Life during COVID-19
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Waiting for my COVID-19 test results: Notes from my quarantine journal
On the St. Joseph River / Cindy La Ferle For social media sharing options and more content, please visit the home page. “’For a while’ is a phrase whose length can’t be measured. At least by the person who’s waiting.” ~Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun July 20, 2020Looking back at my earlier quarantine journal entries, I see that “patience” has been one of the overriding themes. The COVID-19 pandemic, after all, has an unpredictable path of its own. Some public health experts predict that our nation could be muddling through it until the late fall of 2021 — unless we can pull together and show the virus…
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Patience, porches, and other silver linings: Notes from my quarantine journal
On Lake Michigan / Cindy La Ferle “It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.” ~Julius Caesar June 22, 2020Until this morning, I didn’t have the emotional strength to process several events that spiraled downward in the past couple of weeks. To protect the privacy of friends and family, I won’t rehash everything here.Suffice it to say that too many good people I know have been battling relentless challenges, grief, or loss — personal battles that would try anyone’s soul outside the frame of a global pandemic.Last week, just for starters, a dear friend’s elderly…
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Gardening, wearing masks, and small sacrifices
“There must be a happy medium somewhere between being totally informed and blissfully unaware.” ~ Douglas Larson Saturday, May 16 … Last week, I caught myself laughing at the sheer irony: The governor of Michigan had lifted restrictions on nurseries and landscaping services, but nightly frost warnings made it impossible for anyone to plant anything. The weather was so unseasonably cold, in fact, that I dragged my beautiful Mother’s Day container gardens inside the house, several nights in a row. So I wondered if the folks who’d been grousing about the landscaping restrictions were happily chopping their shovels into the frozen soil. Across the state, Gov. Whitmer’s critics have been…
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Zoom fatigue, snail mail, and poetry: Notes from my quarantine journal
Snail mail / Cindy La Ferle ____ For more features and additional content, please visit the home page. Social media sharing options are located in the beige box below each day’s post. “What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters to each other. You can’t reread a phone call.” ~Liz Carpenter Friday, May 8 ….Staying connected to friends and family presents a new set of challenges during a pandemic. With the national COVID-19 death toll topping 77,000 and rising daily, social distancing is the best preventative available to us now. But it’s not the easiest.On days when the plaster walls of my home are closing in, it’s tempting to…
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Sheltering in place at my own private Walden
“I am stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen.” ~Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope Sunday, March 29 An only child, I was always at ease in solitude. Growing up, I had a troop of playmates in my neighborhood, but sometimes I’d hide in my closet when they came looking for me. I read — a lot — and often preferred working on craft projects or playing alone with my menagerie of pets. As a preteen, I adopted “In My Room” (Brian Wilson/Gary Usher for The Beach Boys) as my personal anthem. Yet I’ll be the first to agree, right…
