Covid Roller Coaster

 

I sit at the kitchen table and study the wall calendar. I do this every-single- day.

Three more days until the winter solstice here in the southern Hemisphere. Thirteen days til the end of the month. Then I’ll turn to a new page and continue counting days. Until quarantine ends. Until Covid-19 gets under control.

I was counting days and weeks and months more than a year ago, thinking “Well maybe just a few more months….” Time concepts have become amorphous, misleading, making predictions useless. It demands of us gargantuan doses of patience and the ability to adjust and reframe what we think of as ‘the future.’ Fortunately, some time concepts are fixed, giving me something to grab on to, to look forward to.

Today I’ll pot the gaily colored primroses I bought to brighten the drab end-of-fall garden. 

Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning (and every morning) I’ll savor a mug of aromatic coffee while reading the newspaper. 

The day after tomorrow I’ve ordered food to be delivered. A weekend of freedom from cooking. Next week. Next week maybe we’ll see our grandchildren.

Spring sparkles brightly in the not too distant future. The emerging sword-like freesia leaves in the garden tell me that I can count on it. Just three more calendar pages.

Summer, just five months away, tantalizes with visions of the temperate forests of southern Chile’s Lake District. How I long for the scent of a forest.

Structure in my days helps move me forward, gets me round the bend …to the next day, week, month. Ongoing projects – writing the historical novel based on my Scottish-American aunt’s life, discovering new facts on my family tree, exercising to facilitate the healing of a fractured vertebra – these all fill my days.

And I follow the Covid numbers on the news. Falling. Rising. We’re in quarantine again. Hope rides a roller coaster. The numbers creep closer to home. A son calls. His whole family has Covid, though relatively mild. The numbers mean something when they include family members and friends.

 Two days ago, the Delta variant arrived in Chile. Back on the roller coaster again? I turn to the next calendar page…. and hope… and feel amazed at how resilient we are.

 

Feeling Bitchy

This quarantine feels eternal. I succumbed for two days to feeling crotchety and bitchy, angry at the world: my wooly socks that resisted my efforts to yank them onto my feet; the pull up tab on a tin can of tomatoes that refused pulling up. (Hubby’s comment: what will you do when I’m not around); the soup that boiled over in its pan (because I forgot to turn off the flame); my inability to stop snacking; the misguided who don’t respect the quarantine. I won’t go on.

Then, suddenly, I had a great day, reminding me that nothing is forever. What made it great? The shining sun, inviting the fall leaves to show off their golden and ruby colors; a morning email informing me that online magazine Literary Traveler accepted an article I’d submitted (yes!); Radio Beethoven playing Rossini’s overture to the opera Masmetto II, and ALL music, for that matter, now that our only classical music station is back on the air after a lapse of several months, just in time for quarantine. I think ahead to the joy of attending a live concert in the future.

It’s important these days to have things to look forward to. I’ll be relieved to visit the dentist. I’ve had a loose molar since the beginning of quarantine and I’m tired of months of chewing my food on one side of my mouth.

Rain is announced for the next couple of days. I pray that the weather app knows its stuff. How I long to hear the swish of a heavy rain. All the growing things in my garden and the surrounding dull brown hills would give thanks as well.

 How satisfying and comforting the books I’ve read in this time of solitude, (more satisfying than snack food), the last two written by Sue Monk Kidd. Now I’m reading The Last Wilderness by Neil Ansell, who describes his solitary walks through the Scottish Highlands. Anything to put me in a Scottish frame of mind as I sit in front of my computer waiting for inspiration on my novel. I wanted to play some Scottish music but the CD player wouldn’t cooperate. I’ll have to try YouTube

            I’ll enjoy preparing for our book club meeting in 10 days, via zoom. I will be the moderator as I suggested this month’s book The Invention of Nature. Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf. What an extraordinary, brilliant man Von Humboldt and so unknown. This fascinating book is a must for all nature lovers. I had my son bring me a copy from the States because I wanted to be able to underline and place the volume on my bookshelf among the keepers.

            In this time of contemplation many turn to nature for spiritual sustenance. How fortunate are those who live in the countryside or at the coast, in less developed places. Our city garden is small but I can look out my back window and rest my eyes on the feathery branches of the California redwood tree I brought to Chile as a seedling thirty years ago. It is my forest.