Settling In Gently

For the first week of schools closed and everyone staying home, it was the most beautiful spring weather imaginable. Every plum and cherry tree on the street was a sweet cloud, the sky was clear west coast blue. All the little plants in the yard grew fuzzy little buds, all at once. The kiwi vine and the apricot tree I was sure I had killed through last summer's negligence put out tiny leaves and buds! The daffodils and narcissuses nod their yellow manes on the back hill. I stomped around outside in my pink muck boots and pajama bottoms, listening to Hadestown and Post Modern Jukebox on my headphones, while Liko played with the gravel from the path. The other afternoon I stood outside watering the garden boxes where Maile had just put down the seed potatoes and where the pea shoots just starting to nudge their pale green bent necks out of the cold black dirt. I heard a chirp and a zoom-- and a hummingbird swooped nearby. It paused just a few feet away from me, and levitated in the

I woke up this morning at 4:30. The cat was resettling herself on my hip, where she likes to sleep, balanced on four needly claws, rotating with me when I roll to my side. It was still dark, and I felt calm and rested. Just a quick peek. I turned on my phone-- facebook scrolled. My early morning/late night softness ground into the tinnitus of screen-light anxiety. No. Somebody dead from Covid19 at the hospital down the road, right here in Springfield. No tests available yet. How do I mitigate this, what's the lamb's blood I need to splash across the door? The facebook algorithm reads my mind: Buy this Jewish holiday box and learn to celebrate Jewish holidays at home. Oi Mama.... I suddenly remember my mom's sweet crooning in her Dutch-accented Yiddish and I am crying. How I wish she was here to joke, comfort, share vision, extend healing from the spiritual power of motherhood, of cronehood. Would we blend the sacred and the silly, light the candles and braid the c

Today was the first day of cancelled school in Oregon-- a cold bright day, snow on the hills to the east. I cranked the heat up to a steamy 63. Last night when I saw the announcement that Govenor Kate Brown had ordered schools to close, I lay panicking in my bed. The community spread, the lack of tests, the relative severity of this virus-- it overwhelmed me. For months I've been wanting to build up good food storage, to prepare to be self-sufficient, to make my own medicine and food. But when the prospect is now, I feel underprepared. By the morning, that anxiety had congealed into something more like a plan. I got up and made routine checklists for each kid, with their chores and meals and vitamins and water, and also things like, Art, Read, Go Outside, Read, Music. Maile and Liko loved theirs, printed on bright cardstock (ah, out of printer paper!!) RJ, nearly 13, was out cold when I went up to give him his to-do list and confiscate his phone. I was worried it would be

Right after Matt died, a well meaning neighbor smiled sadly and told the kids, " your daddy is your guardian angel now!" Maile responded in her flat jaded 6 yo way: "he is definitely not an angel." We all agreed. Angel Matt-- not a possibility. But then Maile considered it for another moment. "He's a more of a spirit." Vigorous nodding. Yup. Definitely more spirit than angel. * I don't know what I believe about the afterlife. If you asked me 20 years ago, as I was preparing to go on my mission, I would have been really clear about it. We are spiritual beings having a human experience! We persist in the next world, and serve others by teaching them the truth, and eventually maturing into greater and greater spiritual beings, and eventually even godhood! Ten years ago, my answer would have been just as definite. Nothingness. The electrical silence of the brain is the end. We only persist in the sense that the matter that made us and passed