30 Notes from June

I’m irritated by slowness and put off by inertia

I learned from an early age how to be alone

I did my panic-buying early. I was all set with paper and canned goods

Then the world shook and slid ever so slightly off-center

I take an empty escalator out of the belly of the building up to street level and step outside, where pigeons far outnumber people

Out I go, latex gloves from an old box of L'Oréal on my too scrubbed hands

I was acutely aware of the mask and its slightly plastic smell

In Second Life it's always a good hair day and I'm always ten years younger than my daughter

In other words, it’s June, but I am nonetheless deep into September

They just keep coming: race, politics, social safety nets, waste, greed, hegemony. Pandemic

This is clearly pandemic-think, a scarcity mentality part Little House on the Prairie, part Walking Dead

"Cut that part off. It's fine." Use what's usable. Get on with it 

I was making lunch when my friend Joy phoned to say she had delivered some items to the local homeless shelter . . . and saw a young black man walking down the street with a Black Lives Matter sign

My brother called me from Cleveland because he was worried about the white supremacists standing at the end of my street

I tried not to cry or say anything stupid. I tried to just listen 

The point is how different one life experience can be from another, even lived side by side. The point is how desperate white people are to feel good

Nobody likes the one/ who brings bad news, Antigone said

If we were lighter (closer to light?) skittering over the porch /floor, down the street, caught up next to a curb or between two strands/ of that spider’s web

I made my way through the books not on the beach but at our kitchen table, or on the couch, or lying in bed, in between working from home, which I began deeming homing-from-work

The other cat has started to throw up at least once a day now, choosing the orientals for his deposits

I’m seeing more clearly, from my present location, how young thirty-eight was. How scandalously quick seventy is. How the person inside the age is always saying, “but not me”

Small collapses/ an atom at a time

I should be clear that this was not . . . a metaphor for being hungover; a car literally backed into me on a busy sidewalk, popping my knee sideways hard enough to engage the impact sensor in the bumper

Unstructured time felt nearly as disorienting as the steady uptick of Covid cases and the nightly newsreels that mimicked a disaster film I wouldn't have watched a second time

Those who are thinking that once we find a vaccine for the virus that our world will return to the way it was prior to 2020 are ignoring history 

We sat on the tops of two fence posts and looked down a long time on the lake’s gray expanse

Almost everything seems to be happening at a distance -- just around the corner or down the block

I am standing under a tree. A small silver screen hangs from a low branch, like an ornament 

This moment always feels like sending a small boat out onto a wide sea

Come morning the dew will/ weigh down the grass in the field between us

We’ve taken a sentence or two or some lines from each blog post in May to create a quilt, a cento, a mini-collage, a fringe of whose story is this? We hope it’s ours, in the same way that holding hands can help (although we can’t do that now).