Almost. Almost. Almost.

This almost feels like one of those wishes I should have thought a little harder about before I wished it. I know I'm not the only one who has daydreamed of a pause button, fantasized about stepping off the hurried, worried world into a place of stillness, have no reason to hurry, nothing that needs to be done for a while. Almost. Almost. Filing big chunks of time with the moment. I'd forgotten how long a day can be, how many pages of a book can be read, how many dishes a family of five can get dirty! In the spaces where I'm not thinking about why we are here, why we are doing this, I can almost love the pace of this life. This isn't how I wanted it to come about, but there are pieces of this I am going to save. Pieces of connection/disconnection, that I am not going to give away again.

Happiness sometimes comes on a sticky note.

Closed Because We Care

Activities:

• Morning walks with the dogs. Afternoon walks, too. The frequent rains have messed with our walking schedule. And this morning I slowed us down because I felt compelled to read and take pictures of all the signs along the way.

• The girls and I have been re-reading Harry Potter together. I'm reading quite a bit these days, though probably not more than usual. I am drawn to anything that isn't current events.

• Making plans for Meadowlark Books. Feeling like I've taken a bit of a stumble here. March and April were supposed to be months of book releases and poetry events. 

• Preparing for the first board meeting via ZOOM of the Kansas Authors Club. We've talked about holding virtual meetings for years. I guess we needed the prod to figure out how to make it happen. I, for one, am going to miss the road trip and visiting with so many of my writing friends over lunch.

• Yoga. Stretching. Core Strength.

• Watching Star Trek - Picard, one episode per night. I love him.  

• Book keeping, bill paying ... a lot of the usual going on at the law office, but more relaxed with the doors locked. All clients are now scheduled for phone consults only. And our days are shorter. I didn't go in at all today, and I may or may not go tomorrow. I haven't decided yet. Sometimes we play ping pong at lunch, which is also usual.

• Texting. More texting than usual, with a wider variety of people than is usual for me. Been getting some nice notes by email, too. Not much by phone. I've never liked talking on the phone much. But I have talked to my dad and my sister this week, which is a lot for us.

• Whole family eating evening meal together, and everyone is taking turns cooking, so only have to prepare a real meal one out of every five days.

• Board games. Maybe every third evening or so. Love playing board games with the kids.

__________________________
NYTimes has us at 171 cases as of 9:07pm, 3/26/2020. Lyon County has 3. 

Rhythms and Routines, or – Is My “Exact Change Gene” Showing?

Life has certain rhythms, and I have long been a person who enjoys embracing my routine, tweaking my routine, inserting personal bits and challenges to change-up my routine, occasionally upending it altogether and starting over fresh. It can be fantastic (though also sometimes scary) when changes to life’s rhythms are personally driven. For instance, I took on a Jen-Sincero-Bad-Ass approach to publishing last year and the results were/are exhilarating. When I decided at the age of twenty-seven to leave my job and try on full-time parenting as a gig, it was a bit terrifying, but resulted in one of the most satisfying and personally growth-filled periods of my life (never mind the growing of kids, which was also rewarding).

But sometimes we don’t get to make those choices about the changes to our rhythms and routines. Occasionally one falls down the stairs, as I did quite literally in 2006, and everything you believe about yourself changes. Or a plague comes along, just as an example, and you find your routines spiraling out of control.

When R and I moved to Houston, I almost immediately began having difficulty sleeping. I would lie down in bed and begin to immediately wonder if I had locked the door to the apartment. I would get up to check the door, find that it was locked, and go back to bed. I would lie there for a bit and begin to wonder, had I already checked that the door was locked? Was it possible that I was remembering checking the door the night before and that I had, in fact, failed to check that the door was locked? And so I would get up to check that the door was locked again.

Gratuitous cute pup photo to
help spread the smiles.

In my favorite psychology course in college (abnormal – isn’t that everyone’s favorite?) I remember getting the giggles one day as I began plotting the extremes of the personalities of my friends and family to their most dysfunctional extremes. Because that’s both the beauty and curse of psychology, right? Things that we all experience and feel, become personality markers, and conditions or tendencies that may come and go, and for a few, full-blown extremes of debilitating proportions.

Psychology student that I was (or perhaps it was just my farm girl roots that taught me the solution to most problems was within me), I began to examine my “did I lock the door” behavior and ask myself, 1) when does this become a problem, and 2) what is triggering this behavior?

My solution was eventually two-fold. First, I began keeping a stack of hairbands at the door to the apartment. When I locked the door, I would slip a hairband onto my wrist, and when I was in bed and begin wondering if I had locked the door, I’d snap the hairband to remember that it was real and I had, indeed, locked the door. The second thing I eventually did was to stop watching the nightly news, a habit I had from my father, something that seemed to me to be necessary as an adult living in the world. I began to realize that the nightly news in Houston stressed the *lucky duck* out of me. Living in a metropolitan area that was larger than my entire home state of Kansas meant that the picture painted nightly on the evening news was very, very different than the one I had grown up with. I still vividly remember stories from our first few months in Houston, including a child that was abducted from a home and murdered on “our side” of town (it was miles and miles away, in a different city-entity… but in my mind northwest meant too-near me). One night, I remember the news anchor declaring that it had been a good day in Houston with not one stabbing, shooting, car wreck mangling, or death. That was my eye-opening moment. I turned off the television and began reading the newspaper, where I could skip over the headlines that triggered my “is the door locked” behavior, yet still feel informed. Eventually, the stack of hairbands became a simple convenience that I could grab to tie my hair up as I was headed out the door.

Through my late teens and early twenties, I had a developing hyper-thyroid condition, which I now believe also contributed greatly to my hairband on the wrist episode. When the body is in a constant state of fight or flight, the mind tends to look for reasons to support the accelerated heartbeat. The nightly news was feeding me an ample supply of evidence that I should be concerned about locking my door. I had half of my thyroid surgically removed at the age of twenty-four and immediately gained a whole new calm and perspective.

 More than a decade later, a time of blissfully embracing the rhythms of life and glorifying in my routines, I had an event (the above-mentioned stair fall) that put me on a path that eventually led to a number of less-than-healthy routines. Unfortunately, this round it took me much longer to identify and take action against the behaviors that were beginning to control me more than I was controlling them. I did not become agoraphobic, but I could certainly see it from where I stood. And I began to understand OCD on a level far deeper than my college textbooks ever showed me.

Most of my friends and family will be surprised if they are reading this. Or maybe they are nodding their heads, seeing it now--the must-be-the-last-to-use-the-bathroom Tracy, the she’s-never-going-to-let-you-drive Tracy, the must-pay-using-exact-change Tracy. I’ve never had the ability to share the things that make me feel weak as they are happening, only later, and often then only through writing or in intimate conversations with people I really trust.  

It wasn’t until the rolling panic attacks began hitting that I forced myself to stop and reassess the way I was living and take action to change it. They were terrifying. I would feel them coming on and had only minutes to prepare myself. It was like being consumed by an ocean wave. My body would break out in sweat, begin violently shaking, and then the tears would come. I had never experienced sobbing like that, not even when my mom was dying. I used all the breathing and meditation techniques I had picked up in my youth while dealing with a hyper-thyroid, but they wouldn’t stop.

I eventually figured out that lack of sleep was at the heart of my issue, and I wasn’t sleeping because of damage that had been done to my upper back and shoulder in the fall. The bruises on my butt had been so extreme, I hadn’t stopped to consider how the rest of my body had been affected.

This isn’t to dwell on my history of behavioral extremes, but to say (yes, as it is happening) that I feel my “exact change” gene showing. As I imagine do many of you.

Paying for groceries with exact change has—off and on through the years—been one of my challenges. For the positive, it’s great for budgeting, making me feel in control of money when I am attempting to hit financial goals. There have been moments in my life, however, when I’ve found myself fishing through my coin purse, my pockets, the bag on my shoulder, determined not to break a dollar bill when I look up and recognize the look of exasperation on the face of the clerk. That’s when I know I’m crossing the line. My quest for exact change has become a hindrance rather than a help. I did it at the grocery store, my one trip last week. My heart began to race as I searched for exactly seventy-three cents, while my fist was full of dollar bills.

These are stressful times we are living in. These are trigger-inducing times for the psyche, and I would expect that even those of you who have rarely ventured on this path of behavioral extremes (at least those you dare to recognize) are seeking coping mechanisms at the moment.

This is my 14,000 word way of saying—it’s okay. You are going to be okay. You may have to resort to snapping yourself with a hairband at night or disinfecting your doorknobs routinely with aplomb. Yes, your hand-washing routine may be feel like it’s becoming a major operatic production. You may be longing (like me) to tackle-hug friends and acquaintances with whom you’ve barely shared a handshake until now. (Oh, the horror, what is this world coming to?)

I leaked tears on at least four separate occasions yesterday, and my centered-self couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for any of it. Well… except for the plague and all. But you know, what’s a little social distancing for a solitary-loving girl like me?

It’s appropriate to have messy feelings right now. And it’s appropriate to come up with some creative behavioral modification techniques if that’s what it takes to get you through. Just don’t delay my grocery checkout by digging for exact change. That’s all I’m asking. Pay your bill and get a move on. I’ve got a decontamination routine to accomplish once I am through here.

No really, we’ll get through this. (Write it again, make it true.) We will get through this.

And maybe we will pick up some beneficial coping mechanisms along the way, and may those that are not beneficial for long-term use fall away naturally and gracefully as our “new normal” begins to evolve.

Sending love and light.

A Birthday Pie

When we celebrated E's birthday early two weeks ago, we did so because her little brother was in town and we figured we wouldn't see him again until M's graduation in May. And here we are with K at home and no parties for birthdays or graduation on the agenda. No parties, at least, with guests beyond our little clan. Two weeks ago, I might have come up with a dozen accounts of how we were planning to spend E's actual birthday and none of them would have ended like this.

Happy 24th Birthday to E.

M and I made an apple pie today since we had already had cake. Not that two cakes would have been a bad thing. But we did have plenty of apples and E is a fan, so that is what we did. We were missing ice cream, but it was still delicious. The birthday meal was make-your-own-nachos bar. Mine ended up looking more like a taco salad.

It feels like our family members are starting to get into a rhythm - doing their thing for most of the day. For M & K today that included the start of online college classes. Each evening we've been coming together to eat, taking turns being the person in charge of preparing the meal. Perhaps it is our unschool roots showing. This part is feeling a lot like home to me. I'm treasuring this evening coming-together time at the kitchen table, listening to my children laugh and talk and tease each other. I remember my mother sitting like this, quietly at the kitchen table when all of her grown children were home. She'd have such a big smile on her face. I understand now what she was thinking, and I wonder what she'd make of the state of our world today. But especially, I wonder what she'd make of me, her baby, having a 24-year-old. E was the only one of my babies that my mother ever knew.

Some members of our writing group tried a Skype meeting tonight as Monday evenings are the usual gathering time for us (and we missed last Monday's formal meeting, one of the early casualties of the calendar when we were all attempting to make adjustments and deciding how many were too many and if we should get together at all). It's funny that I am one who often misses meetings for need of some alone time, yet I was really looking forward to seeing their faces. And though we had some technical difficulties, see most of their faces I did. I expect it will happen again. And perhaps we will even all get good at it before this is all over.

__________________________
NYTimes has us at 82 cases as of 8:11pm, 3/23/2020. Lyon County remains at 2. 

Sunday, Sunday . . . COVID-19 has reached Lyon County

Doesn't all art start with the eyes?

Quiet weekend at home was almost enough for me to forget what is happening out in the world. Cleaning, reading, games with the family, a short walk, and making myself some sunshine today filled the time well.

My early 1990 era neurology textbook felt like the
perfect medium for the base of my project. 

For the most part, I have felt very peace-filled these last couple of days. Staying away from social media is definitely helpful, though I have to say that I am mostly impressed and pleased with the way my friends and family are responding to our current situation. My Facebook feed says to me that I  have chosen my community well. When I come across those who are ... well, less than like-minded, at least about the actions we should be taking ... I remind myself of things I love about them and try to tell myself that maybe their fear is not allowing them to think things through. On some subjects, I'm willing to say that hey, maybe it's me who has things backwards. But the science and the data seems pretty clear on this one.

Had a short chat on the phone with my dad this morning where I learned he has been through quarantine before. When he was six he had scarlet fever. He said they put a big red sign on the door and he and his little sister and mother could not leave the house. His dad slept away at work and he remembers Grandpa knocking on the door sometimes at night so that he could talk to Grandma. I knew my dad had scarlet fever when he was a kid. I guess I just never had considered that it was something they quarantined families for.

Technically we continue to volunteer to isolate ourselves. As much as possible, anyway.

Tonight's board game was iKnow, by Tactic USA. It's part trivia, part betting where you can get points for choosing correctly whether others will or will not get the answer right.

I've been long admiring the work of some local collage/multimedia artists and today I decided to tackle a project of my own. In the cleaning of the bedroom yesterday I unearthed a couple of college textbooks that I had set aside specifically with the idea of some recycled book art in mind. I thought we needed a little sunshine in our lives. I was pleased with the result.

It makes a fine addition to my door of inspiration and
helps to brighten the whole room.

__________________________
Kansas is at 66 confirmed cases of COVID-19 (2 of them in Lyon County) and 2 deaths. (per my preferred website for keeping tabs, NYTimes, 8:25pm, 3/22/2020)

Let's Live Like Every Day is Saturday

Everyone slept in today. Even R, the dedicated early riser. I am an early bird by training, but he's an early bird by nature... or at least such early training (paper routes) that he doesn't recall if it's second nature.

Six-Word Memoirs, by University Games
is a current favorite of my family. Today is
the first time we have played that I was not
the winner! I came in third 😎

Today has felt almost like a normal. The frightening part of that statement is to think we have adapted so quickly. But I think the fact that I've spent very little time online today has a lot to do with it. I made a reasonable plan for the day, and I followed it. R and I tackled the bedroom for a deep clean this morning. We pulled out everything that was pull-out-able, cleaned from floor to ceiling, and put only the stuff back that really needed to be there. We sent quite a few items to the shed, and made stashes for future library and Goodwill donations. We even washed the curtains.

I spent the afternoon catching up on a little work for Kansas Authors Club. The spring board meeting for KAC is being moved to ZOOM so that we can all attend from home. Online meetings is something the group has talked about for quite some time now. I guess we just needed a little prodding to make it happen. Personally, I am always a fan of the Kansas road trip and I enjoy visiting with my fellow board members in person. But conducting a meeting online makes so much sense. Saves time, saves gas, and in this case, it's simply safer.

Our local writing group is talking about meeting virtually next week, as well. I guess I will just have to get over being video shy.

The family gathered for an evening meal (twice-baked potatoes by K, who says he's been watching a lot of Bon Appétit--Delicious!). Then we played Six-Word Memoirs and watched a movie, "The Farewell."

__________________________
Kansas is at 55 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 2 deaths. (per my preferred website for keeping tabs, NYTimes, 9:04pm, 3/21/2020)

"...everything is coming together and unraveling at the same time."

(from an email exchange with a friend, W.D.)

I woke from a dream this morning where I was shopping at Walmart and an enormous grizzly bear came charging in through the doors, running directly toward me. As I opened my eyes, I was thinking, "As if the plague is not enough. Now I have to worry about bears!"

My sister suggested (via text) that the bear was not a sign of me stressing about going to the store, but a symbol of me as the bear. "Go get 'em," she wrote, and I liked that interpretation better than my own.

Reminders I have had to give myself today:

• There is nothing new to feeling anxious about grocery shopping. I've never liked to shop. Except for books. Books are the one exception.
• Going shopping usually wears me out. The fact that I was feeling fatigued post grocery trip does not mean that I was showing signs of any virus. I was just darned happy to have the task of shopping over and done with and I needed a rest.
• I may gasp at the emptiness of the shelves, but let's be honest. This is still a place of abundance. There are people all over the world who would have been shocked to see all the food that was available on the shelves today. And people in my own community for whom all the abundance on the shelves doesn't really matter because they can't afford it.
• Strategizing for the shopping trip was kind of a kick. List making via store layout is my groove! M came along to make things go more quickly. We knocked out lists for two families (us and the Oparents) in only slightly more time than we usually do for one. 

But let me take off my rose colored glasses for a minute (a blessing--thanks, Mom--and a curse). 

Life. Is. Different.

I am scared. And I keep having to remind myself to breath. And to stop gritting my teeth. 

I am heartbroken for my daughter, who had her last days of college classes without even knowing they were her last days. Who won't get to experience the big hoopla of walking across the stage for her college graduation.

I am angry on behalf of all three of my kids, whose plans for the immediate future have been thrown into all kinds of topsy-turvy unknowns. Though they are survivors, and I know none of this is going to break them. It doesn't stop me from mourning for all that will be changed for them.

I am afraid for the people who are close to me who might get sick, those for whom this might hit the hardest.

I ache for the families my husband works with, the calls we've been getting this week, the couples who were already struggling to successfully co-parent, and now have this wrench of (sometimes further) job instability thrown in, and additional worries about the fates of their children when they can not be with them.

And though there's plenty more stored up inside my brain, that's as much as I can allow myself to express right now. Because I have never found much comfort in focusing on my fears and my afraids, my angers and my aches. Drawing attention to them simply makes them too, too big.

And so I say, enough for now, and I look again at all the good I see in the world.

My community is an amazing, special place. And it will surprise me in the levels of amazing and special it reaches. I will continue to contribute to it, to lend my strengths, and try not to to detract too much by my weaknesses.

M's mural continues to grow. 

The Son Came Home Today, The Sun Came Out Today

M began an art project on our
hallway wall. 

Some of you may remember that we used to have a German Shepard named Nancy. One of Nancy's many little quirks was the way she would count our family members. She'd circle the room giving each member of the family a nudge with her nose. If everyone was present, she'd settle down and become a really sweet dog. But if someone was missing, she'd count again and again and come to me with worry. She simply could not relax if one of the kids was missing. And she was pretty sure I was entirely incompetent as a mother. Why could I not keep my children accounted for?

I've found myself thinking of Nancy quite often in recent days...and empathizing.

The kids are grown now, but I have to admit that I felt some tension drain away when we got the phone call this morning that K was on his way home. And then I looked outside. The rain stopped, and the sun came out to play.

That's a romanticized version of the story, of course. We really did need a day of sunshine. The dreary skies have not helped the processing and adjustments to this new and constantly evolving normal. Kansas not only doubled its number of COVID-19 cases, there have been confirmations a bit closer to home, in nearby Council Grove.

And now we will adjust to living in a house full of five again. It's strange for all of us. Kids who were on their way out the door, on their way to leaving, gone ... wondering what the future will bring now.

But I feel a bit like our old dog Nancy. Now that everyone is home and accounted for, I can relax.

I am tempted to call this entry: Quarantine, Day 3

Wednesday Morning Walk - Bridge over the Cottonwood River
Gloomy morning, but the company was good!

When R and I lived in Houston, we had the pleasure of living there through one significant hurricane watch. It was fascinating to me. They gave away hurricane tracking sheets at the grocery store checkouts, and we watched the grocery store shelves empty in the week leading up to landfall. In the end, the hurricane resulted in a lot of rain for us, some flooding in the downtown area, and things returned to normal fairly quickly.

The whole experience was so bizarre to me. This sitting and waiting and worrying for something that was on the way, and might or might not hit us hard. I told my co-workers, who were terrified at the thought of a tornado, that I'd take a tornado over a hurricane any day of the week. In the days leading up to a tornado, life goes on as usual. Sure, the storm itself can be spooky. Terrifying, even, depending on how close it gets. But we didn't worry ourselves into a frenzy over it. Fast-forward 24 years and social media makes a lot of storms feel more like that hurricane watch in Houston than the tornadoes of my youth in Kansas. And this... pandemic, which still sounds like such a storybook word, though my goodness how our language has changed in the last 24, 48, 72 hours... this is like that hurricane watch, but on the big screen.

Stay at home-social distancing guidelines, in theory, shouldn't impact my day-to-day life all that much. The office is just us, the same people who live at home, so going to work doesn't generally involve hanging around with others. On a full day, I might visit the post office and the bank, hit the grocery store on the way home. I did all of those things on Monday and Tuesday looked somewhat similar. Today I ventured off to Lawrence to bring the big furniture back from K's dorm room. The entire drive, I kept thinking about how normal everything looked. The grass is getting green, the days are getting warmer. But when I got out of the car--to get gas, to help my son carry his stuff to the car, to grab a drink for the ride back from the grocery store--it was so clear how much has changed in such little time. It's mostly an internal shift, a state of mind (though there were far fewer people out and about than I would usually see in Lawrence on a typical Wednesday afternoon).

I am so rusty--or maybe it is that the distractions are coming fast and from so many directions--that these few paragraphs have taken me most of the day to construct. I'm not seriously calling this a quarantine journal, but when I made a list of self-care possibilities, the daily, or near daily blog post kept returning to me as something that I once found very satisfying. It was also very satisfying to spend some time on my long-neglected website, tidying things up for a few hours.

No promises. I am here today. We will see what becomes of it tomorrow.

Because if the world is going to change, there ought to be a record of it, no?

March 16, 2020 (an actual journal entry, written in the morning - entered here with minor revisions on 3/17/2020)

Beginning last Wednesday, the day my son left for spring break, COVID-19 came to the top of the Kansas news feed as the outbreaks in NY, Washington, and California were really warming up. We here in the center of the country were coming late to the realization that the timing for sending our young people off for spring break might not have been ideal. As they returned, what would they bring with them?

The colleges reacted first, with KU and ESU announcing extensions of Spring Break by one week with plans to then move to online class formats. At ESU, the initial date was "until April 10" when things would be re-evaluated. Pretty quickly, we started hearing that it would likely be through the end of the semester. Through about Friday, I was feeling rather thankful to live in a small community, thinking that the cities would feel the worst of this and that we would be somehow sheltered. But I was also looking at the calendar and beginning to, at least mentally, cancel upcoming travel and event dates. There was much upcoming on the family agenda. In April our family of five (four living at home) had three destinations -- M was to attend a conference in Houston, E has plans to visit England and Wales with a friend, and R and I were looking forward to a trip to Oregon. March and April were filled with book events, as well.

I did travel to Iola, Kansas, on Thursday for the debut of Meadowlark's newest book, All Hallows' Shadows, Book 3 of the Pete Stone Series, by Mike Graves. Iola had selected Mike's first book, To Leave a Shadow, as the winter community read book. In Iola, we were already fumbling with handshakes versus bumping elbows. Social Distancing was not quite to the center my radar, but I was thinking quite a bit about for how long and how often I was washing my hands and reminding myself not to touch my face and doing my best not to touch any unnecessary surfaces when I was out and about!

I spent too much of Friday and Saturday reading articles about the virus online and attempting to stay off Facebook as the energy there was making me feel quite ill. I spent a lot of time contemplating my "nobody tells me what I can and can not do" contrarian roots. I wrote the following note in my daily to-do log: "Hospital capacity is the real chiller with this virus, and this means our small community will stand no benefit over larger cities. Our only hope is to lie-low and hope that we can slow the spread of the virus so that its pace never fills our hospitals to capacity, so that our doctors never have to choose who gets the lifesaving equipment, the beds, the medications, all of which may quickly run in short supply."

This sounds like hysteria to a calm Kansan's ears. We are the people who stand on the porch so that we can see exactly where in the sky the tornado is dangling. We are accustomed to taking responsibility for our own well-being and nursing our own family members through cancer till death-do-us-part. We know we are capable of long days of backbreaking work, and that we are capable of doing with less if we need to. It's hard to imagine a future where our grocery shelves aren't always lined with an abundance of food--or toilet paper--and where we can't just pop in to the quick clinic or make an appointment with our doctor when we feel a little under the weather.

Even though we have neighbors for whom these things have been a going concern, we live lives of such abundance that it is hard to really see, to take seriously the plight of our poorer community members when we are working class ourselves. We know what it is like to struggle to get the bills paid, yet we have managed to take care of ourselves just fine--thank you very much--so far. Why should any of that change?

In the coming weeks, one of two things will happen. People will stay home, possibly hoard toilet paper, and we'll see the needed break in the cycle of spread of this virus. It will still get here, but hopefully slowly and with little loss of life because our hospitals will be able to take care of those who are most affected and most of them will recover. If this virus does not hit us hard, we will have succeeded. Fingers crossed.

The other possibility is that we are going to learn that our efforts were too little, too late. As surreal as the events of the last 3 to 6 days have been, the feeling that our world has been turned on end--our cancelled concerts and potlucks and book signings--are going to seem mild in comparison to what's ahead.

I don't like to imagine what it might be like, but I know that we will adapt and learn to cope. In the meantime, I am making a list of "take care of me" items. I can still take walks and do yoga. I can still turn up the music and dance like nobody's watching! I can check in with my sister and my son and the rest of my family and friends through this marvelous technology I call a phone. (Hey--it does more than take pictures!)

I can use this time to write and publish books (or at least get books ready to be published). I can catch up on the family photo albums. I can pretend it is spring and deep clean my house (wait, it almost really is spring!)

Here are some images I came across on Facebook that I thought were beautiful for this time and all times.

What To Do In a Pandemic (Animals) – by Ricardo Levins Morales
Please visit his website and like his Facebook page.
IMAGE via URL to artist studio page - shared with attribution as requested by artist.
**Attribution is important, as is permission!**