~summer shorts~ give rise

Posted on July 19, 2021 by marybethrew

“Some people have an aesthetic of delineation and symmetry, of keeping each vegetable distinct from each other vegetable. That’s great, and it works for them. My philosophy, though, is abundance. I want to draw people in with color, and piles of overflowing vegetables, spilling forth from cornucopias, piling into one another, blending into a rainbow.”

I stacked sopping wet bunches of carrots, cold water droplets sprinkling the multicolored veggie-print fabric on which I laid them. The new staff member painted by number, adding veggies to each basket I had laid out with a representative of what I wanted there.

Laurie had asked me to help refresh the vibe of our market booth. When she asked me to make a rainbow display, it flipped a switch for me. My pandemic farmer’s market year-plus has been a continued effort of showing up, devotion, doing what I believe in – food security, organic growing, getting food to the people. It used to be more about enjoyment than just devotion. I haven’t been making displays, much less rainbow ones. I have been letting the crew who handled the veggies handle the veggies, while I handled the money. An important job, but not soul-nourishing. Emerging from the pandemic has been halting and awkward, as predicted, but it’s been dawning on us that we can revive some things, like big, beautiful displays. The prospect of making a sweeping swath of veggie artwork before me, I was back to excited.

Cascading eggplants, purple onions, and purple majesty potatoes, purple carrots with their orangey-red lateral root scars. Fragrant basil, parsley, dill, and mint flooding green leaves around four kinds of zucchini, two kinds of cucumbers, and broccoli. Pattypan and yellow summer squash the color of sunshine blending into goldenrod-hued sweet Italian peppers, their tapered tips and seductive shoulders peeking from a basket near the center, making their summer debut. A mountain of orange carrots, golden beets blending into red beets, red Norland potatoes, dryland (non-irrigated) tomatoes, concentrated red succulence.

While searching for the term for the lines on a carrot, wondering about that specific feature of rootiness, I stumbled upon a Plant Ontology forum (as one does) and learned they can also be called root periderm scars. I guess they have been called root lenticels, but it is now understood that they do not conduct gas-exchange. They are formed when lateral roots emerge and initiate a wound response in the periderm – the peripheral cell layers. Cells proliferate, heal over this wound, form a new layer. The plant ontologists decided a new name, root periderm scars, was warranted.

It makes me think about how forming new roots can inflict injury. How wounds can result in scars, in tissue that cannot breathe. But also how injury can give rise to new growth, new layers.

~rainbow mondays~ reflect

Posted on January 4, 2021 by marybethrew

We’ve reached the end of the rainbow for 2020 so I’ve rounded up the last photos of the year.

Two days of perching on my whale watching rock produced one whale, and many rainbows.

Roses were blooming for Christmas again!

A few of these were taken to document how high the bayou rose during our recent big rain! The handsome, bearded man in the photo has spent nine years with me and 2020 has kept me mindful of how lucky I am!

Black oystercatchers

Harbor seal

Snowy egrets! I have never seen them flying in formation before!

Moon on the bayou above, and sunrise on the bayou below. One year ends and a new year begins – always a time for reflection, and possibly even more than usual this time around. It is a time I think we will look back on and with the clarity of time passing, be able to see how we grew. It was painful growth, full of a grief that somehow made me more grateful. I never announced a word for 2020, though back in the beginning of the year when I was meditating on mediocrity, I did have the lightness of butterflies in mind, the flux of tides and cycles. My concrete goals for the year were to grow more flowers for butterflies and a few purple vegetables, to go to the beach more and drink more tea, to not try to be everything for everybody. I did not envision that this extreme contraction of our lives, this hunkering down into self is the context in which I’d be carrying out these goals. One of the things I’d like to remember for this year is finding out that going inward allowed me to, paradoxically, expand in ways I wouldn’t have guessed. Though very much still cocooned, I believe I am emerging in new and exciting ways.

I have not arrived at a word for 2021 yet, though there is something resonating for me with navigation, with orienting. Discerning the best course to steer my little ship. I’m not sure what that’s about yet, or where I’m going with it (ha!) but I think there will be time to figure it out as the year starts to unfold.

violets are purple

roses are pink

they just call violets blue

because it’s hard to rhyme with purple, i think.

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~thankful thursday~ hallowed

Posted on November 26, 2020 by marybethrew

11/19/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

I am grateful my husband gives me assignments when he knows I am feeling blue, to go outside with my camera. Otherwise, I may never have noticed that spiders build webs in clothespins. I am grateful for date night takeout and not having to cook dinner. I am grateful for the reflections shimmering on the bay, the moon slipping out from behind its veil as it followed us, and the surprising coating of hail around one curve of the bay road. It’s easy to feel grateful on Thursdays.

11/20/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

I am grateful for hope.

11/21/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

Today I am grateful that my husband bought me a heated shirt, and that he reminded me it might be a good day to wear it at farmer’s market. He bought it back when I used to spend hours at a time in a 2 degree C cold room siphoning carefully around Arctic cod embryos, and it was a game changer in my life on the same level as the sun ball. (Cold/dark are not my happy places have we talked about this?) I was so happy to push the power button on my shirt after the initial hustle to get the booth set up was over and it was time to stand in one place where I’d need my extremities to continue to function in order to punch calculator buttons. Continue to function they did! Also, the sun was especially shiny today and I am grateful for that excellent light, in addition to warmth.

11/22/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

It has been eight years and eleven months since Rich first talked to me about watching the sunrise while out in the forest cutting firewood… and today we celebrated by taking a drive out to the forest to cut firewood! I didn’t lift a finger, but instead hiked around the surrounding area with my camera, finding fungus in all colors and sizes, and admiring the stumps of the original old growth trees that once presided over the area. These stumps had seen fire long ago, and the moss and lichen layers now knit variegated green tapestries across the charred black canvas. My favorite aspect of the fantastically gigantic stumps was that they each had some sort of window or archway or dome built into them, and each one now housed a hollowed out center – or maybe more accurately, a hallowed space. I peeked through the windows, positioning myself where I could gaze upward through them at the stained glass effect made by the trees and sky, but I did not enter each cathedral, fearing I’d drop down into some underground root system catacomb never to be heard from again. As I circumnavigated each stump, I would inevitably end up on my knees, photographing the tiny mushrooms juxtaposed against such immensity, marveling at the poetry of the whole thing. Rich watched a half dozen elk glide through the ravine from his vantage point, and when he was done filling the truck, he met me down by the stream that coursed for stretches out in the open, then snuck underneath the spongy moss-covered layers of old decomposing timber. Eight years and eleven months ago, Rich and I concluded that we have the same idea of how to go to church on Sunday, and I am grateful we got to spend our morning doing just that together.

11/23/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

So much to be grateful for, like a brother phone call, a super quick and friendly grocery pickup (I had my book with me…), a kitty perched sideways on his tower, a pastel rainbow halo around the moon as its reflection in the swamp water looked like a shiny egg in a nest of twig shadows, then hovered in just the perfect pocket between tree limb silhouettes on a bayou walk, in the periwinkle sky as our after work walks inch closer to dusk. Scattering more seeds in the gratitude garden.

11/24/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

I am belatedly posting a Tuesday post again, because between actually having lab work to do again, and the third session of my writing workshop, I ran out of both time and words. It’s funny because with how I am fairly stewed in words by the end of a workshop session, I simply cannot form sentences. Then this morning my brain woke up at 4:40 with words, but they were for the workshop piece, not the gratitude post! I joked today that I will dedicate my first book to the sun ball which is 100% responsible for me being a born again morning person. I am grateful both for work and workshops, and that my gainful employment brings me up close to creatures such as cod #9436, pictured here looking out from the swim tunnel (think fish treadmill). Of all the years to have been learning so much about respiration, a year characterized by so many horrific examples of struggling to breathe. I am learning all kinds of things about how cold water fish like #9436 breathe, and how they struggle to breathe in water that is too warm. I am grateful to use my dimensional analysis skills hard won in freshman Chemistry class, to still keep trying to save the planet.

11/25/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

Today I am grateful that on my way to put my fish through its paces, I arrived on the scene of a rainbow shining brightly over the ocean.

~rainbow mondays~ float

Posted on July 20, 2020 by marybethrew

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~rainbow monday~ sunlight plus rain

Posted on April 27, 2020 by marybethrew

After the clouds, the sunshine; after the winter, the spring; after the shower, the rainbow; for life is a changeable thing. After the night, the morning, bidding all darkness cease, after life’s cares and sorrows, the comfort and sweetness of peace.

~Helen Steiner Rice

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~thankful thursday~ trilliums are red violet, shop towels are blue

Posted on April 23, 2020 by marybethrew

~timeline/gratitude~

Saturday 4-4 With all of the mask-making theory coming across my screen, it’s no wonder I woke up thinking about the people sitting at their sewing machines to produce PPE to donate for health care workers. It called to mind a saintly woman I haven’t thought of in a long time, Grandma Jo, who used to lead us in rolling torn bedsheet bandages for missions when I was a small child. She was not my grandma but she was everyone’s grandma.

When Rich alerted me that some studies are showing that blue shop towels provide a superior material for making masks, I had to admit that I was not surprised.

Quinn is back in a phase of wanting to binge watch all of Vi Hart’s math videos. Today, after Quinn and I spoke, she put out her first-author publication about contact tracing to digitally slow the spread of the virus. What an amazing woman. Vi Hart is extraordinary, and I am not sad that Quinn idolizes her. She is the Isaac Newton type, and I’m not even going to hold that against her.

I was visited by birthday santa yesterday, then a birthday easter bunny left a big pile of veggies on the door step. Then camp boss must have been birthday tooth fairy, because she made lasagna rolls for dinner and a peanut butter pie for me tonight, with a card and flower bulbs. I am so grateful for my dear friends who made sure my pandemic birthday didn’t slip by uncelebrated.

~timeline~

Sunday 4-5 I slept in (it felt super late) until 7:30. I made coffee and we ate more peanut butter pie to give me the energy to cook potatoes, eggs scrambled with spinach and garlic and topped with leftover sausage gravy.

Q and I spent almost two hours on hangouts today doing math doodles. His choice of activity lately is to watch Vi Hart videos “with me” meaning he’s watching them, I’m watching his face in hangouts and maybe also playing the video on my phone. But mostly just looking at him because it’s all I want to do. I suggested that today we bring graph paper to our hangout and do some of the math doodling she talks about and we worked on Pascal’s triangle and Ulam’s spiral and then he wanted to do a Fibonacci spiral. When he had drawn the squares and it was time to draw the spiral he said, “the perfect spiral in any given square of your series is the same as the infinitieth iteration of the net thingie…. I think for my next programming assignment in javascript I should program a Fibonacci spiral and have it draw the spiral using the distance between two pixels, I could have a totally netted up Fibonacci spiral … hmm, where did I put my pencil?” Absent-minded professor Quinn.

Grateful that some are using this time to kick coronavirus butt. Grateful that it is also okay to not be a super-efficient pandemic producer and to be just managing to do the daily necessities and not invent gravity or write King Lear or cure any diseases or sew a hundred masks or write any books or even any chapters.

Cooked stir fry, joking with Rich that he could do it (it is fabled by his children that his stir fry is the yummiest in all the land, but alas, I have never tasted this mythical ambrosia.) In the middle of cooking the carrots, I had to turn off the burner and go outside with my camera to witness the rainbowiest rainbow I have ever seen. It hung out over our house/forest for a very long time.

I am feeling a little withdrawn. I know that social distancing is really a physical thing in time and space, not a social thing in terms of connecting with our loved ones, and that connections matter even more right now. And yet, I feel very depleted and unable to handle much connection, cannot handle much discourse without totally wiping out everything I have left in my emotional reserve, and defaulting to less is more when it comes to communication. Trying to find a balance with connecting in ways that do not contribute to the depletion, but instead help to replenish the reservoir.

Monday 4-6 Having mutual pep talks with Lau, about how we need to cut ourselves some slack. I could not get started on work this morning, so I graded camp boss’s son’s home school science labs and swished the toilets. Now I’m feeling like I can tackle some work with audio Harry Potter for company. Something has got to give. We have to be kind to ourselves.

Tuesday 4-7 Today was sunshine and birdsong. Today I parked a lawn chair in the bayou and did an hour and a half of data analysis overlooking the trout lilies.

John Prine passed away today, such very sad news. I have loved his music since the days I dragged my guitar along on schooners and we would sit around on deck at night and sing Angel from Montgomery and Paradise, all the way until now when I burn his songs onto my love’s mix cds, because “in spite of ourselves, we’ll end up sittin’ on a rainbow.”

~4-8 gratitude~

I spent an hour in the bayou this morning while it was sunny on the trout lilies. Heavenly.

Quinn and I sink into an hour and a half of hexaflexagon making on our hangout, easily folding ourselves into this comfortingly familiar activity. Like a plate of nachos or a hot bath, it soothes us to just sit together and crease paper strips into a long accordions of triangles, then twist them into a foldy hexagon. His face smiles at me through the curve of the tape dispenser among the screenshots I have gotten in the habit of capturing while we spend our space phone call together each day. I started drawing butterflies on my hexaflexagon, so that when I fold it, they can trade wings, change directions of their flight, and reunite their wings in cycles.

~timeline~

Wednesday 4-8 Grocery store run – first in two weeks and two days. Needed coffee and will soon need dairy products. I buy organic milk as usual. I think about dairy farmers as I place the carton in my cart and push it towards the self check-out. Without the restaurants and schools they normally supply with milk they have been dumping it into their manure pits. I am not sure the organic farmers are in the same predicament – I suspect not. As a dairy farmer’s daughter, this whole category of thought makes me want to weep.

It was announced today that Oregon schools are closed for the rest of the school year. I know we all saw it coming, but the response among fellow parents seems to be dismay. I feel that ship had already sailed for me – I was already operating under the assumption of done for the year, but I also have a much easier schooling situation than some, with just one thirteen-year-old. He is not a senior, he is not a small child. It is an oddly “good” time to have a pandemic, middle school (raise your hand if spending some of your seventh grade year at home would have been okay?). He is fairly self-tending, without any major high stakes like graduation and college entry looming. If anything, this is freeing him up to pursue his chosen learning endeavors, and I secretly hope he really likes it and wants to choose to continue it (but please let it be by choice in fall 2020, not because of pandemic reasons.)

Amanda Shires’ iso-lounging show tonight was a tribute to John Prine. Amanda and Jason shared that the advice to couples they had received from John and Fiona, the most important thing from their perspective, was to stay vulnerable. Both Rich and I seem to have been overcome at the same moment by a sudden cloud of cat hair in the living room.

Thursday 4-9 Rich’s 50^th birthday!

I gave him his painting right away in the morning, I couldn’t wait! He loved it. Then I made him french toast and sent him off to work. I ordered us Sorella’s for dinner: lasagna, rigatoni and meatballs, caesar salad, garlic bread, a half rack of ribs, and chocolate cannoli for birthday dessert. I lit the tall taper rainbow candles, sat on his lap and sang him happy birthday. Then we both got sleepy in our chairs and fell into bed as usual.

all found artistry is on etsy and is the same artist who made my wedding earrings; check her out!

I had a moment where I needed to clear the table so Rich could eat his ribs there (instead of his chair in the living room), but he came to the kitchen before I had a chance to clear it, and I found that I could not let him clear anything, as this is now my work place as well as my virtual parenting space. I’ve been camped at the kitchen table for weeks now, and I’m going to need to be there again tomorrow and know where to find things. It took me a few minutes to realize why clearing the table was such a big deal but when so many things feel out of control, it amplifies one’s need to control the little things when one can.

Planning ahead for Friday game night hangout, Quinn decided we should design our own d and d dice (4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, 12- and 20-sided) out of paper and then make up a game to play using them. I knew it would take us far longer than Friday to make such a thing, but agreed it sounded fun and we started in on our project.

~meme of the day~

“It’s just that masks are terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.” ~ the Dread Pirate Roberts

~timeline~

Friday 4-10 Today might be a little hard. It is day 14 since the family visit but Quinn has been thinking it over and he wants to stay at his Dad’s until “we hit our peak” and then come back here to “ride out the rest,” and I am struck by his maturity level and how literate he is on this subject. So I am supporting his decision and he is not going to come home today as we had tentatively planned, and I’m trying not to think about how our peak is still estimated to be in the future and how this estimate can change based on so many factors out of my control.

~4-10 gratitude~

I am feeling grateful today for our continued incomes, our solid relationship, and strangely, the timing of this in my life’s timeline. Lauren and I talked about how there were times in our lives that would have been so much worse to have had to live through a pandemic. I mentioned last post about having had far worse birthdays – those were spent under the same roof with a person I am so thankful to not have been stuck in shelter-in-place with back at that time because, oh, lord. It makes me mindful of those who are stuck in homes in abusive circumstances, and seeing how high emotions are right now, I know in my gut, without having to check statistics that I am sure would only confirm, that abuse is skyrocketing behind so many closed doors. Just like I’m grateful for this timing for my son – who is neither a toddler nor a 17 year old, and who is dealing very well with missing seventh grade, I am ever so grateful for my life situation, safe at home under the same roof as a wonderful, kind husband. I am also grateful to have heard from my parents on my birthday and hear my dad jump briefly on the line to tell me, “I had a cold but I got over it.”

This week has been a sunshine daydream and I’ve spent many of my work hours in my bayou office beside the trout lilies. I keep my camera handy in case a hummingbird visits again, but mostly I’m pressing data through the playdough fun factory at a pretty high level of efficiency, considering this is a pandemic and all. Today I did see an osprey briefly circle above the spruce boughs, and the sun shone through its fanned tail feathers so brightly that the light spots shone like stained glass, outlined by the dark feathers against the clear blue sky.

The trout lilies are starting to drop petals and some of them have seed pods starting to swell, but the late bloomers still have their petals and have been throwing them back in a sun dance all week. A time to mourn, a time to dance.

The trilliums, too, are beginning to age, but while they look a little more weathered, they are also turning the most beautiful shade of red violet. This makes me think of Glennon Doyle’s pep talk the other day about how we need to burn the memo we received that says, “my role as a parent is to protect my child from pain.” She says it better than I could paraphrase, but the gist is that pain is going to shape our kids, is shaping them right now, in this painful time, and they are going to be all the more amazing and strong and resilient and brave and wise and smart and compassionate because of it. Burn the memo, because our job is not to protect them from it. I don’t mean that I won’t protect him from physically catching this virus – I will – that is my job, as much as it is in my power, to protect him from physical harm – but protecting him from the emotional pain of knowing about it, from understanding the impacts it is having on his community and the world, no. He is grappling with that in his own way and I’m not going to try to keep him from experiencing that. I wonder just how many young people are deciding to pursue medical careers as this pandemic unfolds. I would not be surprised if there is a surge in nursing and pre-med enrollment in the years to come. At the end of the day, humanity is still humanity, and we create new meaning even as we mourn the death of our old normal. We may come through this season of shadows more weathered and beat up, but we are also turning a deeper shade of red violet.

100 monthaversary ~ going-to-the-sun

Posted on April 22, 2020 by marybethrew

“We need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar.”

~Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder “Knowing Our Place”

I’ve been re-reading Small Wonder in the bathtub alongside Bobbie Lippman’s book Good Grief, and salting the bathwater with my tears. On the day Bobbie shared in her newspaper column that her husband had died, she said it would have been their 523^rd monthaversary the next day. Reading this quote about our need for wild places that move at the pace of glaciers reminded me of our honeymoon trip to just such a place, by just such a name.

After those readings, I calculated our monthaversaries and realized we were coming right up on our 99^th! And now, today, is the 100^th monthaversary of our love. I know many marriages are being tested on exactly how resilient they are to sickness and health, better and worse, richer and poorer, during these difficult times, and I feel extremely grateful to be able to say that after one hundred months, our love only seems to grow stronger and more resilient. Surrounded by our little bit of wilderness, we immerse ourselves in it together and enjoy observing the slow transitions from egg to fledgling, bud to flower to fruit to seed, the angle of the sunbeams migrating around the compass bearings and between different trees, nature always moving along with its own agenda, unaware of our daily human struggles. Our routine afternoon walks together are a highlight of each day, grounding us back into nature and each other.

I thought I’d post some photos from our first day or so in Glacier National Park on our honeymoon road trip, in honor of our 100 months, and since all of us are staying at home right now, this is one way I can still take us to one of the wild places we know our souls need. Take a virtual drive along Going-to-the-Sun Road beside mountains, wildflowers, and rainbow-rock lakes.

Rich, the journey I’ve been on with you these last 100 months has been every bit as exhilarating and as much an exercise in deeply trusting as our first drive up Going-to-the-Sun Road, and the name of the road really says it all: we’re heading towards the light, together, always. I love you!

~thankful thursday~ chronologically beset

Posted on April 9, 2020 by marybethrew

this post comes with a camp boss tea warning!

~timeline~

Saturday 3-21 Market day was long but sunny. I considered a walk on the beach before going home, but then when I drove towards it cars were swarming like a summer day, it appears we’re hosting everyone who wanted to get out of Portland, Washington, or California and not cancel their spring break plans. Our stores are already emptied out and our hospitals definitely don’t have enough capacity. Anger.

Came home, stripped and left my clothes by washer, showered, got on hangouts with Quinn to play more Taboo. I need to come up with more games… he wants to try Risk. I had sent him a picture of quokkas from Australia (they have a permanent smile and are an Australian marsupial starting with the letter Q so… duh) and he hadn’t received the text so he googled it on a new tab while our hangout was going, then screen shared with me so I could see what he was seeing. I had tried to screen share the other day and failed but of course, he already has it down.

I made Rich and I green smoothies for dinner and Rich serenaded me with the radio when Dolly and Kenny Rogers sang islands in the stream and we made lovey faces and we went on a star date, “because,” he said, “I haven’t seen a lot of you today” and held my hand and we pointed out stars to each other and hugged in the dark back yard.

~meme of the day~

The meme wondering when we will be assigned our hunger games districts tied for meme of the day with “Kenny Rogers dippin’ out in the middle of the apocalypse is the most ‘know when to fold ‘em’ thing ever.”

~timeline~

Sunday 3-22 I met Quinn at Ona beach and we walked for over an hour, played pooh sticks, hiked along the creek, looked at textural details of drift logs and he came up with a new plan to create his own jurassic park but without carnivores. We pantomimed hugging from 6-10 feet apart. I didn’t cry a lot when we got back in our cars, only a little.

zoom lens got me artificially closer than 6 feet.

Watching from a distance as husband person and his son play fire monsters in the trampoline with the girls, conflicted about their visit, their trip to visit friends the night before, their horseplay, and yet reveling in their energy, soaking in the sunlight.

County commissioner exhorts non-locals to leave, to please come back and visit when this is all over, we will welcome your business then. Not now. State parks, whose campgrounds have been full all weekend with spring break tourists, announce they will close the following day.

~Meme of the day~

Hands down, the explanation of Tot waffles.

~3-22 gratitude~

Once I absorbed enough of the sun’s energy, I took a bayou walk and called my mom. As I was sitting in the leaf litter at the base of the bayou trail with the hood of my purple hoodie pulled up, switching the phone between hands to warm the other hand in my pocket, hearing my mom talk reassuringly about her household’s efforts at isolation, a hummingbird (anna’s, male with red violet crown) visited one trout lily, then two, then three. Then this one little bird hovered before me, looked me right in the eye (maybe thinking I might be a large purple trout lily) and told me, “every little thing is gonna be alright.”

Don’t worry about a thing.

I am blessed with the ability to keep earning my paycheck from home and feel so grateful for this. I plan to spread the abundance around my neighborhood and keep supporting those who may not have as much assurance in their upcoming paychecks as I have – thinking of local artists, my dojo, and so many small businesses providing local food.

Rich and I are celebrating our 99^th monthaversary today. Back before we got engaged, we used to say we’d stay together for 99 years and then at that point, we’d reassess. Since then we have upgraded to forever, but 99 is still a number that feels meaningful. I feel grateful to have gotten to spend 99 months loving such a good human.

~timeline~

3-23 Monday I read a long explanation of the differences in virus response to mitigation vs suppression, and how what we are doing in the US is only mitigation and is going to spell a lot longer time of living in this situation. Then an essay by a group of Harvard medical doctors affirming the seriousness is exactly as I understood, got chills as I scrolled down through the list of hundreds of names of MDs.

Grocery run with a serious, organized list. Customers all look traumatized, but kind, maintaining distance, taking turns, smiling politely. A lot of customers for 7am, but not that bad of a crowd if it had been after school. Certainly better than the weekend of tourists, but the empty shelves told of the weekend rush. First time ever I felt the pros of self-checkout outweighed the cons.

Smell of purell may be a future anxiety trigger, feel of rain shower exiting the store a welcome relief, air entering my lungs realizing I had been shallow breathing the whole time in the store, tears and raindrops mingling. Mild anxiety still surfacing in the form of breath holding and tears. Applied the hand sanitizer before closing the car door, touching steering wheel or gear shift. The only thing I didn’t find a replacement for was toilet paper, but am trying a random odd rice brand and got bison instead of ground beef. No pepper jack, but we can easily live with medium cheddar for our nachos for the time being. Got extra cheese, coffee, half and half, a box of my favorite tea (no echinacea to be found), comforts. Came home, shed outer layer of clothes, scrubbed in, sanitized my way back out: doorknobs and car handles, steering wheel and gear shift, then carried in groceries and washed hands about five times, a solid twenty seconds each time, while unloading and putting them away.

Finally felt ready to reheat second cup of coffee, add half and half, cuddle with Bart and type words into this growing journal of COVID-19 living.

Risk with Quinn in hangouts from 12-1:30 was a sweet oasis in my mid-day. Bart kept sprawling across the board on my side, but no cats were messing it up on Quinn’s end. We paused the game but he already has almost all of Asia as usual.

Executive order issued by Governor Kate Brown to shelter in place; defines essential and non-essential and the precautions that must be taken by essential workers.

The Olympics are postponed.

~3-23 gratitude~

Rich and I took a mailbox date and bayou walk when he got home. While we were standing and gazing out on the bayou lookout, it started to hail, but then a rainbow stretched over the whole vista.

Went into my office/Quinn’s room when the living room felt too crowded and arranged my office nature photos around the desk to look at. Eagle flying one unbroken line photo to remind me to write and defragment as apparently anxiety fragments me as much as depression. Butterfly – I am not taking this class for a grade. Dolphins – lithe and free and graceful and strong and purposeful and empowered. Hummingbird; joy. Web; we are all connected. Urchins and anemones; grounded in the ocean.

I think it’s nachos for dinner.

~timeline~

Tuesday 3-24 I had two morning tantrums, at least internally. One was due to thinking I would need to go out to the store again and the anticipatory anxiety it brought (until Rich gently corrected that misunderstanding), and one while taking out trash bags and feeling overwhelmed at the many hand washings required throughout that process.

Read “hold the line” essay by a “lowly epidemiologist” which re-explains why we need to stay home and some of the biology, psychology, and reality of all this. How “seemingly small social chains get large and complex with alarming speed. If your son visits his girlfriend, and you later sneak over for coffee with a neighbor, your neighbor is now connected to the infected office worker that your son’s girlfriend’s mother shook hands with…. conversely, any break in that chain breaks disease transmission along that chain.” The psychology of having to know we will feel like we can relax when we see the curve flattening, but that it will not be time to relax yet, not for a long time.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about glove wearing and hand-washing at my lab job, and have perfected what I call the Michael Jackson method of protecting myself with a glove on the hand that is holding the chemicals, but protecting everyone else by turning the doorknobs with my other ungloved hand. It is reaching a new level of overthinking where details like not bringing my phone to the store with me or anything extra at all are all occurring to me… lots of overthinking of all the steps and points of contact.

~meme of the day~

“Be like this little piggy” with arrow pointing to the second toe on a baby’s foot.

~timeline~

Risk part two at lunch. Mama plays defense, Quinn still looking like he will dominate, to be continued tomorrow.

Transition two minutes later to All Hands webex with NWFSC, and then another two minutes came in a third call from D clarifying today’s lab methods for her heavy workload. Explaining about flash freezing larval arctic cod samples in liquid nitrogen, and how it is important to remove water from the tube before doing so, that too much water would result in the tube exploding upon coming back out of the liquid nitrogen, but also acknowledging that removing the water was a very difficult thing to do. Made my best attempt at explaining how to get as little water in the tube as possible in the first place, and looking to my right at a pile of legos in my “office,” settled on, “If your tube contents are about the depth of one lego or less, you should be good. But wear your safety goggles.”

Text check-in around 4pm with my girl D:

MB: how’s your ten-hour day going?

D: oh best believe it’s lit. my fail from earlier pictured above lol (picture of tube of larvae with extra water)

MB: so lit! ok so a little taller than a lego… did it explode?

D: i got it way lower than that. no i didn’t have any explode!

MB: ok great job!! You’re killing it!

D: thanks for the encouragement (laugh emojis) sos

MB: while you are doing these the next few rounds, if you take any awesome pictures of the process or successful sub-lego results, we can add them to that SOP.

D: successful sub-lego results has me DYING lol. haha just lab things.

MB: (laugh emojis) your sos calls are making me feel marginally useful in my new lego-encrusted office.

Husband person got us more pizza for dinner, and I was in the middle of making a salad for the grownups when D called one more time, our fourth and final work call for the day, and we laughed about the absurdity of her long hours as we supposedly shut things down. She is rising to the occasion beautifully and I called her wonder woman.

Our county commissioner Kaety has been on the radio so the stay home, save lives measures are being broadcast loud and clear.

The girls asked us to play Uno last night. I played, but cringed as I was handed a yellow four that had just spent time in someone’s mouth. The observation that kids, and adults, don’t like being told what to do.

~gratitude 3-24~

Grateful for Mom’s homemade soap, the lilac bar at my kitchen sink is really getting a workout, but it is lasting through so many hand washings, continuing to foam majestically, not drying my hands out too much, and comforting me with the scent of spring lilac blossoms on the way and the thought of the dear hands that made it.

~timeline~

Wednesday 3-25 Ani DiFranco shared an article concerning how pandemics amplify the inequalities already present in society. It has already been on my mind how the current situation is terrible for families of alcoholics, families with abuse dynamics, families with domestic violence. Being stuck at home with so many things that can trigger addict/abuse behavior is a nightmare. And then there’s the more first world problems presented by income inequality; the choices a majority of families will make of who works, who takes care of the kids, become a return to the 1950s, even if two-income household partners get along and don’t have abuse stress.

One favorite uplifting post today was Dr. Elvis L. Francois from Mayo Clinic singing Imagine with one of his colleagues Dr. William Robinson on piano.

The cats are loving the bed as my alternate work venue. Bart is on my lap and Lisa at my feet. My “desk chair” at Quinn’s desk is not exactly ergonomically appropriate for me, but it will only be a temporary office situation for me.

Started a 21-day abundance meditation challenge. Though I don’t need any additional challenges, and I will not take that class for a grade, it came my way passively when I was already doing daily meditation and seems like a good way to practice mindfulness.

PPE donations are being requested by our local hospital and I am trying to encourage my lab peers to do the right thing.

Rich came home at 10:00 as planned and although I had thought I would be in a meeting then, I was not. I do have a meeting at 10am, but it’s on Thursday, and today is Wednesday. I am one of the lucky people still working, leaning more heavily on google calendar than ever before, and even so, I am a day off already.

Today’s Risk session was number three, and there is still no end in sight on this game. I kept joking to Quinn, “now it’s really going to take me a while to get back Asia.” I had most of Asia, briefly, at the beginning of the game, and now he has it with a pile of troops on every territory. I really do stink at Risk, but it’s making him happy and therefore it is making me happy. It’s a good way for us to connect while we’re doing this insane tele-parenting thing.

I’m a lot more even keeled than last week, but I still feel like an agitated bundle of jangled nerves, not quite getting the hang of new routine nor a handle on a meal plan yet. Rich is dealing with me and my angst so well.

Now it is night and I am boiling water for a cup of calm tea.

Thursday 3-26 My connection got cut off about seven or eight times during lab meeting. Someone wanted to share pets at the end so I showed off Bart.

I have been staring at the same data set for two days and finally feel like I have it correct and a template to move forward with (and actually a map of the template, because this data is complicated.) This template is the equivalent of building the playdough fun factory that I can now press the rest of the canisters of data playdough through to extrude it into the star-shaped tubes (or whatever shape) it is meant to be. I have spent a lot of the two days with my legs under the covers and with at least one if not two cats, my coworkers, on the bed with me.

In Risk, Quinn is back to owning all the continents except the Americas, but I have a pretty good pile of troops in Alaska, Venezuela, and Greenland, so we may be playing for 40 days and 40 nights.

The family visit has ended and I am so relieved. I love them but this was really a struggle for me, the dissonant collection of personal realities under one roof.

A Stir Crazy friend compares notes with an Essential Employee friend; Essential points out that some would gladly trade places with Stir Crazy, but Stir Crazy is feeling regret for the first time about living all alone. I think everyone has their own challenges with all of this. Nobody is off the hook. I think it is giving people an opportunity to find some empathy.

Breweries and distilleries are making hand sanitizer. Factories are retooling to make face shields. Gap, Nike, sports gear companies are making masks, scrubs, gowns. Tesla is making ventilators.

~Meme of the day~

“For those who have lost track, today is blursday the fortyteenth of maprilay.”

~timeline~

Friday 3-27 A return to better ergonomic teleworking conditions and “sanitized sanity” a phrase coined by Lauren; wrapping up a productive week, all things considered.

Commented to Rich this has really helped me break my hangnail chewing habit. My hands look great despite being a little dry from so much washing.

~3-27 gratitude~

I am feeling grateful that I can isolate now, other than Rich going to work, but he works outside on a boat with welding/cutting torches so nobody gets close. (He is my definition of hot, in case you were wondering.)

Quinn is staying with coparent for now. I am pleased I can start counting days, though I am not exactly sure how many I am counting to. It still feels better to be on day one than not even counting yet. Perhaps in 14 days, Quinn will come home. I don’t need to work outside the house at all now, including for the farm. They are down to just veggie box pickup format.

Rich and I got takeout from our favorite local Italian place last night and lit candles and had date night at home. Trying to maintain some sense of our normal routine. Trying to help see our local businesses through this crazy time. I am buying a painting for Rich’s birthday from a local artist friend who normally sells at farmers market but can’t do that for now… since I can work (grateful to have that going for me) I feel like these are ways I can spread the love around. But this is our community and they give it right back… the food last night is four nights worth of dinners… plus soup, salad and 2 pints of gelato for dessert!

Alberta’s last stand

Two sessions of Risk with Quinn, because it’s Friday. During the first one, he took over South America, and during the second one, he whittled me down to just 15 troops left in Alberta. The second session took a while because he was eating handfuls of the goldfish I had sent home with him after our hike last Saturday, and would pause for long intervals in between dice rolls, just to drive me bonkers. His dad says the game sessions are doing a lot of good for Quinn, that he looks forward to them every day, and I can say the same is true for me. During one turn, a goldfish cracker had fallen on the board and since my troops were the matching yellow ones, Quinn said my territory was having its troops augmented by “the Navy.” Then between goldfish eating and processing speed, when I asked him at one point if he was attacking the next territory, he said no, he had not gotten that far yet, that he was “chronologically beset.”

I don’t believe I’ve ever one time in my life used the word beset in a sentence and here he is, thirteen. And what a turn of phrase to utter at no idea o’clock on a blursday in Maprilay. We are all indeed chronologically beset. I freaking love my son and I am so grateful for him, for the technology that is keeping us connected, and for his expansive vocabulary that makes me laugh so hard.

~rainbow mondays~ light seeker

Posted on April 6, 2020 by marybethrew

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~rainbow mondays~ rainbows on roses and whiskers on kitties

Posted on December 31, 2019 by marybethrew

During this holiday season, none of us really knows what day of the week it is, so I figured I could sneak in a rainbow on this lovely last day of 2019, whether it is a Monday or not!