Tag Covid

Long slow suppers

Hi there. Each week I will post an excerpt of one of the thousands of things I’ve written in the last 25 years, and then follow it up with some modern context or point of view. Today’s piece from the…

Magic

The 18th of October was the first night it got cold this year. Cold enough to frost. Cold enough to kill the remnants of the basil plants in the pot on my deck. I was at a community meeting around…

The other side

When I was 10 years old, my 5-year-old brother got appendicitis. His stomach was hurting intensely, and after a period of home remedies, we took him to the doctor, who diagnosed him with a swollen appendix, and he went to…

The Storm

Her name was Betty, and how exactly we were kin is a long story that involves marriages, divorces, widows, and time, but it’s far easier to just tell you she was my cousin’s wife which, while true, downplays her role…

Two Years.

In about two weeks, it will be the anniversary of the last time I did anything that involved other people that didn’t include worrying about COVID. It was a funeral for a friend’s dad, and while we had heard stories…

What We Leave Behind

I bought some life insurance last week. I’ve been putting it off for ages, ostensibly because I wanted to research my options, but the long list of other things I have procrastinated on speaks to the lie in that scenario.…

Next

On March 16th of 2020, I had a lunch meeting scheduled with a colleague.  We had planned to go to Subway and eat, and then go to her office for a more formal meeting with a third person, but she…

A Crowded Table

Our dining room table will seat 8 comfortably, 10 in a stretch, and we have squeezed 12 in on at least two occasions.  It’s not a pretty table – it’s that honey oak popular in the eighties – but one…

2021

I was talking to Renee today about how weird 2021 has been. Nothing really bad happened to us, personally, this year. But the general anxiety of living through the second year of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands…