Gary is downstairs talking to our friend Jim. They are discussing the elevated consciousness of a character in Moby Dick. It’s been a long time since I read that novel and I did not love it.

I have left them alone to figure out their meal. There is good homemade chili in the fridge, sourdough bread, cheeses, sauced rice, and fixings for all sorts of food. I will make waffles for breakfast before Jim leaves us and we head off to return samples to Portland.

Gary insisted I take this photo of my project. I have used an inordinate amount of Icelandic vodka but the rhubarb was coming on strong. I figure rhubarb used in cordial is rhubarb not used in tarts. I do love a rhubarb tart, but I am satisfied with one or two each spring.

I am trying to decide on a color to reupholster my mother’s little wing chair. I like linen the color of a paper sack or raffia. Colors of linen called “Linen” or Natural.” I thought a neutral would be pleasing and practical but now am leaning toward something closer to the color of the rhubarb cordial I have been distilling (brewing? creating?). I think a pinkish chair would have made my mother laugh.

So my mother’s chair covered in fabric the color in the neck of these pretty rhubarb bottles? Would Mom think a rhubarb-colored chair ridiculous?

I am still reading Alice Munro, increasingly impressed with how she reveals the error and falsity of stories we tell about others and ourselves. Not lies, but too often the inaccuracy we trust implicitly. We imagine we understand the story of other’s lives or create one of our own. Munro trusts her readers to be smart enough to recognize when we get it wrong. It is Friend of My Youth. I wrote a great deal about that story collection during my MFA program. I wrote my long third term literary analysis essay about just one story after cutting twenty pages involving other stories because I went on and on. It is still too long. I always meant to cut it in half.

But now, reading these stories again, I find what I missed back then, just a few years ago but really a lifetime in dog years. Munro uses limited third and first person point of view to tell the stories while allowing readers to be wiser than the narrator . . . or not.

My thinking seems dulled and slowed by the pandemic, and I notice this in others too. It is harder to do math in my head. When I am faced with an actual person, I have trouble keeping track of conversation. I wonder if the lack of face-to-face interaction is to blame. The stress? But perhaps it is only me and my mind has always been dull and slow—more dulled and slowed as I age?

It is how I feel about the writing I am not doing, the study I am no longer engaged in. Looking back, I think I missed a great deal while I was a student myself. Perhaps I am noticing now only what I missed when I was so very busy trying to teach full time and also complete a degree full time? I feel I made do in those years, sacrificing greater leaps because my attention was so divided. I wish I could have taken more time for myself during my MFA. Public school systems don’t often accommodate the professional passions of teachers anymore. I had to use (was allowed to use) personal days for my residencies. I still feel some resentment that I was not better supported. I think I might have been the only teacher in the district with a master’s degree in my subject rather than in education.

Now my peevishness is showing. How to excuse that? I miss teaching. I miss talking to students. I think I must be a very annoying person these days—too eager to teach people who are already educated. Ha!

Admire the weather.

We are still walking over twenty miles each week, which counts how far we walk from home and back, but not the up-and-down on the rocks searching for treasure. Sometimes we will spend an hour searching a couple hundred yards of rocky shoreline.

These months in isolation, slow and steady, solitary. Most of my days I speak to no one—have spoken to no one other than my husband. He walks out to chat with neighbors, but I do not. Given the chance I will greet people I know on our morning beach walk, but I do not linger and find I am not very social. In truth, I never have been comfortable around people. And yet. And yet for most of my life, for at least forty years I worked with students and relished every moment. I am pleased when I am invited. Invitations have always been rare. I was rarely invited to join theater groups or reading groups or other such social meetings. I have always assumed this was my fault for being socially awkward despite all those years in front of the classroom.

Someone smarter than I am will know immediately why. I only know it’s true. I enjoy the massive flocks of seagulls and the single birds. We see them. Gary speaks to them. They do not like “Kitty-kitty-kitty” because they know he is teasing. But otherwise the birds sometimes talk back to Gary.

Sometimes they walk away.

How is this like searching for sea glass? You must first of all look right at it because it will only rarely catch your attention. You must look right at the bit of glass, but then you must also see that it is there, that tiny glimmer of green, that soft first white, the brown that inexplicably glints ruby-red. You must see it. You must bend over and gather it to you.

It’s not what you look at that matters; it’s what you see.

—Henry David Thoreau