Mid Pandemic Check-in

How habituated we have become to the pandemic life. Masks hanging from the turn signal rod in the car, always at the ready, masks in the handbag, masks folded with dog poop bags at the ready, in the pockets when I do the laundry. 

Once or twice we have dined out in public indoors. There was a moment when it seemed we could give up the masks. We ate by the door, eyes upon all who entered, hearing the alcohol fueled laughter with the dismay of having heard too many times that laughter and singing spreads the virus more effectively than casual conversation. 

Some time ago I stopped checking the statistics every day. Then I stopped listening to the talk and separated myself from social media. Now my only reminders that we are still living in the time of plague are when I leave home. I leave home nearly daily. This is a big change. 

There are parks here where we now live. There are vast outdoor spaces dedicated to matters of eating and mingling. Some call the revamping of the center of the city gentrification. I experience the change from boarded up old motor lodges to white stucco tap room and international food court, all outdoors, as homage to place, as acknowledging human requirements and preferences. 

This part of town is a hodgepodge of style, decrepitude, grand older houses with venerable trees and gardens, and the renovated, rebuilt, and newly constructed dense residence structures with too few parking places. The purpose is to encourage public transportation use. 

Here in Albuquerque it is called ART. Rapid transit one imagines. All I see is Art. The Art district. I feel myself to be within the Art District. Behind our house upon our property is a never finished addition to the garage. It looks like part of the garage but is more like a barn, inside. Or it used to be, before the moss green concrete floor got poured. The millions of spider webs are next to go. Cable studio lighting, a heater cooler mini split, drywall, and voila, an art studio. We have a nifty air purifier that is sized just right for the space. Does that make it covid safe? Doubtful. Everything is doubtful. Safety from virus is a matter of personal practice, wearing the masks.   Choosing the outdoors to linger. 

Perhaps the best part is that the studio has an outdoors. Already, an outdoor room, with a bar and barbecue and sink, a fire table, seating for a small group.  There is an old elm. I read up on elms. They are a tree people are not encouraged to plant. This one is so far past its prime that it is potentially near the end of its life. It has dead branches. I would prefer an oak, a sycamore, a cottonwood. But, such thoughts are best abandoned.  This elm provides beautiful shade, and makes the entire back area an expression of Bosque beauty. 

Soon there will be a pond back there, and a hot tub surrounded by a wooden platform with container plants upon it. This is a time of becoming. 

Were it not for the pandemic, would this chapter have been inserted into our lives? There is no answer. Like the weird twist of fate that took us all indoors before it thrust us all outdoors, what prompts we take to action are not to be anticipated. Like earthquakes in other places, these large events happen upon the earth stage, and we take them in stride. For me, better without the opinions of the world strewn like autumn leaves during high winds. 

The Women Writing

 The Women Writing

Here they are on the edge of the world 

Perhaps you see the crumbling cliff on which they sit

leaning on bent palms

coconuts waiting to drop

precarious as all existence

They are finding their voices

words coming at them from that soft clattering cadence of rattling fronds

You can imagine the azure sea glistening with sunlight on the curls of the tide 

You can see the green leaves and grey brown trunks

With the color changed to sepia as with images of old, you can barely catch the ocean breeze and fragrance of distant plumeria in the image

These women writing will not be hearing the critical voice, the telling them how to capture their audience

Those who listen will hear their authentic emotive song as the sailors once heard the sirens 

compelled to the rocks

shoals that never learned indifference 

rocks of fate upon your shore itself

#napowrimo2021

Moirai

 Moirai

A young girl is told the facts of life, given to understand the nature of the spindle, the rumination of the thread, finally, the arbitrary scissors that end it. 

In her dreams, she sees the length of thread spinning out for her, how it stretches into the endless sky, thusly quieting the deepening hole in her gut.

The randomness of fate assures her of a broad path, a trapeze of a life, swinging broadly between achievement and ruin, love and despair. 

Shifting her gaze from sad eyed lambs to children in cages, from tumors on sea turtles to arrays of flying fish breaking out of the ocean, the idea the world should make sense in her terms lays out upon the sand. All the ideas shimmer in the ocean augmented light. A wave comes, and sweeps them away. Ideas lost in the ocean.

Time rattles on like a freight train, humming on the tracks before and after the rail cars flash by. The long threads of very long lives, the short threads of those who vanish before they finished what it seems they had been meant to do, and the rest. You see the reasons with those on the ends, the careless daring before the snip, the stray illness that comes from nowhere, the elderly demise where the senses have been stilled. What then of those cuts in the middle of it all, those lives snipped off like fabric cut in the wrong place, proof of the wild nonsense that is in fact in charge of our lives.