS!) but that was only a couple of dollars. I also purchased thread for the binding because one of the things I learned as part of this project was that a well matched thread makes stitches disappear and the blues I had on hand weren’t quite right. I spent less than $10 on the entire project and used up a fair number of scraps that otherwise might have just ended up in the recycling. That’s a good thing.

I also learned that 90% of sewing is actually done with an iron. Every time I considered whether or not to press something before sewing I would hear the eldest in my head yelling at me to go upstairs and spend 5 minutes with the iron. Another lessons learned is that slow and steady makes for fewer mistakes. If it took me a week to get a pocket just right, so what? I also need to go back to kindergarten and work on cutting straight lines. I’m bad at it, even when I’m going slow and steady. When I messed up cutting even using a straight edge and rotary cutter I just had to laugh. It’s either that or scream and I’d much rather laugh.

When I finished up the housewife the other day I recorded it in my red project book. It annoyed me when I put in the end date and realized I’ve been working on it since August.  Why the f did it take so long?  It’s just a sewing kit.  A roll with pockets tied with a ribbon. But then I look at it, use it and it’s so much more. It’s the brown twill fabric that a work friend found and brought in because she knows the eldest sews. The eldest then turned around a made a quilted skirt and dapper hat with the yardage. I bound the edges of that pocket with scraps trimmed from the hem of her wedding gown. The ribbon that ties it all together is from her bouquet. The pocket that holds thread and other notions is made from the same fabric as the curtain that I made for the youngling’s closet. The yellow floral print came from my mother’s fabric stash (c1975) that the eldest used when teaching the youngling how to sew a pinafore. Even the tiny scraps I used to stuff the pin cushion have a deeper meaning. Of course that took a while to pull together.

So many tiny stitches.

Recently I caught up my office calendar that deals with creator name stuff.  I mark when and what I post about to remind myself of what I’ve done so I don’t repeat too often  I could do endless posts about the dumbass way Greg has chosen to hide or what I ate.  Trying to ride that fine line between interesting and idiotic and writing it all down helps. 

So, the calendar has been flipped to April since April 2023 because I’ve been busy.  As I updated the calendar the other night, marking things down I realize that I’ve actually been rather consistent about posting and that a lot of wonderful things happened in 2023.

Finally finished up Tiny Study and it was accepted for a gallery show.

A tiny preying mantis friend made an appearance in my urban driveway before moseying along.

I saw Jupiter from my front porch.

So what it took 6 months to make a housewife. The making was an experience in and of itself and now I get to use it and see it every day on the table next to my side of the couch.

The little things of life can be so heartbreakingly beautiful if one only slows down enough to see it.

Summer salad

It’s summer.

It’s hot.

I’m not going to unduly whine and tell you about my lifelong hatred of summer before I get to the damn not-recipe recipe so here it is.

Pasta of your choice and availability, cooked and cooled.

Veggies, I used green peppers, cucumbers and finely chopped red onion.

Greek style salad dressing. I’ve been liking Ken’s Steak House Greek dressing these days.

Bulgarian white cheese. It’s softer than feta and has a milder flavor so those who still have intact taste buds might like it better. Feta will work here as well but you won’t get the creamy effect with mixing that the Bulgarian white cheese gives you.

Grill some chicken. I sprinkled mine with some Penzy’s Turkish seasoning before throwing it on the grill. Rough chop the chicken once it’s cooked and cooled.

Combine all the above and add a splash of lemon juice for extra zing and salt and pepper as desired.

Skip the chicken to make it vegetarian. Add more and different veggies as desired. Olives would be a classic to add to this but no one here likes the fatty little globes. It’s a pasta salad, make of it what you will. The Bulgarian white cheese is really the key to it. Tastes even better the second day.

Which is really good because the only thing I hate more than summer is having to cook when it’s hot.

The Adventures of Hortense

This post got lost in my draft folder from Spring 2021 but I still like it so why not post it.

Several weeks after my mother died I finally made it to her house to sort through her hoarder paradise. It was a house I’d never been to before, hadn’t seen in any pictures so it was a foreign place in that respect but it was full of things my mother had been dragging about for decades and smelled like her.

I stumbled in, late at night, after driving 1300 miles by myself over two days. I’d never traveled so far by myself let alone during a pandemic I was at high risk of dying from. My aunt had been kind enough to leave some lights on and warned me that the front door stuck. So I yeeted my things onto the kitchen table after I cleared it off, took a hot shower in the nasty smelling sulfur water and collapsed into the bed my grandmother once slept in.

The next month was non-stop sorting, chucking and packing, in a strange house alone. There were a couple of trips to the grocery store that had surprisingly little food, a trip to the lawyer to prove who I was and set the legal process in motion and an uncomfortable trip to the funeral home to pick up her ashes but otherwise it was just me, the house and lots of stuff.

I don’t mind being alone but this was extreme isolation, even for me.

Standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window, wondering if there was anyone else out there alive (seems people in the Florida panhandle don’t go outside much in the summer, it’s just too damn hot) I noticed that there was a spot of green on the windowsill. It was a tiny little chunk of plant that had been left behind by my aunt when she rescued the houseplants before I arrived.

The nubbling was from a plant my mother had for years. She had acquired the original nubbin sometime around the time my eldest was born in the mid 90’s. I was working for the family business at the time and remember her showing up with this scrap of plant that she actually managed to root. In time I took a nubbin from the plant and it’s upstairs safe from the cats behind my bedroom door. Seems it’s a delicious plant.

This nubbling on the window ledge in Florida was still green even though it had been a month or more since it had fallen off the mother plant. I was avoiding dragging another bag of garbage to the curb so I found a container, scooped some dirt out of the yard and planted it.

The rest of the time I was there it lived on the nightstand next to my bed. It felt good to know that there was something alive in the house beside myself and the palmetto bugs. I named it Hortense for no particular reason and started every day by saying good morning and ended every night by saying good night.

The dirt from the yard was horrible stuff that packed right down into hardpan but luckily I found an open bag of potting soil in the garage that was too full of literal garbage to ever fit a car. Hortense didn’t do much growing while I was spending my time chucking and sorting but at least it didn’t die and seemed to even get a bit plumper and more green with the new surroundings.

Driving back to New England I kept Hortense in the cup holder right next to me and brought it into the hotel when I stopped for the night. I didn’t want it to fry in the hot car or get lost in all that I was bringing back.

I stopped for food in New Jersey because even though I was only a few hours from home I knew I wouldn’t make it through NYC without sustenance. Bolting back onto the highway from the rest stop I pulled a fry from the container and accidentally knocked Hortense over. It fell down between the seat and the console and disappeared into the darkness of the car. I pulled over on the ramp and looked for Hortense but couldn’t find it in amongst all the chaos. I figured it was gone.

It seemed silly to cry over a plant nubbling even as I was doing it but sometimes it’s easier to cry over the silly things. If I cried over the big things I’d never stop.

Once I arrived home, the youngling and her father, all of us masked because I’d been traveling through plague country, helped me unload the car. It was horrible to not be able to hug her after a month away but I was in quarantine for two weeks to make sure I hadn’t brought anything deadly back. Once the car was empty and I was alone again, I did a hard target search of every nook, cranny and dark space of the car looking for Hortense.

I found it, replanted it for a third time and put it in a place of honor, and good sun, on my desk.

A few months after we got home, Hortense started to produce a little bud right on top. I was so excited to see proof of life. Tragedy struck again when I knocked off the bud when opening the curtain so we could share the sun. So I took a piece of cardboard and built a shield to protect any future buds from the curtain and my clumsiness.

The other day the girls and I went to the garden center for the first time in over a year. It’s time for pansies and lettuce and it’s a safe place for a socially distanced outing. I’d noticed the other day that Hortense had four buds on top and I wanted a new pot for it. Found a purple one I liked but then the eldest picked up a beautiful cobalt blue one for only a couple of dollars more. So I bought the blue pot, proper succulent potting soil and lots of pansies.

It’s Easter and the younglings are with their father for a few hours so I figured it was as good a time as any to re-pot Hortense. The day before I’d found some pretty rocks to put in the bottom of the pot for drainage and a bit of landscaping fabric to keep the dirt where it belongs. I snuggled it into its new home and gave it a good drink.

Now we’re sitting here at my desk, the window cracked for a bit of fresh spring air and Hortense is settled into its new home. Adventures hopefully over for the near future.

I looked up the meaning of Hortense, its from Latin and means gardener.

Can’t think of a better name for a plant. Maybe someday it’ll grow into the name.

Debt? Free!

I’ve been in financial debt in one form or another since I was in high school, which was more than a few decades ago.

I was paying my own way by then.  My mother was getting child support as well as charging me rent but nothing was ever enough for her, ever.  My sister actually dropped out of high school because she needed to pay rent to our mother.  She couldn’t find a job that would pay enough and work around her school hours.  She was told to figure it out so her solution was quitting school. 

My solution was to barely sleep.

I’d go to school from o’god o’clock till 12:30 when I went to another school for creative writing till 4.  Then I’d get to work as soon as I could hustle there, generally 4:30 and work till the kitchen closed, 10 or 11 on weekdays, midnight or 1 on weekends. 

I was always broke even with working almost full time.  I was paying for rent, food, clothes and anything else I wanted or needed.  Living at “home” was cheaper than moving out so I stayed there.  A boarding house would have been a lovely solution but I didn’t know any existed at that age.

My friend M was always loaning me $20 or so to get me through to the next check.  I almost always had a tab with her.  I’d catch up with the next infusion of cash from extra hours over a school break, cash gifts from holidays and general scrounging and hustling.

It was so kind of her to do that.  She never judged or nagged.  Just this calm acceptance of this is how things were.

A bit of peace in a sea of chaos.

I was in college when I got my first credit card.  It was a Sears card and I used it to pay for my first pc so homework would be easier.  The computer lab at school didn’t have hours that synced with mine between classes, work and trying to have a somewhat social life.  And they were always crowded with no paper in the printers so their usability was minimal.  State schools don’t have the resources that private ones do. 

From the store card I went to a general purpose one in quick order because I always paid my bill on time.  It might not have been much above the minimum payment but at least it was always on time.  I didn’t really understand the wonder and curse of compound interest yet.  I’d always lived in a paycheck to paycheck family with a flush of cash on payday and then digging quarters out of the couch for gas, cigarettes or booze by the end of the week. Saving, money management and other financial issues weren’t something discussed around the dinner table. It just didn’t exist for people like us. Doing whatever needed to be done to get through to the next paycheck was just the way the universe functioned.

So I got that credit card and M and I went to the mall.  She was home from college for some break or another and borrowed the family car to get out to the shiny and silvery burbs.  I bought a burgundy silk shirt with a wide ruffle at the scoop neck and generous sleeves.  The fabric felt fantastic, the color was super saturated and it was hideously expensive for me.  Probably the most expensive piece of clothing I owned for several years, including shoes. 

You know how much it was?

This was the early 1990’s keep in mind.

$50

Shocking, I know.  Just gives an idea of where I was on the economic ladder.  A ladder I only vaguely understood existed because I knew no one different except for an aunt I saw rarely.

So I bought the shirt, and probably school books and the occasional meal.  I always paid my bill on time.  It might not have been much above the minimum payment but at least it was on time. 

And then came a youngling, marriage and full-on adulting.  I was focused on raising her and he was closed-mouthed about numbers.  Dangerous combo for my climbing debt load.

Once he left I started whacking at the debt but when the younglings needed shoes and backpacks and winter coats, options were limited. I wasn’t extravagant but they weren’t going to go without when I had this handy plastic option in my wallet. Been there, done that, wasn’t going to push that on to the next generation.

Then came another romantic partner with his own mountain of debt to climb.  We differed on how to clear it all out and my mountain grew a bit more, especially once I got sick and couldn’t work as much.

When he left, he took 2/3’s of the household income along with his worldly possessions in trash bags. I kept whacking at my debt.

Being the only adult in the house I could now make all the decisions and most of the sacrifices.  But they were my choices to make.

I was tired of carrying this weight, for decades now.

My possibilities were anchored down and limited by it.

I paid off 2 of my 4 cards and was working on the last ones but they were the highest balances. I didn’t see being able to finish them off any time soon.

And then my mother died.

Whoo hoo! 

But that’s another story.

I stepped up as executor and was buried, literally, in paperwork.  Pandemic lock down and unemployment couldn’t have come at a better time.  It was nerve wracking in the moment, but I can’t see how I would have cleaned up her mess without the space it gave me.

I would have figured it out no matter what historic event was taking place but this one worked in my favor, for once. 

My siblings and I all figured she’d live for at least another couple of decades and by then there wouldn’t have been anything left besides decades old bill receipts, tchotchkes and dead bugs.  So many dead bugs.

Guess we got lucky. 

How horrible to say you’re lucky because your mother died before reaching 70 but how very true in this case.

Once I had run down all her accounts and found what money there was my siblings and I were issued checks. I tried to negotiate with my card companies as instructed by a volunteer financial advisor I’d found through my therapist.  I would have had to trash my credit score, be in default or bankruptcy and close the accounts in order to get them to reduce the balance. It’s like they know they have you over a barrel or something.

So I paid them.

All of them. 

Every one.

It took me a few moments to press “pay now” on the last one.  It was the biggest balance overall but was lower than it had been in years.  I pressed the virtual button and my blood pressure immediately spiked.  My vision went kind of wonky and I had to breathe deep to calm my pounding heart.  The youngling came into my study just after I’d done it.  She held off her teenage angst rant long enough to ask if I was alright. 

Yeah, I am.

It’s done.  It’s gone.

Balancing a household budget will still be a challenge because of the nature of my work and capabilities.  But at least I’m paying for the tangible things and not the privilege of borrowing a bit of wealth for a moment. 

2021 has certainly been an interesting year.

If nothing else, I can look forward to seeing zeros across the statements in 2022.

Tiny Study

I think it was the towards the end of 2019 that the book nook craze hit the interwebs.

Spent more time then I’d like to admit scrolling through endless posts, tutorials and websites looking at the tiny worlds people were creating all over. The diversity of universes, methods and final results was fascinating.

So of course, I had to make one myself.

I’ve always been intrigued by tiny things. My favorite toys as a young one were Fisher Price Little People back when they were still made out of natural materials and The Sunshine Family. I didn’t have any of the accessories or structures for the doll family so I made my own out of cardboard, paper and anything else I could scrounge up around the house.

In the time between high school and college the place I was living wasn’t the best and I was working too many hours behind a hot stove on a line and just looking for a bit of an escape. Sometimes that was through drinking too much and slam dancing the night away in a mosh pit at a Ramone’s show. A gentler escape was browsing at the miniature store on the other side of town. I didn’t get there often and even when I did couldn’t do much more than ooh and ahh over the tiny treasures. I made the occasional small purchase to squirrel away for a day when I would have the time, money and space to build an actual miniature house and furnish it.

I think the box is in the basement next door.

College, kids and a couple of more careers took up the next few decades and my body decided it was long done with mosh pits as a viable means of escape.

So what’s next has been a persistent thought for the last couple of years.

And now there’s book nooks.

I like books. Lord knows I have an insane amount of shelving in just my study alone. 137 linear feet the last time I counted.

So I gathered ideas, photographs and materials. I’m not quite sure when I started working on the actual thing because the process photos that serve as an external memory in this day of dated digital photos were lost in the Great IPhone Bricking of November 2020. Based on my scattered memories (and whose memory isn’t a bit scattered after two years of plague?), I began actual construction sometime in early 2020.

Building the structure from foam core was a challenge since I’m not the best at cutting straight lines and I only had one sheet of foam core and no funds (and after March 2020 the ability) to purchase more. So I made it work. I always do.

The books took forever but were a great thing to keep my hands busy and my body upright as I was fighting off 6 sequential rounds of different weird pneumonias in the middle of a respiratory pandemic. Every book was individually assembled complete with marbled end-papers and printed pages.

I’d finished up the structure, bookshelves, skylight, window (that took multiple tries and I still want to do another one) and the chair was halfway done when my mother got sick and eventually died. I’d even bought the tiny led lights so it would look like the sun was coming through the window and skylight. It all got set aside so that the Adult Responsibilities could be taken care of.

A year later it was time to clear out the unfinished projects that were taking up space on the worktable so I finished gluing the chair together, got over my fear of screwing up the lights and just finished the damn thing. It took less then a week and I wondered why I’d put it off for so long. This is a reoccurring theme around here but I’m working on it.

I’m great at starting projects, not so good at finishing them.

It’s not perfect but it’s done and in a place of honor on the bookshelf.

Now that I’ve been looking at it for the past few weeks, I think the draw of the tiny world is about the ability to build a home, a life, a tiny bit of the universe where I am queen and my word is law. I can literally shape the universe as I see fit. A powerful draw for a person who has all too often felt powerless.

I do so love being in charge of my own universe even if I have to build it from the ground up.

What world to build next?

Its been a year

What a year.

But not.

In a life full of far-reaching events, being in the house for a year really isn’t the worst. I’m very lucky in that I’ve got food, shelter, warmth and more books then I’ll ever be able to read.

I’ve been in this strange limbo where time moves along outside the house but things seem much more static inside, but not.

Lock-down and unemployment has given me the most time off I’ve ever had. I’ve been working since 13 or so except for this past year. Vacations have been far and few in-between and even when I’m sick and stuck at home, I’m usually dragging myself to the desk in an attempt to get in some billable hours.

It’s very strange to wake up in the morning and there’s nothing that HAS to be done. Laundry can be put off a day. Meals can be scrounged from what’s already been prepared. Leaky faucets can be turned off instead of immediately replaced and those boxes in the corner aren’t going anywhere so why do they need to be dealt with today?

It’s not like anyone is going to die if I spend the day reading, watching Star Trek in its many iterations on an endless loop and puttering about.

Is this really living or a strange version of not-death?

So many people dead, of the plague and other maladies. It’s one of the few things we all have in common. We all eventually die.

Dad 3 died in March 2019. What started out as gallstones ended up killing him after about a month in the hospital. I missed his last moments of consciousness. I missed hearing his voice one last time. I’m still feeling his loss, dealing with his absence and most likely will be for quite some time. He was the youngest of my 4 parents (3 living at that point) and the one who was most like a parent, even with all his imperfections. He was sober after so many years of not being so and he was a part of our lives again.

He wasn’t supposed to die of gallstones, strapped unconscious to a hospital bed.

I think his body was just worn out and so very, very done.

May 2020 I was woken up at 3 am by a phone call from the nursing home where Dad 2 lives. That’s never a good thing. He had COVID and they needed me to convince him to go to the hospital. He pulled through after a couple of weeks but I didn’t know that then. I thought I had just said goodbye as I cajoled him into going for treatment.

I woke up the youngling because I forgot to cry more quietly.

I’m usually better about such things.

My mother died in June 2020. She drank herself to death over Dad 3 whom she had walked away from and divorced almost 20 years before. My thought is that he was just a convenient excuse. A “good” reason not to pull herself together, deal with her issues and move on with her life.

Suicide by cheap vodka and liver failure.

The last time I talked to her was Mother’s Day. An aunt called to say she was sick and I needed to convince her to go to a doctor. So I called and tried to talk to her. Asked what she wanted done when the inevitable happened since the conversation led that way.

She hung up on me.

That was the last time we talked.

Up until that point I had been trying to see my layoff as a chance to spend my days as I wished, an opportunity to get my house and life in order and to take advantage of a gift of time that was unique in my life.

Instead I’ve spent the last 10 months cleaning up the mess my mother left behind.

Fucking typical.

First there was a 1300 mile journey down the Eastern Seaboard during a pandemic to her hoarders house to salvage whatever was valuable, distribute what was usable and get it ready to sell. Tidying up her finances was a nightmare. Just finding and accessing her money took months and countless hours digging through boxes of paperwork and on the phone convincing bank officials that I was who I said I was. Twelve accounts across four financial institutions will do that. She also hadn’t been paying the medical bills she was racking up for the last couple of months of her life. I’m still not convinced they’ve all been paid but I’ve signed the legal paperwork that says they are.

The house is almost ready for the market. It’s down to the new carpet and deep cleaning stage and my only duty is to coordinate and pay for it. I hate making phone calls and talking to strangers but the money to come once things are all settled is a powerful motivator.

I’ve spent my life trying to not be greedy or take more than my fair share but I’m viewing her money as reparations for a lifetime of having to deal with her. It won’t erase the past but maybe it can make moving forward a little easier.

I’ve been poor for most of my life so watching people online (the only way I interact with most people these days) talk about their upcoming anniversaries of going into lock-down has been somewhat jarring. While in quarantine, the playing field was more level. No one could go out to eat, or to a movie or show, or shopping, or on vacation. These were all things that I rarely did beforehand so losing the ability/option to do them this past year was meaningless. If anything I liked not having to explain to people why I hadn’t done all these things .

No, I don’t have cable to watch some show or commercial. Haven’t in decades.

No, I don’t go on vacation. Don’t get paid if I don’t go to work.

No, we don’t take day trips to X. If I did, there would be no grocery money for the month.

I’m just treading water here, trying not to drown.

So, one year later, down to the last parent and heading back to work, into the fray of trying to keep body and soul together.

It’s been a year.

There is no deeper meaning behind this photo other than I like flowers and they make me happy.
We could all use more happy.

It’s the end of the world as we know it

and I feel fine?

How could I not have this song running through my head these days on an almost continuous loop? Maybe it’s a Gen X thing.

The last time I had a therapy appointment in person on March 12 we talked about how things were moving to telemed, about the stocking up I’d been doing since late January to prepare for possible quarantine and how I would deal with being in the middle of a pandemic as a person with multiple medical issues that put me in the high risk category.

“How do you feel now that the apocalypse you been preparing for your entire life has finally arrived?” my therapist asked. Still thinking about that. My tentative conclusion? Apocalypse, in one form or another, has surrounded me all my life. Is this one really all that different? At least this time I’ve got a roof over my head, food on the table and I don’t need to leave the house and deal with the wider world.

My maternal grandparents lived through World War II in Ukraine, Poland, Germany and spent time in Nazi work camps, specifically the coal mines in Westphalia and I’m not sure where else. It never occurred to me to define them as Holocaust survivors, we’re not Jewish, but the youngling was doing homework the other day and according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, they count. They lost 2 children during the war but managed to walk out with each other and their eldest child. They were so much luckier than so many. My mother was born in a DP camp in West Germany years after the war and came to the United States as a baby with the rest of the family. They might have left the war and the old country behind but they never really escaped.

My grandparents and eldest aunt in a Nazi work camp during the war.

Grandmother’s house was a horders paradise. Nothing was ever thrown out. When you’ve gone without like she did you can’t really blame her for holding onto every little thing. You never know when you might need it.

I have a hard time getting rid of things too. I’m not as bad as my grandmother, or even my mother, but for me objects contain almost all my memories. Without the thing I lose the ability to recall the memory. I don’t live in a horders house by any measurement, I’ll just never run out of things to read.

I hate to shop so I’d rather do it in big trips and then be done for a while. In many ways I’ve been prepping for the ‘poclaypse most of my adult life; whether that apocalypse be a snowstorm or a temporary absence of funds. I have the space and don’t like not being able to bake or cook whatever comes to mind when the mood strikes.

Once they locked down Wuhan I knew shit was about to get serious. I’m a historian. I know what happened during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. My youngling’s great great grandparents on their dad’s mother’s side died during the flu epidemic. This history is personal. Hell, I’ve got this bit of history hanging right up over my desk as I sit here typing.

Grippe is an old-fashioned term for influenza. 50 million people died during the 1918-1919 flu epidemic.

The end of January was when my thinking started moving away from typical high level anxiety about the general state of my universe and shifting into oh shit, how do I deal with this? The last few years have been lean and the cabinets were bare but I’ve got credit and used it for a solid month to build back up the supplies. I figured, even if it all magically disappeared like some were saying it would, I just wouldn’t have to go shopping for a while.

By the end of February I was advised by multiple doctors to isolate. This wasn’t difficult for an introvert like myself. I’m not out and about much on a regular basis and once the stocking up was done I was okay with just going to work and coming home. There was one last trip to the library but I was already there doing some research for a side job. Once the youngling’s school closed down that was it. No more going out. We’ve been home since March 13 except for 2 trips to the pharmacy drive through. If it can’t be delivered to the doorstep, we’ll live without it.

I’m in an online mom group for people with traumatic pasts. Many of us have commented on how we’re oddly calm. In many ways, life and death situations are the norm for us. I’ve always been great in a crisis, it’s the day to day life I have trouble with. When things are calm I sit here waiting for the next shoe to drop, the bombs to fall, the loved one to say horrible things, get up and walk away. That’s been my experience of life.

But I can also see where I’m so much luckier than so many. I’ve got a house I love so much I never want to leave it on a regular day. There’s food on the table, another human being to talk with, share meals with and even watch a show or movie with at the end of the day. So many aren’t so fortunate.

This disease may end up killing me but for now I’m safe and so are my two younglings and that’s all that really matters. All I can deal with is today, what’s in front of me. Not what’s to come. That’s still too nebulous.

Who knows, maybe the fever induced by this virus will bring about a new era. My youngest and I have been having conversations about this as she works her way through history homework. Discussing how the Gilded Age lead to reforms that were paused by the wars and Great Depression and then came to fruition in the 1950’s and 60’s with a golden age for the middle class. Now that we’re in a new gilded age one can only wonder what will come about after this time apart. The delivery person, those stocking shelves in the grocery store, the teacher and the medical staff are just as important as any of us and in this time of trouble it’s so much easier to see that. Everyone has a place in society and deserves to have a fair slice of the societal pie. We can have hope for the future and work towards a more equal society in the days to come.

Once we finally put on pants again of course.

Weekend in Vermont

Love this photo, she remembered as she excavated it from a deep dive into the social media photo file.  Why not recycle it for the page once again?  It’s seasonal if nothing else.  The shiny black enamel of the rental car he insisted they needed. 

She ended up driving halfway there even though he’d promised she wouldn’t have to.

So many promises broken over the years.  When do they collapse under their own weight? 

What an odd weekend.  Even more so in retrospect.


Slow burn thinker because words are hard.  So many thoughts swirling around from so much – life. 

He’d moved out suddenly.  The announcement made over Sunday pancakes she’d just spent an hour making.


The first words out of her mouth.  Are you fucking kidding me?


Then tears.  So many tears.

And then he was back.  But not.  She kept the sanctity of her threshold but allowed him into her bed.  If nothing else the sex was worth it.  Put her on crutches more than once. 

Even worth this?


Peeling the band aid off slowly while still having the cake and eating it with two for a bit?


When he was there he was completely in but he shrugged it off at the door and left it behind in her keeping. 

She was always the archive. 

Was it time to do a bit of deaccessioning? 

He rented a car so they could go away for the weekend.  The only time, just like the flowers, and bought with the same plastic. 

Money rushed away like water from him.  She was tired of being the dam.


The weekend was odd and frenetic.  She wanted to spend it in the woods.  To sit by a rocky stream and absorb a bit of that peace. 

Instead they wandered through shops they couldn’t afford being shoved about by people. 

So many people. 

She cooked most of the meals to save a bit.    Saw it as her contribution. He said the weekend would be carefree for her but she still had to fill in all the details. And then to get slammed for it instead of it being seen as a joint effort?  Wasn’t this supposed to be a joint effort?

It was very confusing.


Even years later a blur of feelings and conflicted moments.  What was wrong with the people they were?  Why did they have to pay for the privilege of pretending to be someone else knowing that there were extra bills at the end of it? 

Where’s the fun in that?

He’d always been a chameleon but told her, with so many words between them in so many ways over so many years, that the skin she was seeing was the bottom layer. 

The true core.


He was wrong. 

And so was she. 

She really hated to be wrong.


People on the bottom don’t always recover from their mistakes.  Whatever they are. 

There was another layer to peel.


They returned from the Northern Kingdom and he ghosted again. 


And they went through the process.  Kicked recycling cans and garbage bags of stuff sent off into the night and all.


At least they were alone in the house.  It’s difficult to end something like that. 

So much behind it and nothing ahead.


She saw him months later when he was picking stuff up from the garage she no longer went into. 

He didn’t smell like himself anymore.  This wasn’t the person she had known for all those years.  Her person. 

The skin had been fully shed.


At least I got a good photograph out of it. 

It’s all in how you frame it

Was reading an article recently on how the point of a writer’s life isn’t necessarily publication and success, because lord knows how rarely lightning strikes, but in the joy of the creative process.

I firmly believe that we all need a bit more joy in our lives.  These are trying times (aren’t they all in one way or another?) and I feel the need to make the best of it as opposed to succumbing to the understandable despair.

I’ve been bogged down in editing hell for the last few months.  It’ll be worth it once I’m done but damn it, bushwhacking through the jungle is exhausting.  I just want the thing I see in my head to be somewhat close to what others read on the page.

It’s the getting there that’s exhausting.

And frustrating.

I have so many other things I want to accomplish during my limited time at the desk.

But it’s also exhilarating.  (holy shit I actually spelled that right!)

If it wasn’t I wouldn’t keep coming back to the desk, to the page, to the words.

And I have a lot more time to do that now, for good or ill.  Might as well make it for the good.

Trying to focus on the good.

Got to go away for the weekend to the north country.  That same weekend we found out that my sister-in-law had been murdered.  We knew she had passed but this was just…I mean what can you say?  She wasn’t my favorite person and I’m sure I wasn’t hers.  I just wish she could have been the mother my very wonderful niece deserves.  So very young though.  What does she leave behind?

What do any of us?

This same weekend as I was trying to have a nice time with Dad #3, his lovely bride and my two, my sister’s engagement falls apart.  She’s understandably upset, texting for lawyers and we’re all just trying to enjoy the scenery.

Let the drama intrude or go on with the day?

The view from where I got my chocolate.

Find satisfaction in the daily slog of life and the moments of joy when doing what brings you there?

Or drag along, cursing and bitching the entire way?

The only thing that moved was my fingers on the zoom.

I’d rather reframe the view and find the beauty.

It’s self-preservation if nothing else.