I guess I had Shakespeare on my mind this morning when I was doing the laundry. As I poured bleach into the whites, I thought about Lady Macbeth’s totally unrelated to my actual situation plea “out damned spot out.”

I have had enough of political grief lately, so my thoughts didn’t go too far thinking about Trump’s ideas of using bleach to kill covid, nor about those people who drank it for that reason. Clorox even had to warn adults not to drink bleach. Oops, I guess they went that way for too long. Then I remembered how hard it was to even buy bleach and now how its price has skyrocketed. That was discouraging too.

Then I let the smell of bleach take me to better times. I learned to swim in a chlorinated cold water indoor pool. My first association with smelling like bleach was when I finally got out of that nightmare and put on dry clothes. The smell lingered and reminded me of how much I hated learning to swim. That wasn’t any more encouraging!

But wait. I suddenly remembered a long ago love who swam laps every morning. He always smelled sweetly of bleach. Finally I had found a good free association!

What has any of this to do with Lady Macbeth? Very little as it turns out, but it does give you an unasked for peek into my covid brain.

Our dear Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died yesterday, Friday, September 18th. The same day the Republican leader of the United State Senate announced he would have a nominee named and appointed to fill her vacancy before the 2020 Presidential election has chosen the next President.

In Hamlet, the Prince alludes to the shameless behavior of his mother Gertrude being able to use the leftover food from his father’s funeral to furnish her wedding feast to her second husband. It is an example of total shamelessness.

Yesterday the behavior of Republican politicians did Gertrude one better.

When I was at the library yesterday( yes AT the library after six months without being able to go there) I saw this children’s book displayed. It brought back several times in my life when touch was an issue. (No, I am not talking about MeToo, don’t worry.)

When I was pregnant people seemed to feel free to not only comment on but occasionally pat my stomach. I have no idea why. Somehow pregnant women seem to invite all sorts of questions and comments. I must admit that I fall victim to the same impulse, though I have never been tempted to touch another woman’s stomach. I do seem to blurt out things that are really none of my business such as “when are you due?” and “you look like you are carrying a boy.”

The book narrated by a little girl with big poofy hair suggests that people seem to come up and touch it without asking. She says they need to ask. Of course that raises the question of why they want to touch it in the first place. In this instance, probably her hair is unfamiliar to the kids around her and they are curious about it.

I had a similar experience years ago in a African-American women’s hair salon where I was waiting as a friend had her hair done. I was the only white woman in the place. As I have mentioned, I have very thin wavy light brown hair. One of the stylists came over and asked if she could touch my hair. Agreeably I said “sure.” She said she had never touched hair like mine and would have no idea how to work with it.

We are all curious beings. We just need to ask before touching.

This seems to be the week that both my husband Charlie’s and my childhood stomping grounds have been hard hit by “natural” disasters. I have written about the forest fires in Oregon destroying many of the places I camped, hiked, fished and vacationed in. This morning Hurricane Sally made landfall at Gulf Shores, Alabama before moving onshore to Mobile, Alabama.

My husband grew up in Mobile and spent many summers at a beach house at Gulf Shores before it became built up with countless condominiums. He jokingly called it “redneck Riviera,” a name only allowable to one who went there. He taught himself to surf and knew each inch of the shore. In the mid 1960’s that house was destroyed by a hurricane and his family never rebuilt.

Today he was glued to the Weather Channel and on-line pictures of the water damage. He knew each little town they mentioned and laughed when one of the commentators said “you probably aren’t familiar with Daphne, Alabama.” “No kidding,” he quipped.

So far this season we have suffered through a tornado warning and tropical storm in Connecticut, watched Oregon burn and Gulf Shores flood. They say there are five more storms developing in the Atlantic and that we are running out of names for them. Combined with covid, this year has delivered far too many unpleasant surprises. I just reviewed the ten plagues in Exodus. Apparently we can still look forward to hail and lightning, if not frogs!

When Charlie and I first discussed plans for our honeymoon, I said I would love to go white water rafting on the Rogue River in southern Oregon. This discussion took place two years before our wedding and demonstrates that a woman overcome with hormones will say almost anything. The one time that I had gone white water rafting with Charlie and the kids, the photo taken in the biggest plunge doesn’t show me. That is because I had flung myself onto the bottom of the raft.

So I proposed that we spend a week in a small cottage on the McKenzie River in Central Oregon. That way we at least were next to, if not on, a river. We rented a small unit next to the river and spent a week exploring and reading, him doing more of the first and me doing more of the second. At one point we drove through the McKenzie Pass into central Oregon. By the middle of June, the Pass was opened for the first time of the year, having been closed for snow until then. The week was lovely, full of rest, recreation, good food and gorgeous surroundings.

This week fire destroyed both sides of the McKenzie River, taking out several small towns, restaurants and places to stay and camp along its banks. It will never recover. I feel a physical ache when I think about Oregon and the destruction that drought, wind, fire and climate change have produced. Ignore the debate still senselessly going on in my country about reality. One has only to look at the two photos to understand things have changed. Reality trumps unscientific blather every time.

When I was three I had shoulder length hair held back from my face with barrettes. My hair was light brown and very fine with just a bit of wave. Thanks to the pandemic I had been unable to get a haircut for five months. Although I have been cutting Charlie’s hair I didn’t want to risk having him cut mine. So I have been letting my short all over layered hair grow and grow for the first time since my 20’s. Once I had a short haircut, I never experimented, always going with about the same cut.

Two weeks ago I was finally able to see my hairdresser, both of us masked, with no one else in the salon, for a haircut. I had decided by then to try out a longer look and asked her to trim off the split ends of the layers and cut the rest to shoulder length. She told me that many of her clients were trying longer hair after having the chance to let it grow out. Others had stopped dying theirs.

My hair seventy years later is still light brown, very fine, with just a bit of wave, down to my shoulders with the shorter strands held back by barrettes. I guess everything old really is new again.

No, not that season, although a friend in the Philippines has already begun playing Christmas music. I mean the season of abundant harvest of fruit and vegetables. When I was three, I posed above with part of the bounty of my parents’ large backyard vegetable garden. My mother canned the tomatoes, but we ate and gave away the rest to neighbors and friends.

As a child in the 1950’s, I ate fresh food in season and canned food the rest of the year. My mother didn’t switch to frozen vegetables until I was in high school, but she still mostly used canned goods. She refused to buy “hothouse” tomatoes, maintaining(correctly) that they tasted like cardboard. The only fresh vegetables we had were carrots. While we ate bananas, oranges and cold storage apples all year, the rest of fruit was completely local and seasonal.

Sharing in the local farm’s produce each week, I am once again connected to the seasonal availability of fresh produce. Somehow after years of being able to buy anything any time of the year, whether from Chile or New Zealand, I had lost the instinctive knowledge I had as a kid about when I could eat a particular food. I am grateful to have the experience right now, especially as in so much of the pandemic I know neither the day or the month.

Here in the beginning of September the apples are just coming on, the corn is getting dryer, the zucchini larger, and the blueberries are done. Our own raspberry bushes are full of the fall variety and the grapes are being devoured by flocks of birds. Pretty soon I will be cooking the fall vegetables, including winter squash.

There is a rhythm to nature, and I am glad that it is still keeping her own sweet time, no matter the political or pandemic world.

When I was in grade school one of our favorite jokes ran along the lines of “When they handed out noses, I thought they said roses, And I ordered a big red one.” This came to mind when I read the comments responding to my post about leaving no trace. I realized I had caused the confusion by not posting the picture of the bands in the gym that I was discussing.

I actually loved the idea that several readers took from that post that I had music bands on the wall. That would actually be a much better idea. I could hang all the old devices for playing music there from my first transistor radio, through my cassette player, my phonograph, and on to my Ipod. The cacophony might drown out my groans as I work out!

Then when I was working the crossword puzzle this morning, I entered the word “ajar.” That took me back to fourth grade participating in a synonym activity. We lined up against the wall; she said a word and asked for a synonym. (I guess our teacher really was tired of our wriggling in our seats!) When she said “ajar,” I responded “a bottle.” While this provoked laughter, it sent me back to my seat.

So I certainly understand word confusion.”When they handed out brains, I thought they said trains, And I missed mine.”