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!**

Tips for Taking Your Writing to the Next Level

by Tracy Million Simmons

My local writing group has so many members now it is sometimes a bit difficult to find a seat at the table! I think part of our success is that the group is filled with people who have "can do" attitudes. It's contagious! I've long been a believer in the sentiment that we all rise and fall on the same wave. I think part of the success of our local group is that we are constantly looking for ways to support each other and challenge each other in our creative pursuits. The following "tip list" is largely inspired by what has taken place in my local writing group. 

¨    Attend workshops and readings whenever possible. Online courses can be awesome, but nothing beats meeting other writers face to face. (Watch the Kansas Authors Club calendar or check on the offerings at your nearest university or community college, local library, or independent bookstore.)

¨    Invite another writer (or 2 or 3) to meet you at the coffee shop for writing talk and “write-ins” where you sit together but work on individual projects for a set period of time.

¨    Build yourself a better writing community—your friends and family may or may not understand why you want to write. Spending time with writing friends will help keep you focused. Other writers will provide great advice and feedback to get you over hurdles as you meet them. If the types of opportunities you are looking for don’t exist in your area, create them!

¨    Publishing your work can be fun at any stage of the game, but starting with a focus on fun takes the pressure off. Print a chapbook of your favorite pieces for sharing with friends. Individualized chapbooks make great birthday gifts, holiday cards, or simply something fun and unique to share with those you love.

¨    Find another writer to share critiques and exchanges of proofreading/editing. Look for someone whose work you admire.

¨    Tip for those new to critiquing: Be specific about what kind of feedback you are looking for! It’s okay to start slowly! And it’s okay to start with the positives as you get to know and trust each other!

¨    Organize readings for your writing group so that members can practice performing their work in front of others. Reading work out loud not only helps to improve it, the immediate feedback from a supportive audience helps you gain confidence. Once you’ve had some practice, organize a reading for the public!

¨    Enter contests, submit for publication, write and share, write and share, write and share.

¨    Oh, and read, read, read! A writer always reads.