It is still unseasonably cold around here, but I saw a couple of signs that the birds and plants still believe in warmer weather to come. The robins who built a nest last year under my office porch(old nest on left) have returned and built a new nest. It is positioned in a way that I can easily watch what is going on without bothering the robins. Clearly the robins are not in lockdown, but are happily going about producing more robins.

On the right our raspberry vines are starting to emerge from their winter bed. By the time summer is over (assuming it ever arrives!) the vines will fill out this whole patch by the garage and produce hundreds of berries. Perhaps they realize how difficult it has been to acquire produce around here and are getting ready to do their part.

I am having to reframe my approach to the covid-19 pandemic. One wise public health official said that the United States had been preparing its citizens for a sprint. He maintains that the more apt analogy is a marathon. Clearly marathons require stamina, perseverance and a level of commitment to stay the course. As an added challenge, we don’t know how long this course will be. And of course we didn’t choose to enter this particular marathon. But here I am and here we are, moving along an unknown path, doing the best we can. For the long haul.

This morning when doing the New York Times crossword puzzle I came across a new word. As a 72 year old retired English professor, I rarely encounter a word I haven’t seen before. So I was jubilant. (Yes. During this lockdown it isn’t taking much to make me happy.) The word is “mondegreen,” apparently coined in 1954 and defined as misinterpreting a word or phrase, especially from a song lyric.

Finally. A chance to share one of my favorite “aha” moments from my marriage. My husband and I were at a concert of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon playing together. (Well not together as it turns out. They were taking turns. Sort of.) Anyway Dylan began singing “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.” I had never seen the title of this song, only heard it played. My husband turned excitedly to me saying “this is the only song that is about Mobile.” He was raised in Mobile, Alabama, so this made an impression on him. To my chagrin, I realized that for forty years I had been singing “I’m stuck inside a mobile with the Memphis blues again.” Sounded quite believable given Dylan’s frequently psychedelic verses.

My other mondegreen comes from a song I can’t recall. All I know is that I constantly sing “you’re my corn dog in the night.” I have to assume that the lyric is something quite different. At least I hope it is.

What lyrics have you been mishearing for years? Of course if no one has corrected you this question will make no sense!

The weather in Connecticut this year has been very strange. Winter never really hit us with any intensity and now spring seems very reluctant to move in. I think that this photo I took this morning sums up the situation perfectly. In the foreground you see the blossoms on our sour cherry tree finally beginning to appear. But, lest you get your hopes up, notice the background of the photo. That silver image is of one of our snow shovels, the yellow stripes belong to its companion, another shovel. Today hail is forecast so we shouldn’t need the shovels, but two days ago we awoke to a layer of snow.

Unlike some of the governors to our south, our governor continues to put our continued health over a short term boost in the economy. He believes, and I agree, that too hasty a lifting of regulations will lead to a rebound of the illness. It has hit this part of the country especially hard, and no one wants to see the numbers quickly soar again. So we remain hunkered down, making it feel kind of like late winter but with more daylight.

A few more signs of the potential for spring will appear in my next posts. Mind you I said “potential.” I am not confident that winter has left us for good.

In November of 1969, I became very ill. I was freezing cold, curled up on the heat register of my house and wondered what was the matter. I had other troubling symptoms, including my eyes turning yellow, that alerted me that I needed to get help. I saw a doctor, learned that I had hepatitis A and moved back in with my parents for a two month rest and recuperation. I slept a great deal, ate a lot of white rice since I could digest it easily, and waited for the disease to be over.

After a couple of weeks, I was visited by an official from the county health department. Hepatitis A was a reportable disease and he needed to try to figure out how I had become infected. No one in my family had the bug, nor did my closest friends, so he made a list of all the places I had eaten out. He took this information back to the office and continued with the very laborious process of mapping all the places I had eaten food. He did this for other new cases of the disease also. Eventually he found a cluster of pins on his map at the Tastee-Freez drive-in. Armed with this information, he was able to go to the place, interview the workers, identify and isolate the ill employee. He also closed the restaurant for inadequate sanitary procedures.

I remembered this when I began to read of what it will take to reopen my state’s businesses. When the disease is sufficiently contained, when there is adequate testing both for the illness and for antibodies to the virus, new cases will prompt a thorough contact tracing outward from the new victim. This is a kind of reverse of the process I was involved in. In this new mapping, the known carrier is the starting point, and her contacts will be quarantined and monitored.

Many Americans have lost any understanding of PUBLIC health. We have competent health professionals who continue to try to minimize disease throughout a community. I am not just responsible for my own health, but for others’ as well. I welcome the contact tracing to come, knowing it is an effective check of the rampant spread of any disease.

Every once in a while I rediscover a word and reflect on its relevance. For me, as I am at home for a month now, I have been thinking about “palimpsest.” The original application for this word comes from the practice of reusing a piece of parchment or other material by writing over the previous writing. As shown above, traces of the original still show through, even though the new text stands out more clearly.

But when I was thinking and then writing about my muscle memory, I realized that as I was exercising I was experiencing my body as a sort of living palimpsest. Here were my biceps, once swinging from the monkey bars, now lifting weights. Here were my quads, once pumping my one speed bicycle up steep hills, now being raised to help my sore knees. And there was my brain, simultaneously focusing on the task at hand while musing on all the similar tasks in the past.

This layered experience, not precisely nostalgic, seems to be a constant companion during this pandemic. Perhaps because my life is totally slowed down and contained in a narrow sphere, I have become more contemplative. Whatever the reason, I find that I am frequently in several overlapping places at once. I am peeling the carrot in my kitchen, remembering fixing dinner on the houseboat, thinking of cutting up carrot sticks for my school lunch. Layer on layer. A rich way to enjoy finding connections of present and past. An unexpected benefit of quarantine.

When I was growing up there were a number of promotions that required you to dial in from the telephone. Sometimes it was for money if you knew the password of the day. Other times it was to get a chance to dedicate a song to your secret crush.(This occupied much of my fifth grade after school times with my best friend.) Then there was the “lucky caller number seven gets a chance to win tickets to….” I was often caller number six it seemed, that is if I ever got through to the person answering. There was no rapid redial feature on those phones. One had to patiently dial a digit, wait for the dial to return to home, then dial each additional digit in turn. It took a long time to call back. And you had to call back over and over, hoping to have someone pick up the phone.

This practice came back to me lately as I have been trying to get through to the grocery store on-line service. I am using the computer this time, rather than the telephone, but the process is very nearly the same. “No delivery times available. Times for delivery are released throughout the day,” says the helpful web page for one store. “No delivery times available. Try again later,” says another. Sometimes by the time I have filled a cart with my desired items the available time slot has disappeared.

Yesterday by some miracle of modern science, I not only got a time slot but my basket didn’t empty before I checked out. And even better, it allowed me to add more items until the shopper began my order. I quickly called a family member and said to add things before it was too late. Last evening a very lovely young couple arrived and placed our purchases on my sidewalk, six feet away from my front door as I requested.

In this dreadful time, I am taking my thrills where I can find them. Right now it is “dialing for groceries!” You can hear my victory chant across the neighborhood when I score.

Yesterday morning as I settled down on my mat to do my home version of my exercise routine, I was pleased to notice that my muscles seemed to know what I was asking of them. My trainer has me using routines that I was already familiar with from our time together at the gym. While they have been adapted for me to use resistance bands instead of the cable and weight system I use there, the sensation in my muscles is familiar. I can even hear Colin’s (my trainer) voice in my head. “Throw your shoulders back. Keep your back on the ground. Add resistance if that is too easy.” It makes me incredibly grateful that I had begun this practice in person at the gym. Before that I would have had little idea of what I was supposed to do. In fact, in years past, when I tried working out alone from a book I nearly always pulled or tweaked some body part, discouraging me from any further attempts.

But in addition, as I blasted my music and did my core routine on the floor I started remembering many other times and places I had exercised. I used to rush over to the YWCA after I taught and before I picked up children from school and swim laps. I even tried out a gymnastics class for adults. I did a season of Pilates at the local athletic club. Thinking about high school brought back the awful requirement of running up and down the bleacher stairs. Worse yet were the 10 minutes allotted us to shower(en masse), get dressed and get to our next class one or two flights of stairs away. That was aerobic itself!

And in the end I thought about how I took my body being fit for granted when I was a kid. I ran, biked, swam, climbed, slid, jumped and hula hooped for the pure joy of it. I can’t say that my routine these days gives me as much joy. But it does give me a large measure of satisfaction. That will have to do.

 Even at two I have a mischievous look. Is that rabbit safe?

When I try to find “the wisdom to know the difference,” as is written in the contemplative piece from two days ago, I struggle. I tend to lean towards action, assuming that I can change many more things than I can. I resist discovering the things that I cannot change. Especially now, when so many people around the world are truly struggling, I feel especially helpless. Helpless and I are not agreeable companions!

On the other hand, in addition to changes I can make by myself, for myself, as I described yesterday, there are things I can do. No, I can’t change the leaders of this nation. But I can contribute money to a campaign to unseat him in November. No, I can’t stop the pandemic, but I can follow the request of our governor to “stay home, stay safe.” If someone is approaching me on the sidewalk, I can cross the street to ensure a safe distance between us instead of playing “sidewalk chicken” with the other pedestrian.

I also can thoughtfully consider other opportunities that come my way to help others. Our U.S. Senator Murphy recently woke in the middle of the night with an idea to supply books to children out of school who have no books at home because of poverty. These kids traditionally rely on the now closed public libraries or books from their now closed schools. He coordinated with a local bookstore and asked for contributions to hand books to children when they came to their school playground to pick up their free meals. He raised $120,000 from 3000 constituents in a few days and was able to supply 4000 books to kids. Since I love books, libraries and kids, I sent him some money.

I really do need wisdom right now. Daily I struggle to know what I need to accept and what I can change. My superwoman complex takes a  hit and I see myself as one human among many trying her best to live in these times.

In a time of great uncertainty, sometimes it feels as though the only thing I have the ability to change is my clothing! The serenity writing cited yesterday continues as the writer asks for the “courage to change the things I can.” Clearly there are more things I can change when faced with the pandemic, but sometimes it is hard to think of what they might be.

As I wrote yesterday, the biggest change I have had to make has been to detach from most of the national news. This did take a degree of courage, since it activated FOMO(fear of missing out) in me. FOMO has a firm grasp on American culture with many of us desperately trying to never miss any bit of news. However, like restricting children from eating all of their Easter candy because they will become sick, I have had to restrict my viewing for the same reason.

I have also had to provide more structure to my daily life than I had previously considered. Retirement had freed me from the set academic schedule that controlled my life for so many years. I loved now getting to decide to go out for a meal instead of cooking a time or two a week. Nothing fancy, just someone else’s cooking. Since the places are all closed I have accepted making dinner every night. That change required less courage, but it has been significant nonetheless.

I have also had to confess that I am much less together than I like to pretend. As a self-sufficient oldest child, I patented the “I have got this” approach to life. My alter ego, “go getter,” needed little help and always offered help to others. But I have major ups and downs during this disease outbreak. It takes courage for me to be vulnerable, but I can change and connect with people around me from weakness as well as from strength.

Tomorrow I face the challenge of knowing which is called for, acceptance or change.