Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

Betty Jo Page Davis, born August 4, 1931, died at home peacefully and surrounded with love on October 23, 2021, at the respectable age of 90. She was a rosy-cheeked farm girl from Pleasant Grove, Utah, who could milk cows and drive trucks and bake the world’s best orange rolls. She was also a polyglot globe-trotting adventurer who could fly an airplane, ride a motorcycle, tame wild horses, and domesticate sullen teenagers. She could wail on the saxophone, hold forth on the viola, and astonish on the piano. She composed poems as gifts and odes as offerings, and the most anticipated moment at every family event was Grandma Betty Jo shyly standing up to read a hilarious and touching original poem scribbled in shorthand on a receipt or the inside of an envelope. Her fanclub is worldwide. Today, people from Maine to Oregon to Hawaii to Germany are mourning her passing, remembering the infinite ways she delighted in the world. She is survived by her sister Margene Page Edwards, who was her f...

Today I got my second dose of the vaccine! I'm feeling loopy and sore and shaky, but in two weeks, I'll be DTD! Down to...date! But how? It's been over a year of quarantine. My "people skills" are "rusty." But, full disclosure, I've been reading (and writing) a LOT of romantic fanfic and remembering that I want that. Romance, partnership. The fluttery adventure of getting to know someone with that question in mind-- is this us? Are we good together? Do you like me, do I like you? How much? What are we willing to give and receive, what are we willing to leave behind when we go into something new?  Oof, I have to stop there or I'll freak myself out. Okay, so I go sign in to the dating site. My details are 3 or 4 years out of date. The pictures are still clearly me, but... the last year has changed something in me. I feel haggard and sad in a Pacific Northwest way that these chipper photos in the Utah canyons or on Hawaiian beaches don't really ...

 So I've been struggling lately.  I knew my anxiety was getting bad when the corners of the internet that are my escape from anxiety? They are causing me more anxiety. Yes, I love going to Twitter or discord to find other people who love the same shows that I do, but what if what I have to say about them is stupid, irrelevant, off topic, too obvious, or too obscure... I should shut up, I should delete my post. Or, I should engage more, be more lively, create original content-- ugh, no! I should do more, I should stop trying so hard, ugh, or try harder or etc etc etc I exhaust myself! I swear I could have imposter syndrome at an imposter symposium. But having my escape get colored with my anxiety was unpleasant enough that it forced me to pay attention. Realizing that there was no corner of my mind that was free from screeching, nails-on-chalkboard anxiety and distress sort of forced me to stop and observe. I swear to god, nearly five years of therapy and I am still often so sh...

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 ...

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...

First, things are fine. Everyone is healthy and alive, and mid-pandemic, that is not something to take for granted.  Second, grief is an unfolding thing-- like a comically long devil's contract unspooling across the carpet-- you never signed it but are stuck with anyway, smeary black ink and a bloody handprint sealing the deal. And I'm mulling that over and want to chew on my thoughts, here, longform, in bloggerspace. It's a cliche that there are stages of grief. It's a given, a known, almost a punchline. In graphics describing the stages, they are as neat and orderly as a flow chart. First Denial that morphs into Anger, as you shake your fist at God. Then you beg and Bargain. But nothing changes-- God's face is impassive. You sink into the miserable, neverending reality of it in stage Depression, and then eventually you wash your face, and emerge bigger and better, sadder maybe, but wiser into the stage of Acceptance. Something about this tidy taxonomy makes me gri...

The tempation to reflect as the calendar year flips over is too great for me to resist. I've ordered my 2021 calendar ( a pinup calendar, yes. Of Norse goddesses. Yep. I'm an adult, I can do what I want.) So I think that means I can, gingerly, gently, with much deference and genuflection, put this cluster of a year to rest.  But it eludes examination. It slithers out of my awarenss. What was this year, even? I have to consult outside sources. My memory is just a gray haze of heat, cold, panic, and immobility.  So I go to instagram. This is why I have it, by the way. It is a net to catch memories that my sieve-brain just lets dissolve.  Last January 1st, 2020, we got up before dawn, parked at the closed gate of the parking lot on Spencer's Butte, and scrambled up the bitter cold stairs. I had just pulled the kids out of bed, as is, so they were draped in blankets instead of coats, with thick fuzzy socks stuffed into slippers (aka flipflops). We looked around for the rising...