I’ve been keeping up with my chalk messages, nearly every day. Rainy weather gives me a day off, as do the rare days that I sleep in. But I took today off even though it wasn’t rainy and I did get up early. I was kind of mad at people this morning. Over the last week or so, we’ve seen distressing things around the neighborhood. An outdoor 50th birthday party with many attendees. People having guests over for what I’m sure they describe as “socially distanced” get togethers, but there is very little distance discernible. People stopping to have chats with neighbors from a distance of much less than 6 feet. This morning as Chris and I were out on our morning walk, we saw a group of women running together with no social distancing at all. I find it disheartening. I worry that as soon as restrictions are lifted, people are going to go crazy and the infection numbers will soar again. I get angry that people seem to care so much about their “freedoms” and “liberties” but not so much about the well-being of their neighbors. And in the midst of feeling all this, I thought, “What’s the point?” What’s the point in writing uplifting messages to ease the discomfort of lockdown when people aren’t buying into the spirit of lockdown in the first place and probably find the messages annoying?
I debated whether I should reveal these feelings in this blog. My intention has been that this would be a place of positivity – to bring a “measure of calm” to a world that has so much in it that is not calm. To be an oasis in this crazy world and an antidote to the negativity and griping so often found in social media.
But as I reflect, I realize that positivity without an honest acknowledgement of the darker realities of life veers into a sort of saccharine Pollyanna-ism that really isn’t helpful to anyone. So, yes, I do get frustrated and angry at my fellow humans. I generally like to balance that out with an attempt to empathize, but sometimes I find that difficult if not impossible.
By 5:00 this evening I had completed a full workday in front of my computer. My resentments of the morning had simmered down and I was feeling fairly neutral about the world in general. Chris and I went on our second walk of the day (our second, his third). We passed by (on the opposite side of the street!) a lovely lady – I can’t remember her name but her dog is a feisty little white puffball named “Teddy.” And Teddy’s mom called over to me, “I love your chalk drawings! They make me happy!”
And my heart grew three sizes.
So, I guess I’ll be out there tomorrow morning. It’s National Coconut Cream Pie Day.
I’ve written here before about how picky I am when it comes to buying jigsaw puzzles. Among other criteria, I like my puzzles to have a distinct personality. I will scroll through many, many pages of offerings on Amazon before finding a puzzle I want to work on, and sometimes even then I will go back and forth in my mind on a particular puzzle before adding it to my cart.
In the case of the puzzle pictured above (which I completed yesterday) it was a case of love at first sight. Mostly because I love pit bulls – they have a permanent place in my heart.
In early 2015 I had just completed 10 months of treatments for breast cancer and I was emotionally a mess. I don’t think using the term post traumatic stress syndrome is going too far. I needed something to help me get out of my own head – a way to project myself outward into the world instead of inward into my fearful, anxious mind. After looking at the possibilities close to home, I decided to start volunteering at our local humane society, and I asked Sam to come along with me to keep me company.
After training, we started off small – in the cat room. We “socialized” the cats by talking to them and petting them. Many of the cats were skittish and fearful of humans, but we were able to hold some of them in our laps and cuddle. And then we found out, gradually, that Sam is pretty allergic to cats. So, we trained to become dog walkers. And that’s when the fun really started. We loved it, and were a great team.
The dog population of our humane society at the time had a high percentage of pit bulls and pit bull mixes. I must admit I was a little nervous at the start, because of the bad reputation pit bulls have gotten over the years. Sam and I found, however, that every pit bull we encountered was a “good boy” or a “good girl.” They were sweet, affectionate, and eager to please. Sure, there were a few with rusty manners, but I can say that about approximately 50% of all humans I encounter in the world. There was never a time when I was afraid of any pit bull we walked.
As I worked on the puzzle, I thought about all the sweet pitties (and others) we met during the two years we volunteered. I realized I miss the experience (when Sam went away to college I decided I didn’t want to go it alone) and I am now contemplating going back.
Here are some photos that I hope will make you smile on this lovely Sunday. xoxo
I want to preface this post by stating that I am fully aware that my “difficult week” pales to nothingness compared with that of people who are currently unemployed, employed in dangerous jobs, sick, mourning the loss of a loved one – you get the picture. I am incredibly grateful for my life, warts and all. This time of COVID-19 is challenging for all of us though, and it’s probably not helpful to shame ourselves for feeling out-of-sorts just because others have it much, much worse.Â
On Tuesday I received a message from my biggest blog fan – my step-daughter Chloe. “No blog updates! I’m getting withdrawals.“ Unfortunately, I had trouble with my Messenger app this week and didn’t see her message until this morning. It was that type of week all around. As is probably true for most difficult weeks, several different factors contributed to making it so, and these factors also kept me from posting anything here until yesterday.
First of all, it was a full-on work week. I am now on my (remote) work computer a generous 40+ hours a week, and my department is in the middle of one of our busy seasons. We’re in charge of getting quarterly statements out, among other things, and although most of the first quarter 2020 statements have already gone out, we’re now trying to get the trickier ones ready to go. Over the course of the last week I prepared 313 of the 500+ that I need to sort out. Statement time has a certain amount of pressure associated with it, but like most things, I am the one who puts the most pressure on myself. I’m just a teeeeeny bit competitive, too, so let’s just pile on that internally-generated stress as well. I can’t help myself. When I worked crappy assembly-line jobs with my best friend Beth during high school and college, we would inevitably get into productivity wars with each other that tended to teeter on the knife edge between friendly competition and bitter rivalry.
So, work’s been challenging. That’s one thing.
Something else that weighed on me this week was the arrival of May 1st. Now, I knew better than to think that with May 1st would come some form of normality. Back in mid-March when this all began, May did seem sufficiently far in the future that the idea of a new normal emerging in May appeared plausible. And governor DeWine has outlined a cautious plan for reopening Ohio, which began with okay-ing elective surgeries and opening up stores (both with caveats). But even with the governor’s OK, I don’t feel like it’s safe enough out there to do anything but my grocery shopping. I mean, nothing’s changed with respect to the virus – it’s still out there as much as it was on April 30. So, we continue to hunker down, and I am incredibly grateful that I work for a company that follows DeWine’s guidance to a T. We are not only continuing to work from home (with a few exceptions), but they have bought us all new computers to help us work from home more easily (many of us have pieced together decidedly sub-standard work stations from whatever computers we had at home).
But even though all this is good from the prospect of what is most important – my health and the health of my family, friends, and neighbors – I am tired. This marathon is wearing me down.
I was scheduled to see my oncologist yesterday (actually my oncologist’s nurse practitioner – I don’t see my actual oncologist again unless the cancer comes back, so I hope I never see her lovely face again). That appointment usually brings with it a little stress, and this time it had to be accomplished over the phone. Not ideal. I sort of rely on the nurse practitioner giving me my gold star each visit after a thorough physical exam to carry me over to the next appointment (they started off every three months and now we are down to every six months). When we were wrapping up the call and she said, “OK, we’ll schedule you to come see me in six months” I whined, “I won’t see you for six months???” So now I have an in-person appointment scheduled for July. Squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Finally, although I have seen the death toll get larger and larger every day since this thing first hit my consciousness (I screen-shot the Johns Hopkins figures every night, remember?), it really hit home this week. A coworker lost not only her elderly mother, but a not-elderly cousin within the last two weeks, both from coronavirus. When I received her email, I immediately started crying. It was like someone turned on a switch and I fully understood that this is real. This is not something going on “out there.” It shook me, and I remain shaken. And when I went grocery shopping on Thursday and swung by the greeting card aisle to buy a Mother’s Day card and card of condolence for my coworker, I saw this:
Now, I had seen similar photos in news updates, but I always sort of thought the photos were taken in places like New York and New Jersey, not in tiny midwestern suburbs.Â
I know that I need to come to grips with this situation, because not only does it look like I may be working from home through the rest of spring and summer, but we will be continuing to hunker down regardless of what is technically allowed by the government for at least another couple of months (to be re-evaluated if the situation changes). I’ve dealt with the concept of “new normal” before with my cancer, but there’s a difference here. The new normal I am living due to my experience with cancer is a life-long new normal. I will never have breasts again; I will never have a life in which I don’t immediately think “cancer” (even if it’s for a split second) when I get a headache; I will never be able to be carefree about drinking a margarita on a Saturday night. Those changes range from mildly annoying to traumatic, but they are permanent, and therefore easier for me to adjust to. The current situation we are in is not only temporary but of uncertain length. Presumably we will be able to go back to our pre-coronavirus lifestyle when a vaccine is readily available. Whenever that is. But maybe we’ll feel comfortable doing some of the things we used to enjoy, like going to the library or having a coffee in a coffee shop, sooner than that. I really don’t know. And that is what makes this so hard.
But today is Saturday. I’m not turning on my work computer. The sun is shining. I’m finishing up a small jigsaw puzzle that I’m loving. We’re making our own chicken wings tonight to have while we watch a movie (I’m thinking maybe the new Emma). We are incredibly privileged and lucky to be healthy and safe, and that is what I am going to dwell on for the rest of today.
Yesterday morning I went grocery shopping again, a task I have come to dread. It wasn’t too bad. I went immediately after the special hour set aside for people over 60 (and those with compromised immune systems), so the store wasn’t crowded. I didn’t have to wait in line to check out. Every single person I saw wore a face mask. People kept a safe distance.
However.
Keeping a safe distance in cramped grocery aisles requires taking many about-faces and doubling-back-laters when the aisle will hopefully be empty. When I was in the Air Force working with fighter pilots, I remember the term “SA” or “situational awareness.” In the air, pilots must have constant awareness of everything going on around them – similar to what a good driver has on the road, but taken to a much higher level (as the pilots are moving about 1,500 miles per hour faster than your typical car driver). The intense focus required is exhausting. I can now relate.
By the time I had placed all my items on the conveyer belt to be checked out, I finally felt able to relax slightly. I casually looked at all the impulse-buy items strategically placed around the check-out line, and saw something I just had to have.
I love having cut flowers in the house. I can’t believe I’ve gotten to my tenth “Things That Make Me Happy” post and I’m just now mentioning cut flowers. For a while we constantly had fresh flowers in our kitchen, but we have slacked off a bit in recent months. I’ve missed them especially in these last few weeks. They do make me happy.
It’s been a long, tiring week. I will write more about that tomorrow, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy these flowers.
One of my first “Things That Make Me Happy” posts was about how much I enjoy seeing wildlife around the neighborhood, especially less common animals like foxes and opossums. Now, robins are pretty much ubiquitous – you can’t walk very far in this neighborhood without seeing one bob-bob-bobbing along beside you. But yesterday afternoon when Sam and I were walking out the front door to go for a walk, he opened the door and abruptly closed it again. He said that a bird had been sitting on our wreath and flew away.
Sure enough, when we carefully opened the door again and looked at the door, we saw this:
And when we carefully took a photo of the inside of the nest, we saw this:
And when I looked at the door this morning I saw this:
So, we’re no longer using the front door – we’ll come and go through the garage door – until the mother robin no longer needs her nest. Pretty soon I’m sure we’ll hear the high pitched peeps of four little hungry mouths.
And that makes me happy.
Have a wonderful weekend, friends. I’ll see you back here on Monday. xoxo
Back in mid-March, when we were first given the stay-at-home order by our governor, I felt the need to do something to lift the spirits of my neighbors in some way. My neighbor Chris and I had long had a plan to use something called Rainworks (link here to see what Rainworks is) to leave fun messages on the sidewalks of our town. Two (three?) years ago Chris bought us each a kit to get started on our messages, but we just never got around to doing it. When lock down started, I texted Chris and said, “Let’s do the Rainworks messages! Now!” and he responded, “Yes. Yes. 1000 x Yes!!!”
The problem is, it turns out that making a Rainworks message is kind of tricky. You have to cut a stencil out of cardboard and then spray it carefully so that the letters are distinct and don’t bleed. My first two efforts turned out to be unintelligible blobs. I lost momentum at that point, but neighbor Chris saved the day by buying two large buckets of chalk for us to chalk our messages around the neighborhood instead. After that I was hooked. A couple of chalking adventures in the neighborhood later, I decided to stay closer to home, writing a new message every morning on the sidewalk in front of my house. Every night I go out and wash the old message down.
I’m not sure how long I’ll carry on with my messages. Our governor is set to start gradually re-opening Ohio on May 1, but I’m not even sure what that means (and he won’t be revealing what that means until next Monday). My workplace will start to gradually go back to normal operations on May 4, but we haven’t been told yet what that will mean. I may be working remotely at least some of the time well into June. So, we’ll see. All I know is tomorrow is Arbor Day, and I hope the rain lets up by morning so that I can get out there and draw a tree.
As I’ve often told Sam, “Corny is what I do best.”I’m particularly proud of my artistic talent on display with that jar of mayo! Yes, I had trouble with the spelling of “quarantine”!The clumpy stuff is wet grass from the previous day’s mowing – in case you were thinking some dog made an editorial commentSam helped me with this one 🙂I’m afraid I might have crossed the line from “talk like Shakespeare” to “talk like a pirate” here
The puzzle pictured above kicked my arse. It’s a thousand pieces, which is my puzzle-making preference – very challenging, but not so challenging that it turns the corner from fun to frustrating. It also has definite “zones” in it – the writing at the top, the young mother, the guy with the ball cap, the baby in the carriage, the gnome selling his mushrooms (my favorite part of this puzzle!) – which is my preferred type of puzzle picture. Again, the distinct zones help keep things on the fun side for me. Finally, when I viewed it on Amazon it seemed to have distinct colors – also a must. I’m very picky about the puzzles I buy. I can scroll through 50 pages of offerings on Amazon and only come up with two or three that I would actually want to make. This particular puzzle made the cut.
Then I unboxed it.
Another preference I have is that the pieces be oddly shaped, or at least distinctly shaped in some way (some with all prongs facing out, some with spade shaped appendages, etc). This is something that is just luck-of-the-draw, because none of the puzzle descriptions on websites or even on the box mention puzzle piece shapes. The pieces of this puzzle were all shaped seemingly identically. Moreover, the colors that had seemed so distinct on Amazon were actually mostly various shades of mud or purply gray. I very nearly put the pieces back in the box before starting. But start I did, and before long I was completely engrossed in the task at hand.
Obsessed, more like.
For the last week I have spent every free moment working on the puzzle. My days have consisted of working, walking, eating, and puzzling. That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Of course I have still called my mom each day, texted and messaged friends, watched a movie with Sam and Chris. But other things that bring me joy went by the wayside during my puzzle obsession. Very little writing for this blog, no letters sent to friends holed up in their COVID-free bubbles, not much cooking/baking, not as much just hanging out with Chris as I would have liked. My life felt out of balance. I knew it was out of balance, but instead of deciding to limit my puzzle making to an hour a day or something sensible like that, I said to myself, “I’m just going to push on through and then I’ll take a little break from puzzles when this is done.” Of course, that turned the last couple of days of making the puzzle into the puzzle-making equivalent of the marathoner’s heartbreak hill. It was nuts, really.
Maybe during these coronavirus lockdown times this type of loss of balance is common. I know that some people are spending much more time watching and reading the news than they ever have in their lives. We live in 24-hour news cycle times that are now actually filled with significant new things happening around the clock. You would think that substituting making a puzzle for obsessively watching the news would be a positive trade, that it would result in less stress. And it did. Initially. But balance is about having a variety of things going on in your life, and I learned that “too much of a good thing” is really not a good thing.
So, the puzzle is done and I am going to take that little break that I promised myself. I’m going to reset my internal operating system and bring myself back into balance. Write a few letters. Get some blog posts written. Make that banana bread. Take some photos. Sit on the bench in our back yard and watch the birds. Watch a TV show with Chris.
I hope you’ve found balance in your shelter-in-place days. Above all, I think we need to be kind to ourselves right now. None of us has faced this before and we’re all just making it up as we go along. So, if things get a little off-kilter in your life, I hope you can gently nudge yourself back to the right path with compassion and understanding.
I grew up without significant pets – we had a couple of parakeets over the years, as well as gerbils. And, oh yes, we also had a fish tank at one point. My mom, having given birth to seven hard-to-manage, messy, wiggly creatures, did not want anything else underfoot. I was allergic to cats anyway, and although I thought having a dog would be great, I can’t say that I pined away for one.
That changed when I moved, by myself (at the age of 22!), 2,600 miles away from my family to serve in the Air Force. I found Tobie, a little black cocker spaniel, and she helped me navigate life so far from home. Then Ernie, a black and white cocker, joined the family. It occurred to me a while back that I’ve spent nearly my entire adult life sharing that life with dogs. After Tobie and Ernie came Skyler, a black lab mix. Skyler died a little over two years ago, and since then I’ve been without an animal companion. I have mixed feelings about this. Certainly there is a lot of responsibility and a certain amount of mess associated with pets, but I sorely miss the companionship and unconditional love that flows in both directions between human and animal companions. Someday I hope to have a dog in my life again.
In the meantime, I get a lot of pleasure observing other people’s dogs. It’s a wistful pastime, for sure, but watching dogs and their humans walking together and interacting does bring my joy. And I’ve found something else that brings me joy, something I never considered before. Cats! My sister has a cat, Oscar, who is a character and a half. In my nightly talks with my mother, Oscar is frequently mentioned. Although my mom adores Oscar, he’s still, you know, an animal. She will pet him, she will praise him, feed him, let him in and let him out, but that’s where it ends. There will be no lap sitting, no jumping up on beds. Her relationship with Oscar makes me smile, and it makes me happy that she now knows the joy that having a pet can bring.
Have a wonderful weekend, friends. xoxo
A blurry Oscar – he’s always on the move A neighborhood friend who often accompanies me for short distances on my walks
Taken during a trip to NYC in 2017 – I wonder when the streets of New York will look like this again?
Around the world, most people are wondering when we will be able to go “back to normal.” Until there is a vaccine there is no way we can go completely back to normal, and no one knows for sure when the vaccine will be ready. Three months? Six? Eight? Dr. Amy Acton, the director of Ohio’s Department of Health, said on Monday that the general public could be wearing masks for the next year. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around that, but then again it’s still hard for me to wrap my mind around this entire situation we have found ourselves in.
I’ve developed a routine to my days that I find comforting. Walks, work, reading, writing, puzzle making – the days have a simplicity to them, but also a busyness to them that gives me some distance from the harshness of what is going on in the world. I find that I don’t have much time left over each day to check the news. I do get an email every morning from the New York Times with their daily news brief, and at the end of each day I have a ritual of taking screen shots with my phone of three of Johns Hopkins University’s charts – total cases worldwide, confirmed cases by country/region, and confirmed cases per US state. I then put the three screenshots in a photo album in my phone called “Coronavirus.” I started doing this in mid-March. I guess it’s sort of a way of keeping a scrapbook of this experience.
Life is “on pause” right now. I do work (remotely) 25-30 hours a week (I’ve worked my way up from 15 hours a week), so things aren’t totally on pause, but the pace of life has drastically slowed. And in a perverse way, when I think about going “back to normal” I’m not sure how much of “normal” I actually want back.
I’d love to keep working 25-30 hours a week, but that’s not going to happen. Retirement is still a long way off, and we need my employer-sponsored health insurance. So, going back to the office 40 hours a week is probably going to happen at some point in the next few months. And I have a renewed gratitude for actually having a job, as I wrote about in my last post. I do enjoy working, but I’ve had some distance from the normal work dramas (is there a workplace anywhere without drama?) and I must say I like the distance. So, when I go back, I will give myself mental space from those shenanigans, even if I can’t physically remove myself from being a witness to them.
Before the pandemic started, I would spend a certain amount of time on Pinterest, curating my boards. I do love Pinterest, if only for the fact that it is a great way and place to collect recipes. I’ve still spent time searching for recipes during lockdown, but only when I’m looking for something specific. No surfing. I used to spend a good amount of time looking at the fashion postings on Pinterest, something that has gone completely by the wayside. I just don’t feel interested in that type of consumerism right now. Will my interest return? I honestly don’t know. What’s more, I don’t know if I want it to return. I had already been toying with the idea of a minimalist, capsule-style wardrobe. Having experienced this pause in normal life, minimalism in all areas of my life is more attractive to me.
I think that like so many other types of life-altering experiences, life post-pandemic will be at best a “new normal.” Some parts of this new normal, like wearing masks into 2021 and feeling my “fight or flight” response activated any time I hear someone cough or even see someone approaching too closely, will be unavoidable. This will be similar to how, in a post-Sandy Hook world, I now look for emergency exits when entering a movie theater or concert venue, in case a mass shooter decides to be there, too.
But other parts of the new normal I will be able to choose, and I intend to spend a lot of time in the next weeks and months deciding what those parts will be.
I keep a gratitude journal. It’s just a blank notebook, nothing special. It’s a particularly jazzy shade of orange, so it makes me happy to see it, to hold it in my hands, and to use it. About two or three times a week I open my gratitude journal and write down five things for which I am grateful. Here’s a sample from a random day earlier this year:
Being sleepy at bedtime
Oatmeal
Morning walks
Birds at the feeder
Cozy clothes
Sometimes I write entire sentences, sometimes just a word or two. Believe it or not, there has been a lot of research on gratitude and on keeping gratitude journals. Supposedly the best way to keep a gratitude journal is to not only write what you are grateful for, but why. So instead of just writing “oatmeal”, I should write something like, “I am grateful for how my morning oatmeal warms me, nourishes me, and makes me feel like I am taking care of myself.” I did try to use that technique at first, but found that it became a chore before long. And then I quit for several months. So, in the interest of “done is better than perfect”, I stopped expecting myself to keep my journal the “correct” way. And I don’t put pressure on myself to write every single day.
I’ve been keeping my current jazzy orange gratitude journal since January, but I have several that I’ve kept at different times in my life. I like to read my old gratitude journals – they tell me a lot about where my head was during that time. Here is a day from the journal I kept during my cancer treatment:
The gift of one more day on this beautiful earth
Walked 1.1 miles and I wasn’t tired or breathless
I am grateful for Chris’ utter confidence that everything is going to be all right
The feel of the cool breeze on my hot head
I am loved
It’s amazing how quickly you can start to take things for granted, even after a life-changing experience like cancer. These days I walk around 7 miles a day, and while I do feel grateful for the ability to do so, the gratitude experience of simply being physically able to walk isn’t as intense as it was during those chemo days. I’m also still grateful for each day that I wake up, but the normality of waking up each day has crept back in. This is a good thing in a way, but I never want to forget what an incredible thing it is to live just one day on this earth.
During these coronavirus times, I’m experiencing newfound gratitude for things I used to take for granted, including:
Healthcare workers
Grocery store clerks
Scientists
Sanitation workers
First responders
Fresh food
Co-workers
Having a job
I’d like to think that when this is all over I will feel this gratitude as intensely as I do now, but I know that things will go back to normal and I’ll forget just a little bit how I feel in this moment. That’s one of the reasons why keeping a gratitude journal is so important to me – to remind me that the things I take for granted, including everyday normality, are in fact precious gifts.
