COVID-19

Notes on March – September, 2020 “Perhaps if the human race passes from recorded history, the fake crowd sound at COVID-19-era sports events will loop into the endless future.” –…

* * * Friday the 13th in March of 2020 was a day of threes. It was the last day that schools and daycares were open before the first lockdown…

Image Credit: Creative Commons   During the season of supposed renewal and birth, life halted, withered, and in many cases, died. Fear blossomed in the absence of certainty. Before the…

1: It Wouldn’t Be Macramé   On March 18th, I thought I had the stomach flu. We were early enough in the pandemic to be aware of the virus –…

Magnus Burnsides plaintively asks Paloma, “Did—did I make the right choice?” and I found myself sniffling, blaming it on the fresh chill as I walked through a swirl of dying…

Orchard Grove is a squat windowless building with a green shingled overhang beveled around wooden soffits. I used to walk there from Gerry Rushlow’s farm. Or was it Sally Rushlow’s…

“alert”   On Monday I drove through a fresh snow to get my first dose of the Moderna vaccine. By the time I arrived home, there were multiple alerts on…

A couple of weeks before COVID-19 closed down all the restaurants in NYC, Paul the server was standing in the kitchen, waiting for a pasta course to be plated. Paul…

Before we could identify both its virus and disease names. Before our painter, Mark came and fingered the hairline cracks in my office walls, not erasing, but following their lead…

Image Credit: Author’s father, of her mother and herself, on Waiheke Island, Auckland, Christmas Eve 2019.   My aunt and my mother finally stopped speaking to each other on an early-autumn…

During the 2020 summer of COVID, empty nesters themselves, my octogenarian parents adopted baby birds. Here’s how it happened: in the process of cutting down dead wood from the weeping…

Year fifteen at Fresno State: empty classrooms and empty nest. I begin the online semester fearing that my efforts to gain institutional support for outreach to southwest Fresno in the…

The last time I saw my grandmother alive, I knew she wasn’t going to recognize me. I had a cotton mask over my nose and mouth for most of the…

When I make bread, I focus on the feel of the dough, the windowpane test for gluten elasticity, the delicate question of adding a pinch of flour. Will it turn…