Happy First Birthday Corona

 One year ago I was sitting at my friend’s kitchen table discussing the state of things when she told me that she and her husband had decided to go into deep quarantine and there wouldn’t be a refill on that cup of coffee.

I’m a creature of habit. 

 A year later, and I’m still going out in the morning, but now I go to Dunkin’ Donuts for my coffee, and instead of seeing familiar faces, I’m on the phone the whole time...(hands free).

I have the sensation, at times, of being on an ice floe, and the current decides where I am headed and if there are any ice floes carrying people within shouting distance.  I am grateful when there are.

Because I have been mostly alone, I have valued the brief and superficial contacts life has presented me with, shopping, going to the dentist, pick up conversations with strangers.  It stopped bothering me a long time ago that some people find strangers who talk, intrusive, or crazy, or boring. 

I have a sanity to maintain.

My friend and her husband have been really happy during the pandemic, going from making the rounds to visit all their  children and grandchildren as well as having regular visitors, to having a complete seal on their house.  

I miss people, it’s hard to find the place in myself that wouldn’t, even though my life is slow and simple and I like time alone to stare off into space.

I go out every day, to buy eggs, or glue or pliers or paint.... something to keep moving, yet I ignored important things like paying my taxes. ( I’m straightening that out now, but I did not want to give one nickel to the Trump administration ) I have had a practice of looking people in the eye, asking how they are, (fine) and remembering their names, making an observation about something, hoping to get a laugh out of them, making the landscape real, and being part of that landscape, making myself real too.

In this year of wading through psychic cement, and global grief, any step in the direction of connection feels like progress, and anyway, I think they are beginning to recognize me at Dunkin’s