I am determined to have a good summer this year. It’s time.
The last few years I have fallen out of shape, physically and emotionally. Fatigue became a synonym for laziness. Few things, if any, went my way. After what seemed like a lifetime of fighting, I gave up. If my body wanted to keep breathing, that was its business. I, as a matter of choice, didn’t want to do anything.
So in the evenings, after caring for my daughter, I would vegetate on the couch, cover my head with a blanket, and create a small hole for breathing, which my body still compelled me to do.
As much as we get tired of hearing or talking about coronavirus, it may be with us for some time. After all, the summer Olympics were postponed and spring has only just begun. That means the big wigs at the top didn’t think bringing people together was such a great idea.
More than that, the coronavirus will forever change this generation’s view of microbes. (By this generation, I mean people who live through this and remember it, including my seven year old daughter.) I remember when the biggest and scariest contagion was HIV. You had to get bloody intimate with people to get this virus, either through unprotected sex or a contaminated blood transfusion. Even so, there was anxiety in the air. The rapidity with which the virus spread was indicative of how intimate people were with each other. Turns out there was more intimacy in the world than I imagined in my naivete. I had no idea there was that much body fluid sharing going on.
Now, the contagion is spread through air. Air. What we took for granted has now fallen into the realm of intimacy. I sat in a chair about four feet away from another woman while waiting for an oil change for my car and the woman stood up and moved to another seat. I was the leper, or the potential leper. I have to live with that. If before I lived in a community that largely ignored me, now I’m in an environment where people move away from me.
Every once in a rare while comes a person or group of people that are really great, and then, just my luck, they vanish. I vaguely remember having that feeling in elementary school at the end of a school year. After ten months together, I would bond with the other students, only to have the class dissolved by summer break. Then, just my luck again, I would start a new school the following year. Whatever bonds there were were broken and would always be broken. I learned to get over it and move forward. More →
Two weeks ago was my last day, for the foreseeable future, waking up at 5:30 am to go to the Russian school.These past two weeks I only had to get up at 6 am.In September, we are moving to the evening program.Our classes will start at 5 pm and end at 7 pm.We will be with the bigger kids, the ones that go to school all day and come to the Russian school afterward. More →
that I bought a kitten for my mother for Mother’s Day, and she loved the cat, but my step-father gave good reasons why it was a bad idea.My parents had all the cat stuff still in the house, one and a half years after their old cat passed away after 17 years.
How did it happen
that I meant well, but now I have a kitten because the sellers wouldn’t take her back.“Lol.You can put an ad on craigslist” was their text. More →
