Tag Archives: Covid19

Accentuate the Positive: COVID, Silver Lining Edition

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It’s official: COVID-19 is no longer cool. It’s hanging out with me and the Mate.

8 days and counting…

Understand, we’re the kind of folks who started watching “The Office” in its fourth season. Who are only now talking about maybe watching “The Mandalorian.” Want to know why Facebook’s been on a slow downward slide among young people since 2010? That’s when I joined. (The Mate is actually cooler than I am; he’ll never join.)

Luckily, we have a whole bunch of “luckilies”: We were in good health. We both got only mild symptoms (the Mate, mostly fatigue; me, a juicy head cold with a lingering cough). While we did have to cancel some parts of our lives that affected other people (sorry, my fellow bakers & musicians!), we didn’t have to miss anything huge like a family gathering (or, I don’t know, an MFA residency). Most importantly, we have not, to our knowledge, spread the virus to anyone else.

Also luckily for me, thanks to my MFA homework, I have a voracious appetite for all the extra time COVID has gifted me. For example, here’s what I’ve read since I came home from LA just under a month ago:

I especially recommend Euphoria & the nonfiction Strangers in Their Own Land

I’m also super grateful for having to isolate myself during such stellar weather, as Lopez Island is (so far) not suffering from the heat wave overtaking most of the rest of the globe.

…because it takes extra time and attention to spot the small, subtle Elegant Reign Orchid

I do confess to being VERY tired of the gunk in my lungs. But it also reminds me of my English teaching days, when I’d introduce a Shakespeare unit by teaching the kids about the “Four Humors” of medieval “medicine.” Depending on which planet you were born under, one of the liquids running through your body would dominate the others, thereby determining your personality.

Those four humors? Blood, yellow bile, black bile, and…wait for it…phlegm.

Image courtesy Wikipedia

We still carry the vestiges of the Four Humors in our personality adjectives today. You can be sanguine (cheerful), bilious or choleric (angry), or, my own humor–phlegmatic! (Students were much less grossed out once they learned this meant “deep” or “hard to read”.)

As an on-the-cusp Scorpio, I’ve never felt very in tune with my sign. But right now, thanks to COVID, I’ve never felt more phlegmy–I mean phlegmatic. And I’ll take that Humor right now, thank you very much. Gotta accentuate the positive till it finally turns negative.

What’s Your Position on Positions?

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Note: this post is NOT intended to elicit sympathy toward the author. If you notice any indications to the contrary, please feel free to slap her, remotely (there must be an emoji for that)–or just close the page.

These past couple of weeks I’ve been forced to think quite a bit about positions. Not political ones; I mean physical: lying down, sitting, and standing. Injuries acquired in the service of democracy* have me no longer taking these simple options for granted.

*turns out when you spend hours and hours and hours writing letters and making phone calls to voters, sitting at a table which is just SLIGHTLY the wrong height, your back takes its revenge.

Still worth it. I think.

Before my back started hurting, I was all about sitting. Like many jobs, working as a baker is about 98% bipedal, but I took every 2% chance I got to set my butt down, between rounds of butterhorns. (That doesn’t sound quite right, but you know what I mean.)

OK, these are not actually butterhorns…but gooey enough to be close. (photo courtesy Holly B’s Bakery)

Now? Sitting is the enemy. Even perching makes me pay a price. So what the heck. Let’s celebrate some of the gifts of the other positions, shall we?

LYING DOWN. Good for:

Sleeping–duh. And sex. And reading–like my latest recommendation, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. If you’re looking for short, lyrical pieces that fill you with the desire to go sit (or lie) in your favorite woods, and bring those woods to you if you’re stuck somewhere un-woodsy–this is your book. Get two copies, one for yourself and one for someone you care about.

Bad for:

Zoom. I really, really dislike seeing my future, double-chinned self staring back at me when I Zoom horizontally.

Not my favorite look.

STANDING. Good for:

When someone hands you a puppy.

Though in fairness, I would also have accepted this gift sitting down.

Appreciating sunsets.

Ditto.

Locomoting–which brings you to places where people might hand you a puppy, or to places of extra beauty. (It’s not impossible to locomote from a horizontal or sitting position–just harder.)

Pictured: place of extra beauty.

Bad for:

Knees. Also dizziness induced by drugs taken for back pain.

Which brings us back to…

SITTING. Good for:

Knees. (At least mine.)

All social situations where lying down isn’t quite appropriate (even if you wish it were).

Just sayin’–burgers while reclining could end…badly.

Bad for:

Me, right now. Which is why I’ve written this all on my back (not literally; now THAT would take some dexterity).

But–that fact, above? It’s actually a “good for,” because…well, look. What better time than a global pandemic to start appreciating things as basic as Sitting, Standing, and Lying Down?

Which is YOUR favorite? Tell me why.

Virtual Flowers For Mother’s Day: Inspirational Chutzpah That Would Make Mom Proud

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The last time I was able to venture off my beautiful island, I was lucky enough to catch the Skagit Valley tulips at full bloom, only 15 miles from the ferry terminal.

A FIELD of FLOWERS? It really is exactly as beautiful as you’d think.

Then this morning I felt equally lucky to catch this article by Kirk Johnson in the New York Times about those very fields, and a group of old high school friends who had teamed up to go into the flower business…just in time to get slammed by the Coronavirus.

As Johnson writes,

The annual tulip festival that draws hundreds of thousands of people north of Seattle to Skagit County, where three-quarters of the nation’s commercial tulip crop is grown, was canceled. And that put every other element of the tulip economy into free fall as well: No festival visitors paying to stroll through the blossoms and no money spent on restaurants, hotel stays, bouquets and bulbs for growing at home — a $65 million hit to the local economy that only compounded the economic blows of the state’s shelter-in-place orders.

Faced with the prospect of losing 90% of their revenue, Johnson writes, the five bulb-farmers, once cheerleaders and “yell squad” teammates from Mt. Vernon High, had to innovate, and their courage paid off.

Phone calls started coming in from people who were not going to be able to come in person to visit, said Rachael Ward Sparwasser, whose journey went from cheer squad to lawyer and investor to tulip partner. “Would you be willing to ship blossoms?” the callers asked. The old business model had mostly involved shipping bulbs to gardeners, not fresh bouquets.

Their company had 600 shipping boxes in storage, and Ms. Sparwasser figured they might get orders to send 100 or 200 boxes, 20 stems each.

“Within the first day, we sold through all of it,” she said. Within weeks, they boxed and sold 8,000 bouquets, a completely new business line started from scratch.

Then, as a wave of appreciation grew around the country for health care workers and others at the front lines of the virus, the idea struck that people might pay to have a bouquet of tulips sent as a donation and statement of support. So came their new Color for Courage business line — and more than 4,700 more orders at $15 a bouquet.

Glory be.

Could there be a better story for these times? No, it doesn’t have to do with Mother’s Day directly, but this kind of sharing and make-do innovation, this pivot from disaster to generosity, seems perfect for the day. These folks’ moms should be proud. It brought a smile to my face as bright as any colorful bouquet would have done.

Happy Mother’s Day to all, and to all a big bunch of colorful love!

My New Furlough “Job”: Fun With Elected Officials

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Even though, like many Americans, I’m furloughed from my job at the moment, I recognize that I’m in the 1% of ridiculously lucky people who has no one in my home demanding care nor worry; ample resources; and lovely outdoor space close to hand.

I’m sorry, New York–I wish I could send you some!

What I also have? A sense of helplessness. When we finished quarantining after our road trip, I signed up to deliver food around our island. But then I had to go off-island again. Twice. I understand the reason for the quarantine rule, but still I chafed. What can I DO to HELP?

Enter University of Washington professor David Domke and Common Purpose. I’d already attended an Orientation with this impressive group dedicated to promoting voting, and signed up for national get-out-the-vote work next fall. But next fall is so, so far away, and the daily COVID news weighs heavily. So I was thrilled when the email call came to ADVOCATE FOR EXPANDED VOTING OPTIONS FOR NEXT NOVEMBER,* from my own living room.

*Notice I’m not saying voting for whom? That’s not what this push is about. You don’t have to dig too deep to find which party supports more voting and which party wants to limit it…but that ain’t my affair. I just happen to think America has had about enough disenfranchisement for our past couple-plus centuries.

Plus, Professor Domke said it would be fun!

27 of our 50 states don’t allow for any way to vote except in-person on one single day. Which, in a pandemic, sounds pretty CRAZY, right? Right. Just ask Wisconsin. So I signed up to contact elected officials in those 27 states. Two senators. One governor. And one person in charge of elections.

Oh dear. That’s 4 x 27…128 people. Fun, huh?

I decided to treat this task like a job. You have the option to call, email, or tweet, and since the only thing I loathe more than making political calls is receiving them, I chose email as my medium. I tweaked the form letter Common Purpose sent to make it sound more like me. Okay. Ready for fun.

For the past 2 days, I’ve emailed for approximately an hour. Because there’s a Senate bill coming up now (Thank you, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden!) I started with Senators. 

Copy email letter. Open provided link to given Senator. Autofill all my details. Pick topic. Paste letter. Make sure I’m not subscribing to any newsletters! Prove I’m human. Click Submit. Next…

Y’know what, Professor Domke? This is NOT fun. This is boring as all get-out. I hate this.

So I started embroidering a little.

I let the two senators from North Carolina know I’m a Tarheel born & bred, and finished my letter with “Go Heels!” (Too bad for me if they’re Duke fans.)

I congratulated some of the senators who recently (or less recently) dropped out of the race for being so stalwart.

I started noticing stuff. Like: Some senators make you choose a prefix for your name; others let you opt out. Some senators have “Abortion/Right to Life” on their Issues list; others, just one or the other. Some senators don’t have anything on their Issues list that covers the topic at hand–Elections? COVID? Civil Rights?–forcing me to choose “Other.” Hmph.

And Cory Booker has the most adorable website, which asks for your first name right off the bat, then goes to “Hi, Gretchen!” Awww…Miss you, Cory.

After thirty minutes or so, I noticed something else: I was actually having a kind of nerdy fun. Go figure.

Hey, time’s up. I contacted 40 senators. Only 14 to go. And then all those Governors and Secretaries of State…

Wonder if any of their websites will tell me “Hi!”?

If you’d like to join this fun enterprise–no, really, in all seriousness, if you’d like to participate in the push to keep voters safely at home without being deprived of their right to help elect our next President, click here.

Woohoooo! Democracy! At least until I get to back to work at the bakery.

A Coronavirus Serenity Prayer

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God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change—like decisions other people have already made–

courage to change the things I can—like washing my hands, keeping distant, using masks and sanitizer and yeah, washing my hands some more—

and wisdom to know that for millions of people around the world, life has been a daily disaster for ages, yet nevertheless they persevere.

And can I add gratitude? Lots of gratitude for those laboring to keep the rest of us safe? Except I don’t need to ask God for that. Already got it.

(courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Please share. And stay safe out there.

‘Tis the Season of What, Exactly? On Spring, Food, Coronavirus and Quakers

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My local Friends Meeting has an expression for when we want to think about something before making a group decision: “Let’s season this for a month and come back to it.” I think it’s a modern term (don’t remember running into it during my Quaker upbringing), and right now it’s feeling extra appropriate.

Season: to sit with something and allow it to show itself more fully.

But also: Flu season. Which has since become pandemic season. How long will pandemic season be? As I write this, it feels like our country is beginning to split even on THAT question: whether or not we should all hunker down for a few more weeks to protect each other.

And literal seasoning? While I’m hunkering, I’ll be on furlough from my bakery job. I already miss the thought of mixing ginger into fruit for pies, or adding garlic to sautéed greens for strata.

On the other hand, while hunkering, I’m also cooking up a storm, like millions of people right now lucky enough to have food—and seasoning the heck out of things.

Like adding sriracha to fresh-picked, steamed nettles to blend with hummus!

Finally, since hunkering can also be done outdoors (at a safe distance), we have signs of the season—wildflowers, songbirds, lambs, daylight. That sense of “season” brings me comfort, as if the Earth is saying, “We got ya. It’s okay. Everything comes around.”

Right now the satin flowers are blooming. They bloom only for a week, only in this one tiny spot on our whole island. Satin flowers ALWAYS hunker in place.

I think I could handle that.

Can we stand to think of ourselves as satin flowers for a little while? Do we need to season that thought?

Road Trip X, Days 33-35, Boise to North Bend to Lopez Island: Aaaaaand, Scene!

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So that’s it. Road Trip X is in the bag. As Wing road trips go, this one was DIFFERENT. Past sojourns have averaged around 45 days, but #10 weighed in at a runty 35 (and we still got home midday on that last day).

Difference #1 was, of course, the fact that our beloved Tarheel men’s basketball team played its last game a week ago. But Difference #2 was the fact that ALL BASKETBALL ended the very next day, thanks to the Coronavirus. So not only did we start heading home 3 days earlier, we spent those days eating up as many miles as possible each day, diverging rarely for scenery, and not at all for friendship.

Need proof? Here’s all I got from crossing the upper east corner of Utah:

Hiya. Now keep driving.

A bit further south, hoodoos like these turn into Zion National Park. But along I-80…

If you’re not going to stop, this is all you get.

We did stop for 90 minutes’ recreation in Twin Falls, Idaho. Twice before we’d been blanked when wishing to ride the Rim Trail of the Snake River’s canyon there, once due to weather and once due to lack of daylight. But third time’s a charm.

First you drive over the bridge. Then you bike under it.

Shoshone Falls was even more jaw-dropping than I’d expected.

Guess who just won Best Waterfall of the Trip?

Can we get a close-up?

Rainbow & all.

After spending the night in Boise (where we LOVE the river trail, but no-no-no, time for only one bike ride and you’ve already had it!), we followed the Oregon Trail route into the Pacific time zone, breathless with joy to be beating the big snowstorm we knew was on its way from the coast.

Frost: fine. Snow? No thank you.

That was a LONG day’s drive. But it could have been longer; we’d started early enough that we could actually have made it all the way to the Anacortes ferry terminal if we’d so chosen. But we didn’t.

It was our 41st anniversary (the falling-in-love one, not the wedding one. What’s better than two anniversaries?) and we wanted to spend it someplace special before diving back into our daily home routine. So I found us a BnB in North Bend, Washington, and we aimed ourselves there.

But before checking in, we decided to go for a hike. Snow levels being too high up on Snoqualmie Pass, we stopped at Rattlesnake Lake, outside North Bend, a place we know well. “We’ll get some exercise while practicing our Social Distancing,” we told ourselves. And here’s where irony took over.

The parking lot was overflowing. And the trail? Imagine a food court at the mall. Now take all those happy teenagers and arrange them along a hiking trail, laughing & talking loudly as kids do.

Ohhhhhhh. Oh yeah. Schools are closed in Washington. So are malls and movie theaters. So where do all these healthy young Seattleites go? Hiking! The thought made us happy. But it also made us turn around. Social distancing on that trail was just not possible. Not to mention it was kinda noisy.

Up on that crag was where we had intended to hike. Look closely; you can see a bunch of people up there.

Instead, we found a perfectly nice walk along the lake, with lots of room between people.

Not winning any waterfall prizes, but perfectly nice.

Then on to our trip’s final night. The place advertised itself as being near the Snoqualmie River. It was.

View from the deck of the main house.

What better homecoming to the Pacific Northwest than tall firs and rushing water?

ahhhh…

Our room wasn’t on the actual bluff above the river…

Up those stairs, it felt like a treehouse.

…but a kind of porch swing was, and I took full advantage.

Who needs a porch when you have a river bluff?

And up on that little outside deck, I used our Coleman stove to cook up the Mate’s and my traditional anniversary meal, Reuben sandwiches.

We’re a cheap date.

Next morning we picked up some groceries (as island friends had advised) and drove through eerily light Seattle traffic, back to the ferry terminal. At 150,000 miles, Red Rover mayyyyy have just completed her final cross-country road trip, so I gave her a grateful hug.

Yeah, yeah, you’re welcome. Now how ’bout a wash n wax?

And now? The Mate and I have been everywhere and touched a lot of surfaces in the last five weeks. But turns out road-tripping is the best practice for self-quarantining. We’ll be with each other now and almost no one else for the next two. Red Rover will get a bath. Nature will get our full attention. And Wing’s World will morph out of Travel Mode.

How ’bout y’all? Anyone else in self-isolation? How are you passing your time, or changing your work routine? Please share any wit & wisdom from the experience.

 

 

Road Trip X, Days 29-32, Kentucky to Missouri to Kansas to Colorado to Wyoming: Forget Scenery, Just Get Us Home, Please

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We’ve never had a road trip where all we do is drive. But we’ve never had a road trip during a global pandemic either.

The day we left North Carolina, making Big Left Turn #2 to head for our island home on the opposite end of the continent, all things basketball died. We were shocked, but still spent that first night enjoying the scenic beauty of eastern Kentucky’s Carter Caves State Park…

Apparently they have caves there. But the natural bridges were enough for me!

Even cooler from below.

The limestone just weeps little waterfalls everywhere.

A magnificent beech…one of the trees I do miss, out west.

Next day, we started driving, listening to CNN, and to the sound of most of our road-trip joy being sucked away. We determined not to visit the friend we’d hoped to visit in Louisville. Ditto Milwaukee, the Twin Cities, Denver, and Yakima. We’ve probably already visited too many dear ones.

Just get us home. This isn’t fun any more. Too much is out of our control.

Which explains why I have NO pictures from Missouri, even though I did enjoy a pleasant walk-jog through a park in Columbia. Kansas? This is my only pic, shot out the car window to let Son Two know that it was still winter where we were.

What you see is what you get.

I wish I could say something encouraging about western Kansas, but…it’s an awful lot like eastern Colorado, which, guess what? I also took no pictures of as we zoomed through. Home, home, home. We exercised in the motel’s fitness room and passed up all of Denver’s bike paths. (Sour grapes: it was awfully windy anyway, though much warmer than we’d feared.)

I did celebrate the last of the Traveling Hollywood Oranges, though:

Like a month of travelin’ sunshine! Thanks, Cousin Susi!

In Wyoming, I snapped this shot just to let my mom know that Wyoming seemed to be about done with winter. But we didn’t stop.

Balmy!

And then the rocks got cool enough to want their pictures taken. From the car.

I’d hike in there. Just not now.

And now, here we are in Rock Springs, Wyoming, just 30 miles or so from Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area…and we’re not going. It’s out of our way, and we’re focused on mileage. Home, home, home.

Instead, I’ll leave you with a picture of one of my trademark Noodlebag Dinners*,

Even better than it looks.

*Noodlebag Dinner = pasta pre-cooked & put in bag w/ olive oil & salt, to which all kinds of yummy things can be added before microwaving in a motel room for a cheapo gourmet meal

How are all of y’all coping in this new reality? Any of you fellow travelers (literal ones) changing your traveling routines? Singing that alphabet song as you wash your hands after every truck-stop transaction? Avoiding dropping by friends? Stay healthy out there, everyone…

Road Trip X, Days 25-28, Durham/Chapel Hill NC: Tarheel Fever + Covid19 = Perspective

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I’d planned this post to be the acme of wry grumpiness. I was going to muse, kvetchily, about my earlier assumption that having our beloved Tarheels suffer through such an epically SUCKY season (talking 40+ year-worst) would cause me to feel some much-lacking empathy for fans of teams who regularly suffer—both fans and teams, I mean. All those folks who wait desperately to get into the Big Dance as a 16th seed, only to lose at Game One.

But no, I was going to say. I am NOT empathetic at all. I hate this feeling and I just want it to go away and never ever come within my Tarheel sight.

But I was still gonna celebrate Mama Dip’s chicken and Allen & Sons BBQ.

That’s what I was GOING to say. And then  I was going to assuage my hurt soul by posting pictures of my parents’ animals, here on the little scruffy farm where I grew up. Meet Erda the Norwegian elkhound…

Treat?

…Hank the goat…

Hi!!!!!!

…and the World’s Sweetest Ass, Stevie.

And as a bonus, meet my amazing mom! (Not pictured: amazing dad)

Hold up—can we get a little more Stevie, please?

Thank you.

I was also going to celebrate the fact that a dear former student from Tacoma is now living within an hour of my folks, and was up for a visit!

This is what’s known as “teacher pay.”

But mostly I was gonna be grumpy. 

Then: Covid19. And all its cascading effects. Still fresh, raw, scary, unknown, unfolding as I write this.

The day after our team’s ignominious end of season, all basketball ends. Suddenly the Mate and I, like everyone we know, are contemplating a very different world than the one we thought we were living in.

So, complain about sports? Nope. Inshallah, we can all go back to that in a year or so. But until then? Here’s another Stevie pic, for all of us.

Keep your chin up, folks.