D-Day + 66: Home Sweet Home

Robert Frost said “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  For a long, long time, for me that place was my mom’s house in rural western Iowa. It was the place I felt most at ease, where I could quit “doing” and simply “be”.  It was a respite from the world:  no mail to deal with, no cleaning, no bills to pay.  I could just sit in one of Mom’s recliners and read or nap or watch stupid stuff on TV without worry.  It was the one place that seemed to have a sense of permanence; somehow, I expected that it would always be there.

But times change, and life marches on.  Mom sold the house, moved to a small one-bedroom apartment, and then passed away more than eight years ago.  My sense of home shifted to some odd combination of the place I live at the moment – wherever that might be – and the familiar doorways and rooms of several of my brothers’ homes.  I lived in a condo for 15 years, and there is something about a condo that just doesn’t exude permanence.  Then Ed and I bought this house in south Denver five years ago.  This house now has that permanence thing going in spades, and the longer we are here, the more this seems like the home envisioned on the needlepoint sampler “Home Sweet Home”.

In this time of coronavirus, I’m ecstatic that we have a place that feels so safe and welcoming and, well, kind of “forever”.  So what if we are “Sheltering at Home” by our governor’s decree?  We’re happy to be here, with all of our stuff in one place and – thanks now to our massive Clean-a-thon – mostly spic-and-span surroundings and organized drawers and closets.

But this is America, and we Americans don’t stay put much at all.  In fact, that’s one of the things that is most characteristic about our breed:  we pick up and move.  A lot.  James Fallows talks about this in depth in his 1989 book “More Like Us”.  He says, of American culture, “for better and for worse, this has always been a changeable, self-defining, let’s-start-over culture.”  He makes the point that, “almost every chapter of American history is a saga of people moving from place to place geographically and from level to level socially.”  Ironically, I first read this book in 1989 while Rome and I were living in England.  (Furthering the weirdness is the fact that the subtitle/tagline for the book is “making America great again”.  Mr. Fallows was nothing if not 180 degrees from our current president in making a case for how to make America great again, and it had nothing to do with stupid red hats.  But I digress.)

In this time of coronavirus, the frequency and the sheer numbers of friends and family on the move is really no different, but their situations are all challenged.  We watch from our cozy corner of the world as people we are close to pick up and move.  At the start of this pandemic, we were anticipating updating our Contact apps with new addresses for many friends.  There is Mel, in Florida, moving to Nashville; only now, she’s hunkered down in the Sunshine State, working from home and sequestered in the ready-to-sell house she thought she had sold a month or two ago.  There’s my brother and sister-in-law, who just retired in December and moved from Oregon to Arizona.  The one-bedroom apartment that they rented for the time that their new house is being constructed suddenly got really, really small when the quarantine hit.  There are friends Tom and Debbie.  They had planned for several years to sell their big suburban house and move back into town in the spring of this year; but everything went on deep hold when the “Stay-at-Home” order was issued.  Who wants people walking through your house for a showing, spreading virus droplets everywhere?  Happily, after a delay of 5 or 6 weeks, they put the suburban house on the market and it sold within hours.  (Cancel the order for the extra disinfectant!)  Our neighbors Andrew and Molly are renters.  They had just made an offer to buy their first home when the virus hit.  They walked that offer back off the table as quickly as they could.  But now, they tell us, they’ve found another place to buy, and will be moving as soon as they can close on it.  We’ll miss them, but we are learning to live with the particular impermanence of a transitional neighborhood chock full of rentals.  

These are just a few of our friends and family who are on the move, and coronavirus be damned:  people are still moving.  It’s truly an American way.

But it’s an American way that we’re happy to not participate in these days.  We’re hunkering down at home, and doing what we can – given the restrictions – to keep our house homey. Which means that last Friday, we made an appointment at our favorite local nursery, and braved the crowds to buy our summer container and yard plantings.  The nursery had just re-opened and was enforcing social distancing, as much as they could.  They limited the number of people in the store and had checkout lanes setup to keep people the requisite six feet apart.  Masks were required of everyone entering the store.  They asked that people limit their shopping time to just 30 minutes in order to allow the people waiting in the growing line outside a chance to shop also.

We hurried as much as we could, and filled up the Montero with annuals for color, and replacement perennials for the yard.  Saturday was an all-out assault on getting everything planted (me) and the sprinkler systems turned on and tested (Ed).  I can claim better success than Ed, since I got all the plants in the ground (or planters, as appropriate), while he hit the typical first of season plumbing failures.  That’s a perennial frustration, but Ed bears it in good humor and with lots of trips to the hardware store to pick up vital parts.  Between the two of us, we succeeded in clearing out the assorted plants that died over the winter.  How is it that plants that thrived for several years just up and die on you?  But die they do, and we work at reminding ourselves that it’s an opportunity to improve on our choices rather than to simply bemoan our losses.

There are moments when this all feels like so much work.  Too much work, to be honest, when my knees are sore from kneeling, and the clippers cause a blister on my thumb, and my arms itch from too many dry limbs scratching.  But then, as I clear out some dead branches from our volunteer rose bush in the back yard, I notice that the bird house we nailed to the adjacent fence has twigs sticking out in all directions.  We put up this bird house the summer we moved in, and we had pretty much given up on it ever having an occupant.  Maybe a bad location?  Who knows.

We just know that we may have new residents at this place, our home sweet home.  Has someone truly moved into the bird house?  Or were they just trying it out?  We’re hopeful - but also pragmatic.  After all, last summer we had first a first time renter in the gourd that hangs from the ash tree in our front yard.  We’re not sure that those house wrens will be back there this summer, but we’re heartened to have signs of avian life again.  In any case, even if the birds have rejected the house in our back yard and have moved on, they are just playing out the American dream.  Find a new and better place to be.  But we’ll stay here, thank you very much.  We’re not going anywhere.

D-Day + 53: And what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious confinement?

May has brought brighter days and flowers blooming in abundance.  She is a tease, though:  she gives us just enough sunshine and warmth to remind us of a promise of better days, but then she still turns cloudy and blustery at times.  Ah well.  We will be complaining about the heat soon enough.

With the longer and sunnier days, we are spending more and more time out of doors, and that gives us reason to appreciate the #TogetherApart movement.  What is it that you plan to take with you from your one wild and precious confinement into the New Normal? 

Hopefully we will remember the chalk art everywhere we look.  On sidewalks, and sometimes, on streets that are not so heavily traveled.

We will definitely not forget the local art show that our neighbor Eric put together a week ago.  Eric and his wife, together with her parents, own an interior design business and store.  They have been shut down pretty much completely since the beginning of the shelter-in-place order here in Denver.  We see Eric frequently out in their front yard with their cuter-than-a-bug’s-ear 5-year old son, and we stop to chat with them (from a proper social distance, natch) whenever we head out for a walk.  Several weeks ago, Eric told us that he had posted a query on the Nextdoor app: “who creates cool things?”  He was expecting to get a few hits, but instead, got several hundred responses.  Within hours, he created the plan to hold a street art fair that he called “Covid Creations”.

Covid Creations was held last Wednesday on the block just down the street.  There were somewhere around 50 entries, all spaced at 6-foot intervals.  (The original idea was to have it be a drive-by exhibition, but that just didn’t pan out.)  Eric set it up as a competition, with just a few rules.  The work of art had to be created during the Covid-19 quarantine, and it had to be uplifting.  He asked that nobody spend more than $200 on materials. 

Mother Nature cooperated and brought us a gorgeous day for the art show.  Eric and the business donated prizes for the first through third place winners:  gift cards for local restaurants, a win-win all around, and very gracious to come from someone whose business has been deeply affected.  Our friend Rick came out to provide some music in the early part of the day.  The creations were displayed from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m., and there was a steady stream of people throughout the day, almost all wearing masks and safely distancing.  Local TV stations came out to cover the event:

(Blogger appears to be having difficulties just now with uploaded videos, so if this does not play, google "Covid Creations Denver" and you'll get hits on YouTube for this or similar news reports.)

These are the things I want to remember about our Coronavirus days.

There’s also the neighbor who arranged a social-distancing happy hour on their front lawn last Friday.  We all brought our own lawn chairs or blankets, and arranged ourselves in our family bubbles, all 6 or more feet apart.  Lara, the host, offered to refill my wine glass.  She took it from me, went inside, returned with a most generous pour – and a package of disinfectant wipes so that I could wipe down the glass.

We were sitting on the lawn when, at 8 p.m., the howl began.  Do you do this in your neighborhood?  In Denver, every night at 8 p.m., we have a howl to show appreciation for the people working the front lines of the disease.  At first, some people were posting on Nextdoor and Facebook, complaining that the howling came when their young children were already in bed, and it was disturbing their sleep.  But on Friday night, nobody was complaining.  We all howled and howled.  Eric and Gina said that their 5-year old son loves the howl so much that they set an alarm every day so they won’t miss it.  It continues to surprise me how the howl happens every single day and seems to be getting even more exuberant as time goes on.

That’s something worth remembering.

There’s also the chalkboard on the local bike path, with a reminder to help take care of others:

We hear reports of clearer air all over the world.  We don’t see it directly here from central Denver, but our friends who have a clearer view of the front range tell us that the brown cloud – something that was largely eradicated before Trump’s policies messed that all up – has diminished again.  We love that there are fewer cars on the road, and we can walk down the middle of many of our residential streets in order to keep our distance from others.  (Fewer cars, but crazier drivers, driving at break-neck speeds?  That’s what Ed, who is out more than I am, reports.  I’m not sure what’s up with that.)

There’s the fact of masks becoming the norm.  The first time I wore a mask, I walked into our local Italian eatery to pick up our carryout order.  “I feel like a bank robber!” I said to the waiter as he handed us our package.  “Please don’t rob us!”, he said, and I felt a bit of desperation in his voice.  Just one more blow that the restaurant shouldn’t have to worry about.  I’ve made no more bank robber jokes since then.  But the mask has become the new norm, barely worth mentioning.  Except this:  when I went to pick up an order for CBD lotion from a local dispensary the other day, the young woman who brought my order outside said, “I love your mask!”  Now that’s a phrase I don’t think I ever expected to hear in my life, but there you have it.

This morning, Ed came into my office to tell me that our stimulus check had been deposited into our joint bank account.  He said, “we need to figure out what to do with it”.  This made me think of our former neighbor and good friend Raffi, who stopped by a few weeks ago while he was out for a run.  We saw him approaching the house and went out to greet him – from a social distance, of course – on our front porch.  We spent some time catching up, then Raffi said, “we got our stimulus check, so I just finished writing $2,400 worth of checks to charities I support”. 

These are the things I want to remember when we are settled into our New Normal at some point in the future.  The generosity and humanity of our neighbors.  The fact that we are talking more often with distant friends and family, staying in touch, making sure everyone is still healthy and safe.  The signs in windows of homes, thanking the medical folks on the front lines.  The people who step off the sidewalk to give way so we pass at a safe distance.  The nieces who call randomly, just to chat.  The sisters and brothers who do the same.

Keep doing all of that, okay?  And have a brilliant, joyful time on this glorious spring day.

D-Day + 46: April is the cruelest month

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

-T.S. Eliot

It’s cloudy out today.  Ed says the forecast tells us it will get up to 85 degrees (85!), but with the cloud clover, it just doesn’t seem likely.  The thing is, I chose Colorado as my home largely because of the 300 days of sunshine per year.

Today, I think I am getting gypped.

In reality, it’s only fitting that this final day of this particular month should be so gloomy.  After all, April bites.  With apologies to all those who think that April brings spring and flowers and longer days, well….it also brings rain and clouds and false hope of warm days.  And this year, the lingering coronavirus lockdown, more deaths, and more gnashing of teeth over what the new normal might be in the age of COVID-19.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that April is a month filled with a history of bad stuff happening.  This month, our daily “This Day in History” from the Denver Post has been full of terrors and disasters that happened in past Aprils.  I’ve written before about the Boston Marathon bombings.  But what of so many others?

There was the first major San Francisco earthquake (April 26, 1906).  The Virginia Tech shooter (April 16, 2007).  The Oklahoma City bombing (April 19, 1995). The Ludlow Massacre (April 20, 1914). The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (April 4, 1968).  The Chernobyl disaster (April 26, 1986).  Heck, Coca-cola announced that they were changing the formula of Coke and rolling out “New Coke” on April 23, 1985.  If that wasn’t an unmitigated disaster, I don’t know what is.

April 15^th is a particularly heinous day in history.  In addition to the Boston Marathon bombings, there’s a long list of other disastrous events.  The sinking of the Titanic (1912).  The assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865).  And just last year, the Notre Dame fire in Paris.  And none of that is to mention the normal IRS deadline for filing taxes.

Notre Dame, 1987

 Closer to home, there was the Columbine School shooting on April 20, 1999.  I was in Dallas, managing a project, on the day of the shooting.  Most of my team members were people who lived in Colorado, including some with kids in school.  We started getting emails and phone calls about that horrific event, and spent a nervous afternoon getting updates.  I didn’t know Ed at that time, but he got calls asking him to come help film the event (for news outlets) as it unfolded.  He (so wisely) declined the offers of work.  Some things are just not worth any amount of money.  Mark Obmascik, one of my favorite authors, did not have a choice for opting out;  he was a reporter for one of the Denver daily newspapers.  He went on to win a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on Columbine, but it scarred him.  (We birders were blessed when his soul-cleansing project resulted in the book, “The Big Year” – all about birds and birders, nothing about disasters and whack-job disaster-mongers.) 

Most close to home, our friend Rick’s youngest daughter was a student at Columbine at the time.  She escaped, but was shot at in the process, and she still bears the mental and emotional scars from surviving something like that. Every year on April 20^th, Rick and his daughter get together.  It’s a tough day for her, understandably.  It’s a tough day for him, too.  This year, they shared a bottle of wine at his house, then she went home to her husband and kids.  Rick called us for a virtual happy hour afterwards.  It was clear he didn’t want to be alone.  How do you deal with social distancing when you desperately want to reach out and give someone a big bear hug?

As for me, the novelty of the shelter-in-place order is wearing thin.  The moth infestation of our closet, and then the rat infestation in our yard:  these things pretty well annihilated my sense of order and cleanliness and security in my own home.  The Clean-a-thon was always work, but it started out as a fun thing to do together.  Then reality set in, and the fun transformed into duty and drudgery.  The deep cleaning continues now at a snail’s pace, and the whole damn house is becoming dirty all over again.  Where does all the dust and dirt come from?  I appreciate our housecleaners more now than ever.

Alas.  There is really nothing to be done except to soldier on.  As the prospect of May – just a day away! – comes nearer, I’ll try to focus on the good stuff that happens in April.  For as many bad things happen in April, there have been some really good ones, too.  World Earth Day happens every April (first celebrated April 22, 1970), no matter how much our current administration is trying to destroy the earth.  We also have coronavirus to thank for lowering – if just temporarily – the effects of human pollution of the earth. Nelson Mandela was first elected as president of the Republic of South Africa on April 27, 1994, proving that despotic regimes don’t always last forever.  And, most fittingly, the World Health Organization was established on April 7, 1948.  We can only hope that when we get rid of our despot, we will again return to funding the WHO in order to help in the prevention and mitigation of future pandemics.

Still, for all that, I am looking forward to May, and the prospects of more sunshine and more good news about containing and eradicating COVID-19.  We still have virtual happy hours to hold with friends, and more Zoom calls with our extended families.  We’ll finish up the deep cleaning and pray that it’s safe sometime soon to bring our cleaning crew back in the house.  We’ve already told our favorite restaurant proprietor that we want to be the first reservation when he’s able to reopen.  In the meantime, April:  don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

D-Day + 38: More pestilence.

There’s really no other way to say this other than the blunt one.

We have rats.

There is no three-word sentence in the English language that I would have thought less likely for me to utter.  I love you.  That’s a good three-word sentence, maybe the best.  It’s beautiful today.  I’m on vacation!  Let’s go skiing!  Any number of three-word sentences that are pleasant enough to say out loud.  But “we have rats”?  Ewww. Even just typing those words gives me the heebie jeebies.  There’s nothing that makes my skin crawl more than the thought of brown, skinny-tailed vermin crawling around under (or on top of) our back deck.

But there you have it.  When we did our yard cleanup a couple weeks ago, we noticed multiple holes in our back yard, all heading right under the deck.  We had seen some small evidence of digging at the edge of the deck last fall, but we chalked it up to squirrels.  After all, we host tons of squirrels in our yard.  They are maddening, destructive rodents in their own right, but we’ve accepted that, since we feed birds, they are just part of the equation.  And, they can, sometimes, be almost cute.

But the amount and size of the holes we found that week, well, they clearly weren’t all the work of squirrels.  Ed said, “I’m afraid to say what I think this is”.  I knew it then, that it was bad.  If Ed couldn’t say it, I knew it was going to freak me out.

It should not have really been a big surprise.  Several weeks ago, as we walked through the park half a block away, we saw the carcass of a dead rat.  It was the first time I had seen a rat that close to a home of mine.  (I lived in downtown Denver for 15 years, and people talked – vaguely – of rats near the building’s dumpsters, but I never saw one.)  Then a week or two after the dead-rat-in-the-park experience, a neighbor across the street and several houses closer to the park told us – from a safe social distance – that she had rats under her front porch.  It was disturbing to hear, but hey, denial is a good place to be.  I read newspaper stories about how rats were rampant in the streets of some cities like New Orleans, now that much of their food source – the trash from restaurants and bars, now shuttered – was gone.  But I never dreamed that a home of mine would be infested.

We spent the next week exploring natural options.  We bought a “humane” rat zapper and caught one – mouse!  That just meant we are double infested:  we have both rats and mice!  Good Lord!  Ed worked on finding things to drive them all away.  Peppermint scented soaps.  Bay leaves.  Kitty litter (used, thanks to our two inside-only cats.)  He filled several of the burrow-holes with gravel.  We bought an ultrasonic thingy to try to drive them away.

All of those things just seemed to stir up the rats.  One morning, I finally saw a rat run across the back yard.  Then a day later, we saw two more in the same small back yard, and it sent me over the edge.  You know how The Sopranos series starts with Tony Soprano passing out with a panic attack?  Well, that’s kind of where I was.  Shaking.  Crying.  Ready to throw up.

One has to wonder how someone who grew up in rural Iowa turned out to be so squeamish about rats.  And mice.  And snakes.  And all kinds of vermin.  I didn’t get that from my mom.  Many years back, when I was in Iowa to see Mom, I went out for a run.  I passed a large dead snake in the middle of the road on the outskirts of town.  It freaked me out, even though it was clearly smashed and dead.  I told Mom about the HUGE snake in the road, and she wanted to see it, too, so we drove to the scene.  My mom looked at the snake and shook her head.  “Honestly, Judy!” she said.  (That’s what she always said when she was exasperated or annoyed with me:  “Honestly, Judy!”.  Not to be confused with the “Judith Ann!” that she would thunder when really upset with me.  Nope, this was just annoyance, and puzzlement.)  “That’s just an old bull snake.  And that’s not huge at all!”

But squeamish I am, and squeamish I remain.  It sure seemed huge to me.

Which means that, by the end of that first week, we called in the big guns, and had an exterminator come out and place bait traps around the back yard.  We were fearsome of the impacts of using poison; we’re both mindful of not contaminating the food chain.  The exterminator assured us that the poison metabolizes in the rat, and that it won’t harm other animals – even if, say, a hawk picks up a rat for food, it won’t kill the hawk.  The bait traps are too small for the squirrels or neighborhood cats to access.   We’ve been assured, but, like so much in this world today, we’re not completely sure we believe everything we are told.

The exterminators also told us that the rats, once poisoned, would disappear from our property as they left in search of water – an effect of the poison.  But on the next Saturday morning, when they came back to check the bait traps, there they were:  two dead rats on the pathway in our back yard.  Have I said ewww?  Apparently, the extermination is underway.  Thank heavens the exterminator took the dead rats away with him.

We’re both extremely sad that we had to discontinue our bird feeding, since it is, no doubt, the bird seed that is the food source that draws the rats.  The exterminator tells us that we can start feeding again after 4 weeks, but, well, that just seems like a long time to abandon the birds.  Sigh.  I’m sure they’ll find food out there, but sheesh.  Nothing like running a full-on smorgasbord for our feathered friends and then closing the doors abruptly.

Empty feeders

All of this has been a huge distraction from the coronavirus crisis.  Our house deep cleaning project took a big slow down while we’ve been dealing with the Great Rat Infestation of 2020.  On Easter Sunday, we were both sufficiently depressed by the state of the world, including our rat crisis, that we decided to just shut it all out.  While it snowed outside, we turned up the heat, pulled down the blinds, and watched movies all day long.  When I looked outside, I didn’t see any rats.  Just pure white, beautiful snow.

D-Day + 32: Dancing with Disaster

Ed and I both like to read “This Day in History” in our local paper.  Yesterday’s entry, for April 15, 2013, caught my attention.  “Two bombs made from pressure cookers exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line….”

It took me back to that day in April 2013.  It was the first time in twelve years that I had not been part of that race.  Boston meant the world to me.  Boston was legendary even when I was a fledgling jogger, back in the mid 1970s.  It was an ideal.  I held no delusions that I would ever be able to run in that august event; I was never going to be that fast.  I was happy just to admire those who were that fast, and who completed that very difficult course on the third Monday of every April.  But then, after I had run my first three marathons, amazingly, I hit a day when I was that fast.  On a chilly day in early October 2001, in those scary days just a month after 9/11, I ran a qualifying time in the Chicago Marathon.  I was set for my once-and-done trip to Boston in April 2002.

Then something magical happened.  I ran my first Boston, and then I kept re-qualifying for the race.  Year after year.  It became a huge part of my life.  My friends and family all knew, too, how important it was to me.  Year after year; more people than I ever could have hoped for watched my progress through the on-line athlete’s tracker.  They knew that every April, on Patriot’s Day in Boston, I would be there for the race.

But time and life happened.  I ran Boston ten times, and ten times I finished.  Then I finished my goal of running a marathon in every state, in October 2011.  I was getting weary of all the training and all the racing.  My knee was hurting.  My mom died in early 2012, and that just killed my spirit, too.  I was single.  And lonely.  I went to Boston in April 2012, and, for want of a driving mission (and a bit of heat exhaustion), I dropped out of the race in the Newton hills.  It was my only DNF (did not finish) ever.

And it was my last marathon – Boston or otherwise – ever.

But my friends and family didn’t know all those details.  When the news of the 2013 bombing hit the airwaves, I started getting phone calls.  Texts.  Emails.  “Are you okay?”  “Were you there?”  It was heart-warming to know so many people cared.  It was also heartening to hear that my friends who were part of the race that day were all okay (albeit a tad rattled – or annoyed and angry – by the outcome).  And, while it was a huge relief to not have been one of the people injured or killed by the bombs, I was completely ambivalent.  Shouldn't I have been there?

This wasn’t my first experience courting disaster, and it wouldn’t be my last.  Over the course of my life, I’ve been racking up more than my fair share of near-misses, sometimes way too close for comfort.

There was the San Francisco earthquake of 1989.  I was there, in the heart of San Francisco, when the earth started shaking.  I was in the city for a doctor’s appointment, and the doc had just come into the exam room when the quake started.  While I tried to pull my feet out of the stirrups, he said, “we’ll just have to ride this out”, and that shaking seemed to go on forever.  The medical office was running late that afternoon, by a good thirty or more minutes, which, as it turns out, was my good fortune that day.  If they had been on time, I would have very likely been on the Bay Bridge, on my way back out of the city, when it collapsed.  As it was, it took me ten hours to get back home to Grass Valley, where Rome was waiting.  At 3 a.m., we walked across the parking lot to a grocery store (we had just returned back from a time living in the UK, and were staying in a motel), bought a bottle of brandy, and planned to get the heck out of California for good.

Then there was the emergency landing on a flight home from Dallas in 1999.  I was on a project there, traveling back and forth on a weekly basis.  One Thursday night, I caught a flight with a couple of my colleagues.  At about the time we were supposed to be approaching Denver, the captain told us we were making an emergency landing in Oklahoma City.  Huh?  It turned out that one of the engines had a leak, and we could see jet fuel spewing out behind the wing of the plane.  I didn’t realize how serious the situation was until, once we were on the ground, the captain parked the plane at the far end of the runway – as far away from the terminal as possible – and had us go down the slides.  Fire trucks came screaming up and started spraying fire-retarding foam.  Emergency crews yelled at us as we emerged from the slide, shouting at us to move as far away from the plane as we could.  It’s amazing to figure out, only later, how much danger you were in.

That wasn't my only scary flight experience.  There was the time, back in the early 1990s, when I was on an aborted takeoff;  nothing wakes you up from a pre-flight nap like having the plane come to a screeching halt just at the time it should be airborne.  It turned out that the flight control panel went completely dark, and the captain (and all of us on the flight) would have been in deep trouble had we been in the air.

And there was the time, just last December, when we were in New Zealand, and the White Island volcano erupted.  Ed and I, along with our Kiwi host Delwyn, had plans to be on the tour of White Island just a few days later.  What if?  We had just arrived in NZ the morning that the volcano blew;  Delwyn texted us to tell us the news.  She was shaking, she told us, as she looked at the brochure for the tour that she had on her countertop.  

Also in December, we heard news of a helicopter crash on Kauai, on a tour of the Na Pali coast.  Ed and I had just visited Kauai in early November, and had taken that helicopter tour.  We had not flown with the same company, but does it really matter?  All the choppers line up at the same spot at the airport, and they all cover the same flight pattern.  Again, what if?

There are times, it seems, that I have been dancing with disaster for much of my life.  Perhaps it all goes back to the fact that I might not even be here today if it weren’t for disaster – disaster in the form of the last pandemic to hit the world, the Spanish flu of 1918.  You see, my maternal grandmother was married at the time, and was a young mother, in southwestern Iowa.  In the early fall of 1918, her husband took a train journey across Nebraska to look at homesteading opportunities in northern Colorado.  He contracted the Spanish flu and died.  Grandma later remarried and had a new family with my grandfather.  The collection of molecules that is me would not be here if not for the Spanish flu and that fateful trip for her first husband.

But here I am in April 2020, watching it snow outside, and fairly content to be sheltering-in-place.  The Boston Marathon for 2020 was originally scheduled, as usual, on Patriot’s Day:  April 20^th.  The coronavirus has changed all that.  It’s now set to occur on September 14^th instead, and I’ll be praying that things have improved enough by then for it to come off.  Somehow, this whole pandemic is giving me renewed inspiration.  I had a dream last night that I ran a marathon. I didn’t qualify for Boston, but who knows?  I’ve been known to have some pretty darn good luck in the past. 

D-Day + 24: When Coronavirus Hits Home

John Prine is gone.

My brother Dave put it most aptly.  “We shed some tears last night when we learned John Prine had passed away.  Coronavirus was somewhat abstract until someone we cherish so died.”

Ed and I have talked about this many times in the last several weeks:  the inevitability of having someone we know and care about – family member, friend, colleague, neighbor – get the virus.  And, the harsher reality, having someone whom we know and love die from the virus.

As it is, we know several people who may have had, or may currently have, the virus in a mild form.  My friend Molly came home to Colorado from a work conference in Nashville at the end of February, and had many of the symptoms;  her physician – on a phone call – advised that it sounded like she had the virus, but since she was coping okay, she didn’t get tested.  A birding friend of mine in the Springs thinks she has it.  A running friend in KC is pretty sure she has had it.  Our mailperson thinks she had it back in January.  Ed just told me he learned this morning that his business partner’s brother and kid both had it.

Hell, I got seriously sick at the tail end of our New Zealand vacation in late December:  it started with a horrible cough and was unlike any cold I’ve ever had.  Could it have been present in Kiwi-land even before people really knew about it anywhere outside of China?

In all these cases, the people have recovered.  Or are recovering.  No hospitalizations.  No difficulty breathing requiring oxygen.  No ventilators.

No deaths.

But the specter is there, and it feels that much closer today.  I can’t help hearing Jackson Browne singing, from “For a Dancer”,

I don't know what happens when people die
Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It's like a song I can hear playing right in my ear
But I can't sing
I can't help listening
I can't help feeling stupid standing 'round
Crying as they ease you down

It’s times like these that I envy the deeply religious among us who have a certainty about what happens when people die.  I love the idea of a heaven where we’re all reunited with our loved ones;  I just don’t really believe in it.  But I would like to.  And maybe, as so many people seem to do, as I get older, I’ll embrace that thought more.  After all, Pascal’s Wager says that rational people should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God.  If God doesn’t exist, there’s really no loss, and perhaps a reward of living a better life.  If God does exist, there are infinite gains.  Including, maybe, a heaven where we’ll find all our old friends and family and, presumably, our musical idols.

Several months ago, an article made its way around the internet about the coming death of a host of rock legends.  The article starts out with this dire prediction:  Just about every rock legend you can think of is going to die within the next decade or so.  The article acknowledges the icons we’ve lost already, a too-long list that includes John Lennon and Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin.  Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, George Harrison, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson.  Glenn Frey. Prince.  And more, and more, and more.

Then the article goes on to say, “Those losses have been painful.  But it’s nothing compared with the tidal wave of obituaries to come….All of which means there’s going to be a lot of mourning going on”, and ends with a list of rockers who are currently in their 70s.  Bob Dylan.  Paul McCartney.  Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.  Carole King.  Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.  And on and on and on.

The article doesn’t mention John Prine specifically, maybe because he was one of those guys who flew under the radar.  But it doesn't mean he will be mourned any less. The New York Times refers to his music as country-folk; maybe that’s why a list of more traditional rockers missed him.  I mostly knew of John Prine through his songs that were covered by other artists, most prominently “Angel from Montgomery”.  While I didn’t much know of him as a performer, I still have a piano book of his music from the very early 1970s; the picture on the cover is of a very young man.

But then Dave told me, once, ten or more years ago, that I needed to see him in concert.  Dave said, “trust me.  He’s a great storyteller and performer.”  The next time that John Prine came through Colorado, he played Red Rocks.  My concert-going buddy, Denise, and I snapped up tickets as soon as they went on sale and got most excellent seats.  The man who played that night had gray hair and a very gravelly voice.  We were blown away by the music.  And the stories.  The laughs. And the tears.  We were impressed by the hard-core fans who sang every word to every song that he sang.  We didn’t know them all – not even close – but left the concert with a long list of songs to download from iTunes.

This morning, Dave texted, “We will miss his music and homespun style.  Listen to Lake Marie and remember him.”  Lake Marie just happened to be the song I most loved from his live performance.  It’s playing in my head, all day long, with a picture of him in that magical place.

Lake Marie

Standing by peaceful waters
Peaceful waters
Standing by peaceful waters
Peaceful waters
Aah baby, we gotta go now

D-Day + 21: Coronavirus Curses

Pandemic

Contagion

Infestation

Pestilence

Vermin

That pretty well sums up our weekend, the fourth such weekend of our shelter-at-home days.

It all started innocently enough.  Our housekeepers, who come every other week, do a good enough job.  But not really a good job.  We accept the status quo because they are reasonable, reliable, fairly priced, and very fast.  But in our day-to-day lives, we frequently comment on the things that they miss.  The dusty baseboards.  The cobwebs not removed.  The dusting that only goes so far. 

We had been thinking about the need to do a deep cleaning sometime soon.  After all, we moved into this house five years ago, and have not really done a serious cleaning since then.  So when we asked the cleaners to stay away when their normal cleaning day rolled around a couple of weeks ago, we took this as the opportunity for us to tackle the whole enchilada – just like millions of other Americans.

But millions of other Americans are not project managers.  Unfortunately for Ed, I am.  That means that I put on my PM cap, and out came the scheduling plan.  To better ensure success, I knew we couldn’t go with the Big Bang approach, where you have one task that is “clean the whole house”.  Nope.  I went with a task deconstruction that loosely follows the Agile approach which is the rage among project management philosophies these days.  Now we have a schedule with every room, and every subtask by room – all broken down by phases.

Like any good project management approach, there are metrics associated with completion.  I run a daily stand-up meeting (pretty much with myself, sometimes including Ed; good staff is so hard to come by these days) to determine what tasks to take on next.  This flexibility helps to ensure that we continue forward progress even when the resources make themselves scarce. The project has been running pretty well to plan (the only deadline is to get the damn house cleaned before we both give up, or – hopefully – get released from this quarantine).  

We started out with an easy room – the dining room.  Easy Peasy.  Nothing much there except, well, the usual dining room stuff:  table, chairs, rug, windowsills, a couple of shelves.  The success of that task led us to take on increasingly more complicated and difficult tasks.  Bathrooms.  Piano room.  Guest bedroom.  Our master bedroom was the first real test of our fortitude.  We took the bed apart and pulled it out from the wall.  Our two cats had deposited a prodigious amount of fur under the bed, at the baseboards, anywhere they could.  But thanks to a hardworking vacuum cleaner and fresh attitudes, we got ‘er done.

Then a week ago Saturday, we tackled the library.  It’s a small room.  But some imbecile (I plead the fifth on this one) decided that we needed to take all the books off all the shelves in order to properly dust the room.  The other moron on the team decided to use the unshelving/reshelving process to ensure that our alphabetic filing system was accurate.  A full day and 1300 books (give or take a few), we survived.  It’s amazing how decisions about books one will never read (or never read again) become easier as the shelves get fuller and there’s really no place else to store them.  Goodwill will thank us.

Our next big weekend challenge awaited us this past Saturday:  the HPC.  The HPC is our Harry Potter Cupboard under the stairs.  We don’t have a basement, so this handy closet on the first floor is our catch-all.  It’s chockful of stuff.  A few tools, spare lightbulbs, futon mattresses for the pullout couch, bedding (ditto), old towels, rags, spare cutlery and water bottles.  The big air mattress that we use once every ten years or so.  Cat carriers.  Extra cat food. A little of this.  A little of that.  You get the picture.

We knew that the HPC was going to take all day.  But that was before we discovered that little brown moths had infested the closet.  Little brown moths, moth nests, and – most disgusting of all – little white worms trying to become moths.  Ewwww.  Dear Lord.  Our Saturday was spent pulling every single thing out; vacuuming the bejeebers out of all the surfaces; washing down all the surfaces and spraying everything with a concoction Ed made out of water, isopropyl alcohol, and lavender oil.  We ran 8 or 9 loads of laundry in hot water.  We filled our trash dumpster with wrapping paper and bows and tissue paper:  for some odd reason, those gross little buggers loved the tissue paper.  So out it all went.

At the end of the day, we got the HPC reassembled.  It’s all nice and shiny now, and there is actually room on some of the shelves.  There’s room to walk into the closet now.  We even rearranged so that stuff is mostly easier to access.

It was a big job, but by Saturday night, the rest of our living space on the first floor looked livable again.  We rewarded ourselves with a happy hour out on our front porch, opening one of the bottles of wine that we had rescued from the HPC.  We settled in a bit later with some dinner and a movie on Netflix.

Before going upstairs to bed, we went to the HPC and opened the door to – again – admire our handywork.  And there – up high – on a wall that was beautifully clean and white just a short time earlier – was a freaking little brown moth.

Son of a bitch.  Coronavirus Curses.