Settling In Gently

I'm thinking about stories and grief. Stories, where we lose ourselves, see ourselves reflected, ponder alternatives, take warning or find inspiration... And grief. Well. Grief.  Wow. This is the year for it.  For me, for my little family, sure. Grief is where we live. But not just me, not at all.  Not with Coronavirus, the horseman of plague. How many dead in the US? In the World? I have to pause to look it up.  560,000 in the US, and 3 million worldwide. This is a global grief. The numbers are too big to even make sense of. What does that number look like, what is the scale? I remember the sinking dread I felt when I heard the predicted numbers. 300,000 people will be dead in the US? Unimaginable. I taped a poem to my mirror-- when despair for the world grows in me... Now the dire predications have all come true and been exceeded. At a certain point, a few months into quarantine, I stopped watching the daily numbers climb. I'm ashamed to say that the deaths became real sparks

There's a particular sensation of falling in love with a work of fiction. It's giddy. It hurts. I remember being a little kid in my attic room, reading as far as Frodo poisoned and lifeless in Shelob's lair, and crying myself to sleep. It wasn't until the next day that I realized, with Sam, that Frodo was still alive.  I wandered through my day at Piney Branch Elementary in a haze, just wanting to go back to my characters-- to Middle Earth, to Earthsea, to the Magic Kingdom (for Sale--SOLD!). My mom and I read The Lymond Chronicles together-- and we'd steal the books and get ahead of each other, and yell and weep about Lymond's self-sacrifice and brilliance, and Philippa's goodness and bravery. That world of 16th century high romance adventure overlay the dull and growing pain of real life. And we finished the last book together right before my mom died.  I reread them all again, in a fugue of escapism, love, and grief.  Harry Potter was the next thing to sn