Author: janpriddyoregon

Hotchi-witchi*

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Hotchi-witchi is a Romani word for hedgehog. It’s one of the Romani words Gary uses. I had here a sweet video about a hedgehog, an owl, a phantom horse, and more. It is old and the narration is subtitled and I found it on YouTube but apparently without the creator’s agreement. You will likely still find it there, and if I could figure out which version benefits Yuri Norstein, I’d repost. Ten minutes long and all good. Look for Yuri Norstein—brilliant work!

PAR Yuri Norstein is a Soviet and Russian animator best known for his animated shorts, “Hedgehog in the Fog” and “Tale of Tales.” Since 1981 he has been working on a feature film called The Overcoat, based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol of the same name. According to The Washington Post, “He is considered by many to be not just the best animator of his era, but the best of all time.” He mostly uses cut-out paper. Amazing.

*hotchi-witchi: Mid 19th century; earliest use found in George Borrow (1803–1881), writer and traveller. From English Romani hóčiwiči, probably from the English Romani word corresponding to Welsh Romani určos + a second element of uncertain origin, either an arbitrary extension or perhaps a derivative of Romani veš forest, woods (from Middle Persian wešag forest; Persian beša, (in Iran) bīšae), probably with influence from English.

MISTAKES

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The first time he hit her was three weeks after their wedding. She didn’t leave him, she said, because she could not face telling her mother she was right that he was a mistake. Her husband didn’t like her working, so she worked only when he was at sea and had to quit whenever he was home. He made her return the sofa she bought with money she earned. Every once in a while, he beat her up. It was always her fault. I don’t know if their daughter was aware of those occasional beatings, but she left the country for college and never went back.

Another woman I knew did finally leave her husband, packed a quick bag and drove her children away across two states to her brother’s home. There had been beatings, threats. He didn’t like her working. It was always her fault. She called a crisis line when she came home to find all her work clothing cut into pieces on their bed. The crisis worker told her that was a rehearsal, that she would be what her husband cut next, that she should go someplace he could not find her. She discovered during her divorce that he had put his first wife in the hospital. She hadn’t even known he’d been married before.

A woman I did not know was married to a local doctor. Maybe he beat her, maybe he was unfaithful, maybe he was cruel in some other way. I don’t know. I trust she had her reasons for what she did. She left him, moved away, divorced, and began a new life. She came home from work on a day that was not one of his days to see his children, to find he’d murdered both of her daughters and killed himself. His reasoning was to punish her and leave her with nothing.

For years I tried to understand how anyone could come back from that?

People make mistakes. Maybe you could share a few stories of people who suffered from their mistakes. Maybe you have a story of your own. My marriage has been my salvation, but I have made plenty of mistakes.

Everyone falls. Not everyone gets back up and carries on.

I wrote a novel about a woman who makes a bad marriage, but eventually leaves, suffers unbearably, and then must find a way to walk on through life without her daughter. I’m not certain I could do what my fictional character does, I am not certain I could recover. I wrote the novel to figure out how to do it.

My book, variously titled Everybody’s Mother Dies, The Promised Hour, and Painting Over, is not structured like a conventional novel. The bad stuff happens early and through the middle, but that’s not what the story is about. Everyone’s mother dies, everyone experiences loss, everyone makes mistakes. Mine is a novel about what comes after tragedy. It is the story of a woman taking a day at a time, placing one foot in front of another. Maybe that is where we are all going to be in the next year: figuring out how to get on with our lives.

Have I mentioned recently how much I still miss my mom and dad?

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from REBECCA SOLNIT

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Republicans are standing up to Trump. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late

Rebecca Solnit

Republicans like Gabriel Sterling – who are horrified by the torrent of death threats facing electoral workers – are voicing their outrage very late in the day
‘The measure of our humanity is our ability to care for people unlike us, who are not in our clique, gang or church.’ 

Fri 4 Dec 2020 06.49 EST

The first time I watched Georgia voting systems implementation manager Gabriel Sterling’s furious tirade about the threats against him and his coworkers, I was impressed. Here was a Republican, a self-described conservative, telling off the president and all the people making those threats. “Death threats. Physical threats. Intimidation. They have lost the moral high ground. I don’t have all the words for this because I am angry.” He was clearly furious. He talked about a young contract worker: “There’s a noose out there with his name on it. This kid just took a job and it’s just wrong. I just can’t begin to explain the level of anger I have right now … Mr President, it looks like you probably lost the state of Georgia. Stop inspiring people to commit acts of violence.”

It didn’t take long for me to sour on his indignation. They never had the moral high ground. The death threats and intimidation against him and his co-workers are wrong. However, they’re not the first people to get them but in some sense the last, and if you care about people the president has attacked verbally and urged violence against, you could have started caring during the 2016 campaign. Nothing suggests Mr Sterling did, since he belongs to a party that has supported Trump and, more broadly, campaigns of hate and discrimination for the last 40 years and more. In recent years, Trump has urged police to treat arrestees more roughly, audiences to harass and even rough up journalists and dissidents in his crowds, and is well-known for the 26 credible accounts of sexual abuse and violence with which women have charged him. He’s the guy who pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 2017 for his conviction for disobeying a judge’s order to stop racial profiling.

In Georgia, the far right has finally turned on its own in its furious demand to have an election that serves Trump and the party rather than reflects the will of the people. I admire the integrity of Georgia’s secretary of state and other officials who have, in the face of great pressure to corrupt an election for their own party, refused. It does make you wonder why they’re in that party, though. Because this is the party of intimidation and corruption and voter suppression, the party that undermined a free and fair election in that state two years ago. And because the measure of our humanity is our ability to care for people unlike us, who are not in our clique, gang, church, on our team, side, who are not our color or our kin and who are not near to us in spatial distance as well as in affinity.

That generosity is evident in the medical workers risking their own lives to care for patients with Covid-19, including many who don’t believe they have the disease and didn’t take precautions against it. It’s in the Auntie Sewing Squad, which has sewn more than a hundred thousand cloth masks to distribute to frontline, vulnerable and devalued groups from farmworkers to former prisoners. It’s present in the activists and organizations defending refugees, including the children put in cages and separated from their parents by the Trump administration. It’s present in the work of the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, the Sunrise Movement, the housing rights advocates and activists demanding police and prison reform. It was present in the demonstrations this summer in response to the police murder of George Floyd.

All these things the Republican right has opposed. The war against empathy is always a war against the imagination, against that expansion of feeling to care about others. There’s another kind of expansion, through science and natural history or direct engagement, to understand the systems that connect us, our inseparability from other species, the climate, the environment, and Republicans have waged war on that too, in search of their apotheosized individualism as radical selfishness.

If you care about nooses as threats or actual murder weapons, you have a lot of nooses to care about, especially in the south.

This summer several Black men were found hanging from trees across the country, in cases police ruled were suicides and many believed were lynching murders; similar cases happened in recent years in Georgia. In 2016, 22-year-old New Jersey resident Michael George Smith Jr. was found hanging in Piedmont Park in Georgia. Another Black man was found dead in public by hanging in Georgia the year before. 

If you care about threats more generally, you could have cared about the threats against a Pickens county, Georgia, school superintendent for implementing a trans-inclusive bathroom rule at local schools in 2019; they were his justification for reversing the decision. Trans students paid the price. Just before the 2018 election, in which Stacey Abrams was defeated by Brian Kemp, back when the Georgia election system didn’t seem so uncorrupted, she too faced threats. The Root reported, “One of the merry band of bigots that came to the event to harass and threaten Abrams was James J Stachowiak, a multiple convicted felon who regularly posts videos instructing his viewers to shoot black people on sight.” Brian Kemp, then the Georgia secretary of state competing for the governorship with Abrams, posed during the campaign with Stachowiak while he was wearing a T-shirt reading “Allah is not God and Mohammed is not his prophet.” And it wasn’t just threats. Ahmaud Arbery was shot to death by white men in Brunswick, Georgia, this February, while out jogging: not a hanging but definitely a lynching. Racial killings, police killings, domestic-violence homicides, mass shootings are some of the violence that runs through the fabric of this nation.

Mr Sterling was apparently silent on all of this until the dogs turned on him. He made me think of the famous words by the German pastor Martin Niemoller after the second world war, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist,” and on and on about who he did not speak out for, “then they came for me.” Then they came for Gabriel Sterling. Who was granted police protection and had the safety and standing to speak out for himself.

OPENING FRIDAY

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A few of my handwoven shawls will be on sale at the Hoffman Gallery in Manzanita beginning this week. The show also includes work by other artists: ceramics by Barbara Temple Ayres, paintings by Lisa Sofia, and fiber arts by Kyla Sjogren. 
Hoffman Gallery December Show
Open Fridays through Sundays | December 4-27 | 1:00-4:00pm
Free and open to the public
Hoffman Center for the Arts | 
594 Laneda Avenue | 
Manzanita, Oregon 97130
phone 503 368-3846
I weave three quite differently colored shawls on each warp, about 23″ x 70″ each. Each warp has many shades, tints, and hues. The weft, too, is widely variable. Altogether, I use at least a dozen yarns in each shawl, mostly handpainted merino wool with some hand dyed handspun yarns of merino and silk and alpaca sometimes.

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WE MET A DEER

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments 
We Met a Deer

 We met a deer beside the wooded trail 
 over the cape and east of the highway. 
 I used to walk that way with my boys 
 when they were young and eager. 
 It is a long walk for a five year old. 
 Miles away. 

 Was it even possible to walk home 
 the way we’d come? We never did. 
 We returned north on the highway 
 and through the tunnel, a scary path 
 for any age. By then we were exhilarated, 
 high on adventure and adrenaline, and eager 
 to get home. 

 The deer was afraid in her forest. She stood 
 silent, still, breathing the same air we held 
 in our chests. She willed us not to see.
 We stood still, silent, on the narrow trail 
 above her. We watched, holding breath. 
 We had been climbing for only a short time, 
 up the north slope among alder trees, 
 a lighter green than the spruce and hemlock 
 we would find higher still. 

 There is no leveling off 
 on that early path, 
 it is all up, then steeply down, 
 always up on the right 
 as we climb. Moss, ferns, mud, 
 the dripping moisture. 
 Then the Dark Fortress. 
 Here at the crest, the land 
 slopes steeply downhill 
 on our right. Dry. The path 
 nearly level. Evergreens 
 grow darkly close together, 
 like a crowd of giants’ legs, 
 like a maze of massive pillars 
 grown black and silent. 
 We are near the ocean, 
 a hundred meters above 
 the highway, but while we stand 
 and listen, we hear nothing. 
 The ground is thirsty here
 and deep in duff, the dead 
 needles of the spruce 
 and hemlock trees, dropped 
 a thousand million times, 
 over a thousand seasons. 
 Silent. 

 The deer stood silent as if 
 her stillness might make her safe. 

 And then she turned her head,
 was gone.

 We moved on ourselves. We climbed 
 and counted mushrooms. We walked up 
 and up and up past creeks and perching birds 
 and then through darkness, quiet, 
 and finally down and down and down 
 and through young alders to pavement 
 again. We had listened for the highway, 
 for the ocean, for the sound 
 of our own footsteps, my little boys 
 and me. Everything so still 
 and far away. Quiet,

 until we are safe at home, and all
 our chatter and heat returns.
 Milk and brownies as reward
 for our long walk. “And we saw 
 a deer,” they say. 

 It was years ago. Perhaps my boys
 would not recall that day. 
 They are grown men and too far away
 for me to ask. 

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GATHER IN POEMS

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Please follow the link in this line to view an hour of poetry.

The Academy of American Poets offered an event of poets reading their favorite poems by other poets. Joy Harjo hosted the hour and over four thousand people logged on the hear them live. You can listen my clicking the link in the caption. The meme above is merely a screenshot.

Without Poetry, we lose our way.

—Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate & Academy of American Poets Chancellor (2019– )
Spring Morning

When it is cold enough at night,
spring's strawberries are sweeter
in the morning.

In the morning I woke before
the sun blushed all across
east and west, a gathering 

warmth slid around the Cape
and over Tillamook Head. 
Before hard day pushed past,

pink dawn had trailed her fingers
all round the sky. In the morning 
I bent to berries'

green tipping over into red.
In that morning, red juice 
ran down his chin.

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Even though I’ve already made the herbed dressing, wild rice and mushroom casserole, twice baked potatoes, cranberry bread, pumpkin pie, I still have to make the Waldorf salad and roast the Brussels sprouts. I bought a wild fillet of sockeye salmon. We will eat flesh this day, our only seafood or meat of the year. I will pan-poach with lemon, garlic, butter, and wine. Or maybe with soy sauce, ginger, toasted sesame oil, and garlic . . . Gary seems to find it funny.

Anyway, I prepared most of this post a couple of days in advance because I didn’t want to be too busy. The holiday cards are all addressed to go out on Monday. I mean to slip handwritten notes into a couple of them. (I always mean to do that and never do.) A few gifts going to people far away are waiting to be wrapped and boxed for mailing. On Sunday I deliver a dozen shawls to the gallery in Manzanita. We have not driven there even once this year!

This morning I found an email from a small yarn company that has gone completely, and successfully, online this year. They offered a long list of of thank-yous to many specific people. The list ended with thanking their customers, like me. But it was the first block of thank-yous that led me to save the email in my covid folder: “Thank you to our fellow taxpayers, Congress, the SBA, and Columbia Bank for loans and grants. Thanks to Washington State for health safety cautions and unemployment benefits, and to the Kitsap Economic Development Council for weekly seminars on how to cope with COVID.” They are optimistic about their future. “Because of you, we are back on our feet, getting stronger, and feeling more determined than ever to make this a 100-year company. Only 80 more years to go.”

Well, I feel gratitude too. Thank you here to a great many people who read my blog, who respond to particular posts, ideas, and questions.

Most of the people I have known in my life have given me something good to keep. Just among my teachers I treasure studio skills and experiences from Del Hansen and Bob Gee when I was still a girl, and thoughtful perspective from Darlene Sherrick and James May, and serious artistic growth with Patti Warashina and “Jack” Marshall and Howard Kottler. They changed my life. Sherrick chose me for Honors History. Harriet Koenig stepped in three times to turn my life: a Design class, a conference, my first teaching job. Thank you.

You are probably avoiding the news, but an architect designed a prank Trump website, and this page is my favorite: https://djtrumplibrary.com/portfolio-item/tax
Happy Thanksgiving! Humor is back!

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‘CHRISTMAS PARTY’

/ janpriddyoregon / 19 Comments

In the 1980s and 90s, we hosted an Open House on the Sunday before Christmas. For weeks I would make and freeze holiday cakes and appetizers. We cleaned house and invited neighbors, co-workers, and friends. No alcohol was served, which is probably why nothing awful ever happened. Well, there was the incident with the dog . . .

A full-size Dundee Cake from another year, served with whipped cream

We stopped throwing these parties after the year both my brother and mother failed to attend. It seemed sad to work so hard if my local family couldn’t be bothered.

But I am retired now and I love any excuse to bake. We had talked about reigniting the tradition this year, but then, you know, this pandemic.

No gatherings here or in Portland for Thanksgiving. The up side of this is that I do not have to avoid the foods people do not or cannot eat. I can cook with gluten, eggs, dairy, nuts. I could make my spiced carrots. My pumpkin pie can include cream. There was an article in The New York Times this week about traveling and arriving exhausted and still having to cook, about adjusting to individuals’ preferences and dietary needs, and about having to eat multiple Thanksgiving feasts with each partner’s family. (Gary and I did that until we moved to Oregon.) Apparently other women have found the same silver lining. Less work, less stress when it’s just the two of you. Articles have acknowledged that holiday expectations are especially hard on women, and offered all sorts of suggestions about easing into a lockdown Thanksgiving: cook everything but in smaller amounts for two, cook the one thing you like best, cook nothing and order take-out, or reheat something frozen or just drink.

My solution was different. I am cooking a complete meal in easy stages. One dish a day. I made the wild rice and mushroom casserole a few days ago and we’ve eaten half of it. The rest is for tomorrow. I made twice-baked potatoes with cheese, and we’ve sampled that too. Yesterday I made my regular vegetarian herbed dressing using my own sourdough bread cubes (thank you again, Mary Jo and Dale), celery, onion, parsley, herbs from the garden, homemade stock, and cranberries. We had some of that for dinner last night. I might bake two loaves of cranberry bread this afternoon, but at least the pumpkin pie. (The Delicata squash I am using for the filling was roasted and puréed earlier too.) The trick will be keeping Gary out of the pie—pumpkin pie is the holiday dish he’s most fond of.

Stretching out the Thanksgiving feast preparation has been relaxing. I enjoy cooking, but it’s a lot of work for just one meal. We have enjoyed the Startbefores even more than the Leftovers in past years. It means that tomorrow I will make the apple salad with dates and walnuts first thing in the morning and we’ll have some for breakfast, and later roast Brussels sprouts for the big meal. I only have to reheat everything else.

The next holiday is Hanukah beginning 10 December, and we will burn candles. I was afraid I’d given away all the apricot jam, but after my initial panic, I found there is still one jar for the rugelach.

Then Christmas. The cards are more than half-addressed. I will miss not having Prissy’s wreath on the door, but we have lights and the just-for-show fake tree can go up soon after Thanksgiving. We are not buying a cut tree for the first year ever. (Even during the Big Mess when Gary and I, our two preschool children, and six dogs camped in 500 square feet for nine months including Christmas, we put up a tree.) My collection of clippy glass birds will stay in their boxes. The Swanson-Vance flying animals will hang on the pre-lit white paper “birch” tree from Costco. Just this once.

Another of Gary’s favorites is a Dundee cake, traditional for Boxing Day. My dried fruits—three kinds of raisins, pineapple, mango, and cherries—are soaking in rum as I type this. It only needs freshly grated lemon and orange peel. (I fear it will not be as good as last year when I used Scotch and home-candied orange rind.) There will be no one here to share that rich cake, so I plan to make us a six-inch round, which is still too much for two people.

In recent years our sons and their families have come for Twelfth Night in January. That’s not happening this season either, at least not as a physical get-together.

We are planning Jitsi or Zoom group meetings with family. Gary and I might watch Home for the Holidays, and certainly we will watch When Harry Met Sally. We will not stay up till midnight on New Years Eve—we almost never do. We will manage fine because we have remembered to tell people we love them. They might not be in the room, but there is room in our hearts,

FOR THE LONGEST TIME

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Canadian friends sent us this in appreciation for my photos of the local Cooper’s hawk.

I completed weaving the Olive warp—three distinctly different shawls, none of which read olive and one of which does not read green at all. Now my studio space is a wreck, but if I wrap gifts, bind the last two quilts (and find a place to put the stack of six, and get the most recent one to Linda, which won’t be until January), and invest quality time in sorting and tidying, all will be okay.

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FALSE EQUIVALENCE

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Gary’s upstart crow who hangs out with the gulls at the creek is front and center. Behind is a juvenile and a nearly adult gull. One juvenile gull is still weep-weeping to be fed every morning as we walk north.

Rebecca Solnit has a new essay about the false-fairness strategy of trying to meet bigoted, science-denying, narrow, and Trump-won-the-election fantasy halfway. “On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway: Why Is It So Hard for Democrats to Act Like They Actually Won?” Patience and kindness are one thing; pretending that we can find reasonable compromise with a dangerous minority, maybe not so much. Especially since only the left—the majority that won the White House—even tries.

There is no reasonable halfway between truth and bogus claims. We should stop pretending that there is such a place. Sometimes, however much some people want believe it, a lie is just a lie.

(I used to think that accusations of “Nazi” were overblown and unfair. Then I paid more attention to the signs, actions, and words of Proud Boys and other white supremacist groups. Are cries of “Nazi” unreasonable? No, they aren’t.)

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

—Rebecca Solnit

It is worse to be racist than to be called a racist. It is worse to be a misogynist than to be called out for sexism. It is worse to experience bigotry than to point a finger at the persons doing the oppressing. And climate change is happening whether we want to admit it or not. Truth is truth; fact is fact.

It’s a simple concept.

In the mean time, the State of Oregon has forbidden meetings of more than six people and two households and forbidden unnecessary travel, particularly out of state. There are five cars with out-of-state plates and more than ten people in the rental north of us. The last time I contacted the owners directly, they called me an f—ing b—. (Except that it was said many times without euphemism. Even after I tried to be “nice.”) The last time I went directly to the people offending (big beach fire during a high fire-danger burn ban) I got chewed out over the phone for that too. (From my point of view it was their job to apologize to me for failing to run their business according to law regarding short term rentals in my residential neighborhood.) I’ll get in trouble for complaining to the source.

But should I do as I was told: “shut up and go in your house” and pretend that this is okay? That they have a reasonable position that I should try to understand? Unless I want to be threatened, I should be quiet because their money trumps my community? I should pretend that laws apply only to other people rather than to them and only when those laws are convenient, because since they are Americans and do not consider themselves criminals, they get to do whatever they like?

Is that any way to live? Or is it just another lie of convenience and elitism over fact?

But I am not alone in my confusion.

“We [historians] pride ourselves in saying, ‘Don’t worry, this has happened before,’ or, ‘Worry, this has happened before,’ ” said Jeffrey A. Engel, the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “Right now, if all your historians can say is, ‘We are in entirely uncharted waters,’ I don’t even know how the rest of that sentence ends.”

—The Washington Post

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HOW TO BE

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If you, like me, cried every time you watched the brilliant video of “How to Be Alone,” there’s more. But in case you haven’t, here is that video collaboration between poet Tanya Davis and filmmaker Andrea Dorfman, the one I shared with students more than ten years ago.

Maybe I’m an easy crier, but this one does it every time. So does the new one. Good cries.

Gary and I went out for a quick walk this morning. Then Gary came in because he was expecting the exterminator and a plumber. He’d worked on the kitchen sink for several hours without unplugging it. He used the plunger marked “sink” and removed the trap. No luck. Somehow this has been a crazy year for all sorts of reasons. Months ago a friend said the pandemic was only an inconvenience for us, but Gary and I know people who have been sick and who have died, so while we are not essential workers facing contagion every day (more praise to those brave souls) and we do not actually suffer under lockdown—we have one another, we have our walks, and we are retired—it feels like something more than an “inconvenience.”

We have ordered one take-out meal since March (and not again—too much trust and people who eat restaurant meals are statistically more likely to become sick), we have been to Portland three times (once for a root canal, once to deliver something, and once to pick up a painting), shop for groceries every two or three weeks, and we pick up our mail only every few days. I do not miss movies in theaters, despite the Big Screen. (And Queen’s Gambit on Netflix surprised me by proving better than any theatrical movie I have seen in the past few years.)

Most of what is missing is not missed. But there are gaps. I miss live events. I miss actual people. I miss visiting my old high school and the teachers, who would be in a new building on a fancy new campus but local schools are virtual. I miss the Farmers’ markets and shopping in stores and hugging my grandchildren and eating chili rellenos from The Stand. I have not seen my brother in thirteen years. I miss him sometimes, but he is completely out of contact. Loved ones are divorcing and in therapy—the therapist says there have been a lot of separations during the pandemic, that it is “not uncommon these days.”

But the cards we ordered last month say “joyful” on the front and we have reasons to feel joyful.

Our family is all well, our closest friends are well, friends who are working are mostly doing it virtually and staying healthy. My friend in cancer treatment has completed treatment, her health outlook is excellent, and she has enough hair to brush! We have been able to afford the unusual bills from exterminators, plumbers, electricians, and so forth. We paid our property taxes from our checking account, which held an obscene amount of money because we did not go anywhere or spend money on anything for most of the past nine months. The paintings—those extravagant and out-of-character expenses—are a pleasure and not a regret. They are a glancing vacation each time I pass them. We are lucky that the house is large enough to allow us to spend time away from one another, and even more lucky for our morning walks and evenings together. We have accomplished several major tasks—Gary fixed the drainage on the south edge of the property (a huge task) and I completed a ridiculous amount of weaving and piecing. We attended a virtual wedding. I heard from former students. Adrian sat twenty-five feet away from me—both of us masked—and told me about his life.

There are things we cannot do—visit people we love or any other country—but we are fine. An abundance of caution.

My grandmother had a half-full quart jar of black walnut meats in her freezer when she died in 1978. It was still there when we moved into this house in 1979. The jar remained unloved for a few more months—moved to one corner and then another till I needed the freezer space they took up—and then I opened the jar and tasted them. Incredible.

Thanksgiving will be just the two of us, but I ordered two pounds of shelled black walnuts on the internet.

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