Skip to main content

2020 Pandemic Journey Day 45

May 5, 2020

Today’s reflection – Dogwood winter in Iowa, it will be chilly all week. Perfect weather for the radish cotyledons pushing up in the garden boxes.  I expect peas to be right behind them.  A Baltimore Oriole flew down and perched on a chair outside my east window, morning sun. I’d been listening to him sing in the canopy all week, so it was great to get a minute to gawk at his orange and black elegance. Last night I glanced out of my kitchen window to see the fox vixen steering her kits down the west ravine. These moments build vital points of context for me, reminders that the world around us keeps doing what it does.  Maybe even with more ease since we have withdrawn.

Lately, some local kids have made night raids on the campus committing small but irksome acts of vandalism. They removed the taped barriers from around the playground equipment, leaving it strewn about, they turned on an outside water tap, and it ran all night. I’m sure there is more evidence of tomfoolery we have yet to discover.  Here is just more normal stuff happening. What a relief!  Understandably, the groundskeepers complain, and that is warranted. But I cannot join in their kvetching chorus because I remember feeling the need for taking chances with such a simple act of delinquency. To be a little naughty. Something about it revived and validated our teenage moxie after the long cooped up winter seasons.

In our campus house, a few of our Asian students, who flex their moxie by going to high school abroad, have learned that their parents think it would be better if they stayed in the states over the summer break. The coronavirus has complicated travel. The girls are keeping their chins up about this turn of events, but I would be so disappointed. They don’t feel sorry for themselves but have a sanguine acceptance for their parent’s decision. I am touched by it. Instead of displaying distress or frustration, they pivoted and appeared to plunk up their sense of adventure and surrender. Flow, no flow. They show me how that looks. I am wondering how far back would I have to step from the scene to give it context that could affirm such a hard decision, even in such anxious times?  Is my expectation of being able to go home at the end of the semester an arrogant act?  An entitled assumption? How many generations did it take to cultivate this attitude?

Taking in what the girls are coming to terms with, reminds me to be grateful for every simple thing that goes well.  Gratitude for reliable transportation on roads that are well maintained and typically safe.  For ample resources to make a thousand-mile trip home. For the free time to visit family and good, good friends.  For ample health and sound mind to navigate the journey.  I am grateful.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2020 Pandemic Journey Day 44

May 4, 2020 Today’s idea – What has the fog of our modern conveniences begat? I read an article last night published in 1950 by Berton Roueche’ titled The Fog . In October 1948, a toxic smog settled on the borough of Donora, PA. This town is tucked away on a meander of the Monongahela River in the Allegheny Mountains.   During that time, it was home to three huge mills, a steel plant, and a zinc and sulfuric acid plant. The towering factory stacks of these industries pushed out thick plumes of coal smoke all day and all week. Also, given the town’s proximity to the river, boats and trains added their emission to the cocktail. To seal the deal, Donora sits in the topography of secluded bluffs and hills that allow for little or no wind to carry the smoke and fumes out of town.   So the place was known to be a smutty, smokey mess, tolerated by residents who referred to the sulfurous stench as the smell of money. On this weekend in October, a thermal inversion put a tighter li...
Post a Comment
Read more

Covid19 Journey Day 20

April 10, 2020 Today’s idea – Maybe we’ve needed this for a long time.   To be stopped so we could take a long moment and assess what is alive in us and what is mere rote living, what is unnecessary and what really matters; what we carry by empty habit. To know that busier doesn’t make us more worthy- a good work ethic is not to be confused with constant motion.   We’ve needed this to   learn how to be together as family again, to sit together in conversation, to listen to one another, to play and read together, help solve problems even do homework together, cook together, sit around a table again. And to say to each other, here are boundaries, this is okay and that is not okay because we do that for the ones we love. We needed this to understand that isolation can be hard on some people sheltering in place, the abuser with the abused,   those that must shelter alone, those who need consistent home care for a chronic illness or condition, the family receiving h...
Post a Comment
Read more

Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend

  Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend And life a faithful pillow - a pillow to go flat, a spirit to drift off,  glaciers to melt and raise the sea. The blueprint is clear - Expect a tiny storm of mercy–  full of crows and bottle flies to debride the corpse,  to tithe the land.      And respect the putrid demise - things that fall apart make space for miracles.   Yet there persists the memory of breath rinsed in lavender and salt air. Then the dreams for blood and semen to revive, to metabolize  every tired, sad gospel into a hatch of octopus. Death confesses everything as she conjures her necrosis, as she feigns redemption, fools us with false devotion. She believes our defiance will set her free.   We must let grief to be the thread and needle to darn the rend, renew the cloth. then we can grasp the nascent green of winter wheat in spring.
Post a Comment
Read more