A friend traveled to her vacation house, another marched for justice, and our younger son and his children are here for the weekend.

Most of my yarn order arrived in the post office, but we will not visit before Monday or Tuesday. The website promoting my fifty-year high school reunion has not been updated for months. The painting I bought early in May is still lost by UPS. So is Gary’s CD from Estonia and the doll from Russia. I discovered that UPS does not acknowledge or search for lost packages until and unless you absolutely insist. Who knew?

Just now I am not running, not walking on my sore knee, not weaving or piecing a quilt. I baked bread yesterday and made sticky buns and a vegetarian chili. My browser is infected with malware that interferes with searches. I finished reading one of Dorothy Sayers’ novels and read half of The Washington Post‘s Alexandra Petri’s satirical essay collection, Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why. Though I have enjoyed her work for years, some of these pieces have been more depressing than funny.

What has been heartening is the acknowledgement of white privilege by virtually every business that I visit or that sends me emails: Eileen Fisher, Apartment Therapy, Webs, Churchmouse, and dozens more. Black Lives Matter, and I started paying attention to who was posting Covid messages on websites because that too.

The public high school where I taught for decades celebrated the 2020 graduation in a large municipal parking lot, which I know only from local online newspapers that Gary reads. There have been no updates that I can find on the district website page or even the “Covid 19/School Closure Information” since April. Instruction continues virtually, without any comment from administrators on the website. Their few covid notes are buried pretty thoroughly. (Maybe if we do not look, it will go away?) The Portland Public Schools, by contrast offer plenty of information and invitation for comment about computer use, hotspots, reopening, and so forth, right on their front page. The Montessori school my grandchildren attend in Portland features no comment about covid at all on their website. Probably if I could log on I might find something; for me there is nothing. Twenty-five thousand a year is a lot to pay for an education of two young children that, just now, the Portland Public School system seems to be managing better online. Daily classes and activities, as opposed to a few hours a week.

And I have set Petri’s essays down to reread the next in Dorothy Sayers’ series,  Strong Poison. This is the one that introduces Whimsey’s love interest, Harriet Vane. He is immediately smitten. She is interesting and interested. They cannot help themselves. Mutual attraction.

That is the way it was for Gary and I back in spring of 1969. I was sitting on the kitchen counter of the Edmonds Unitarian Church prior to a dance when Gary came in. He had a golden mustache, round gold-rimmed glasses, and his hair touched his collar. He wore Levis and a cotton shirt with a pattern of tiny flowers. (He was 1A at the time and about to fail his draft physical. “June fifth, 1969. It was a Thursday.” He celebrates that day every year.) I thought: He’s too old for me, but he’s gorgeous. My friend Barb told me I had to hear Gary Anderson play guitar—Gary was a master finger-picker. He had an exhibit of paintings up at the church too. Watching me sweep the church after the event, Gary asked a friend who I was, and that boy said nice things about me. I was sixteen and Gary was nineteen. It turned out we had many friends in common, and we would continue bumping into one another at concerts and LRY and other events over the next months. Neither of us were partnered up, but both of us were eager to be half of a couple. In August we kissed.

It doesn’t often happen that a teenage romance sticks. Ours did.

Optimism is risky sometimes. It can be downright foolish. There is an element of arrogance involved in the way some Americans have approached this pandemic and their own unacknowledged privileges, as if they are too special to become sick, as if they may take unnecessary risks with impunity or even to deny that there is any risk at all. Some carried guns into legislative buildings—do we even remember that was happening before the murder of a black man suspected of passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill? Why did it take until now for people to recognize the paradox of naming United States military bases after sometimes even vile and incompetent men who took arms against the United States and failed? How are peaceful marchers in Lafayette Square more of a threat than armed people in the balcony overlooking a state legislative body. Despite knowing people who have died, my schizophrenic brother-in-law believes the pandemic is a hoax. He’s mentally ill so he has an excuse. What is the excuse of those white men insisting states “open back up now”?

On the other hand, living without hope is probably worse. We plant vegetables we expect to consume two or three months from now. My grandchildren and their dad have followed rules about social distancing and masking since March. Is it foolish optimism that brings them here or a reasonable risk for love?

Today Ruby and I will bake a cake for her dad’s birthday tomorrow.

Under that mass of rainclouds in the image above is the end of a rainbow; above those clouds is blue sky. It’s always there even when we cannot see it.