News

Hi, my friend.

Well, I'm officially sick; I have a cold. I don't get sick very often. I think the last time I had a cold I was a first year grad student. I remember Chris was up visiting for the week, and I couldn't take time off schoolwork to be with him, so I organized my week so that while he was up all my homework involved being outside with him. I wasn't sick the whole time, but I remember one day I went out to the airport bog to look for maleberry for my twigboard assignment, and it was all snowy and drizzling and grey and I couldn't get a good look at anything and I think I was running a fever stumbling around in the snow. So Chris took me to the little Indian restaurant in the airport and fed me tea and hot, savory stuff whose name I cannot remember except that it was green, and then for dessert these little spherical cakes floating in rose-scented syrup. And we sat and ate together and looked out at the wet snow.

So that was a very lovely way to be sick.

This time both of us are sick. Chris is sicker than I am, and has been for several days. He's coughing and spitting and blowing his nose every hour or so. At least he doesn't seem to be running a fever anymore. I have a milder version of the same thing. I don't consider myself sick just because I cough a little, but only when I have to change my habits to take care of myself. Today I felt all fuzzy and distracted for a while and my lungs hurt, so I think that counts.

In what is likely more interesting news:

The silver maples are flowering here, and have been for weeks now, since right around the time of the Climate march on Washington. Elms, too, though I haven't seen one lately. The daffodils are up, though they're slower than they were two years ago, when Chris and I used daffodils upon daffodils to decorate our wedding. A neighbor says a group of bufflehead ducks on the tidal creek have declined to migrate so far. He doesn't know why. For a week or two on every walk I saw a great blue heron in exactly the same part of a short canal, along with a group of ducks, but since then the heron has gone elsewhere. The ducks haven't. They still fly off when they see me. Once I saw what looked like large whitish birds dancing as a pair in the water. I've seen documentaries where birds dance on water side by side like that, but I don't know which of our birds do that and I didn't get a good look. I'm not even sure what I saw, just white bodies, dancing.

I am sure that I saw a pileated woodpecker clicking low down on a loblolly pine tree near the house where Kayla, the chocolate lab, lives. I don't know the names of her people. Kayla was not out at the time, but my beagle spotted the bird and strained at her leash at the bird, who flew away. I know, too, that I saw a bird's nest, I'm not sure what kind and I don't think it's in use, tucked inside a mailbox in front of a house listed for sail. Some junk mail lays on the doorstep of this nest and the mailbox is half, just half, way open.

I want to spend more time outside, being physically active. I used to live and work in the woods. Now I mostly live and work online. And I like writing. I really like writing. I just don't like all the sitting it seems like the different necessary parts of my life won't all fit in the same life at the same time. Maybe I just have to swing from one partial objective to another slowly over time and find in constant change what cannot fit in stasis., but I don't know what my next objective should be. I am glad we humans often get such long lives to lead.

Long life to you, too, my friend.

-best, C.