“Give your mom hugs for me,” I said to a coworker. She was leaving the next morning for California to visit her mother who she hadn’t seen in a year. They had each received their second Covid vaccine and weren’t waiting one more minute. “Please, really, I mean it.” I said to her. “Give her the hugs I can’t give to my mom yet.” I don’t know her mother, but it’s been 14 months since I’ve seen my own who lives in FL. I’ve just received my second vaccine dose. My mom will get her second dose next week. We need to wait two weeks after that. That will bring us to 15 months. But my sister who is immunocompromised and lives with my mother can’t get a vaccine yet. Do I go anyway, stay at a hotel and visit outside only? Do I wait, possibly bringing the time since I’ve seen my mom up to 16 months? Or a year and a half? She just turned 88 years old. The longest time we’ve ever not seen each other was when I did the abroad thing in college. I was away for 6 months.
She moved to Florida about 18 years ago. I still refer to it as my abandonment. We see each other at least 3 times a year. Yes, we talk often. Yes, we video call. No, it does not take away the ache of space and time. This pandemic year has loosened the already negligible grasp I have on the time space continuum. Some things seem like yesterday and some a thousand years ago.
One year ago today I arrived at my first, and so far only, silent meditation retreat. Some notes from my journal: “I’ve been noblely silent for about a half hour. Despite myself I’ve already checked the news and social media as the world shuts down and possibly falls apart around us.” “I wonder what the next two weeks will be like with the kids home from school.” “Am hoping all those dreams I had a week or two ago about death and foreboding storms that we couldn’t outrun and that I couldn’t save my family from were, in fact, anxiety dreams and not premonitions.” “Am wondering what the difference is between waiting, resting, and doing nothing.”
I cried when I finally put a mask on to go to the store. Not because I thought it was foolish, but because it made it real. I cried in the store when I saw little kids wearing their own little masks. Settling down into what was, was impossible so my wheels spun. In my mask, in my house, in our collective unknowing. Some days I settled a bit. Sometimes it took walking miles upon miles watching the things that grew and blossomed while the world shuttered. Walking while my office was shut down for months and my career crumbled. Walking through my husband losing his job. My Aunt died. The furnace died. I got a part time job. I kept walking.
We got a dog. Now we walk together. She is the saving grace of this year. We are all in love with her and she with us. She travels around the house in the arms of whoever is the most stressed. I’m afraid of her reaching max stress absorption capacity which will cause her to calcify and crumble to ash like a Medusa meets Pompeii mashup. So far she’s holding up well.
It’s really windy right now. It was really windy the weekend of the silent retreat a year ago. I remember because the windows in my room rattled at night making it a little hard to sleep. Despite how busy the days sometimes are, I still feel like I’m in between waiting, resting, and doing nothing. Maybe I’ll take a walk. I’d rather go see my mom.
twenties. So the money they were sending to their parents and siblings to help pay for food and education didn’t happen for a while. True story.
Haverhill, MA for a massage. So I abandoned the account for a while and turned back to FB where I have both a personal and a business page. Now I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but FB isn’t really fun anymore. It’s kind of stressful. Way back when, it was a great way to connect with people that I had lost touch with and to stalk ex boyfriends. But as time wore on, we somehow managed to use our FB settings and tools to forge a direct pipeline from our brains to our fingers and keyboards…not a great idea. There’s a beauty to our thoughts which is that we have the freedom to think whatever we want. Isn’t that amazing? Anything at all and no one ever has to know. EVER. It’s a stunning concept. But in our FB frenzy, we replumbed the system so all these thoughts that were never supposed to see the light of day started hemorrhaging into our FB feeds.
Not in a drawer or under the bed. Not in the rain or on a train, with a mouse or in the White House. And I don’t know what to do about this kind of shit. I. just. don’t.
Numbers were much higher in the south because there were way more slaves there even though neither slaves nor freemen in the north were allowed to vote. So more votes for the south and they liked that so electoral college stayed. According to several sources I found. “there have been more proposed constitutional amendments to change the Electoral College than any other topic (700 proposals in Congress in the last 200 years!). 
It is what it is 