Gary standing in the path he built (and has had to rebuild several times) through the rocks. We hope we will be able to turn the loungers around and safely enjoy a 4th of July fire on the sand. (We half hope someone takes these lounge chairs—one of which we found.) That’s a bit of beach trash in Gary’s hand, a length of plastic pipe he carries to poke at the sand.

Today is halfway through 2020 and it’s a good place to pause and take stock. For many human beings this has already been a tragic year on so many levels, so I feel I need to access my situation.

We are both retired so we’re doing fine as far as finances go. That is, unlike so many who are without income such as one son and both daughters-in-law, we still have Social Security. Everyone in our immediate family is healthy but several have continued working in essential services. We have been isolating since 10 March with one exception: our younger son and his two children visited for a weekend sixteen days ago. We are still healthy because they are still healthy, masking and taking other precautions. Other than that, we have the habit of weekly grocery shopping with the occasional extra trip out to pick up mail or deliver mail to the nearest mailbox.

At the beginning of 2020, I set a couple of goals that are still valid. We gave up seafood from our diet. In six months, no seafood, again with one exception: there is fish sauce in my pantry and I made an umami-rich sauce that I’ve used in bowls with fresh veggies and pasta or rice.

The other goal was to purchase no more than eight items of clothing the entire year. I have bought three garments from Eileen Fisher on steep discount (more than 60% off). EF is a highly responsible company and I am glad to support them. Do the two hair clips from eBay count as clothing? Does the replacement headband for the one I’d worn since the 90s but lost on the beach count as clothing? Either three or six purchases, either I am doing fine or this is not looking promising for the second half of the year.

In the past four months I have cooked angelhair pasta at least a couple dozen times (a simple one-pan meal cooked with vegetable stock and with greens, onions, and/or cheese), baked a couple dozen loaves of bread, made gibassier and waffles and spring onion pancakes. I have made curries and vegetable stews and spiced grains. I discovered that a rich soup can be made with leeks and water and salt and pepper—simple as that. Yum. We have eaten pounds of broccoli and uncounted bags of various greens.

Last month I killed my sourdough starter, but I have grown a new one. It tastes fine once it’s baked, but the smell is rather alcoholic than sour. That’s because the “All-Purpose Unbleached Flour” from Costco has barley mixed with the hard red wheat—I didn’t even notice until a local friend and I were comparing notes on our sourdoughs and she said her sourdough had gone rather alcoholic too. A step shy of beer, but . . .

One of my best discoveries is organic miso available at one of the stores we shop once a month. I now have both white and red miso in the fridge! Also, salad greens sauté well with pasta.

My root canal is still sore. I gained back the four pounds I lost. I am not running. sigh

Three packages that we ordered in May have not arrived and we assume now all three are lost. Gary’s CD of Estonian music and my handmade doll from Russia both vanished somewhere in the Baltic. They left their country of origin and never arrived anywhere at all. And the painting—Oh, that painting I love so much—UPS lost track of it at their hub outside Chicago and has issued a refund to the shipper. The refund has been forwarded to me, and I will do the responsible thing and set it aside toward our property taxes.

This year, I have ordered eleven skeins of yarn. I use fourteen for each warp and that much again in weft. This means that the four seven warps I have put on the loom since January have yielded nineteen and a half shawls so far. I am generally still weaving past 7pm. After six months work and subtracting expenses, selling them all might yield a couple weeks or even a month of minimum wage pay, but who’s counting?

I pieced the top and back of a quilt that is waiting its turn to be quilted.

Butterfly Fontanelle has gone through revision three times and I am halfway through reading it aloud again. Tiny changes this time, little corrections but since I am still finding things to repair, change, and move, I will need another edit when I finish this one. I am always in too much of a hurry to send out work. Did it this time too, but I have sent it to a slow responder that does not allow simultaneous submissions, which will ensure I do not send it out again until winter.

This morning I caramelized my last two onions to top macaroni and cheese made with the last of the Stilton, mozzarella, Parm, and with a scattering of dried cranberries because our taste has shifted to sweet and savory and salty all at once. I had only two cups of milk until our next shopping trip so cooked twelve ounces of pasta. It’s in the oven.

At our next shopping trip everyone in the state is required to be masked. Yeah, July 1st! (And about time.) But neither the local sheriff and nor the parks department plan to do a thing about what happens on our beach on the 4th. The one time we tried calling the fire department about a beach fire that was over twenty feet high (absolutely not exaggerating—it flew up another ten feet), the volunteer fire department dismissed our concern. The local millionaires are allowed. “With the rich and mighty, always a little patience,” according to Jimmy Stewart’s character in Philadelphia Story.

I read the news every day—NYT, WaPost, NPR, Guardian—even on the days I swear I will take a break. I study covid-19 statistics. Gary reads different news’ sources. Between the two of us we cover the world. Apparently we are much better informed than the President of the United States. That’s because we read. I have read 34 books so far this year, including nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and novels. Streaming (no cable) we are currently particularly fond of watching Midnight Diner (again) and we finished Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix, even though Phil eats so much meat! Detectorists remains Gary’s all time favorite. On recommendation of a friend, we tried again to watch it and decided we liked Shitz Creek after all. We look forward to Monty Don and Gardeners World on Friday nights. We paid to stream two current release movies and they each had their good points, but we’ve found better distraction and information and drama via our subscriptions.

The hall where I meant to paint is not finished, but Gary and I are scouring the house for set of essays written by a former student. Gary is not optimistic, but our search will be thorough. I was fond of those essays and kept them and still trust they must be here someplace . . . I hope. In the mean time, searching has forced us both to sort and clean. It wasn’t how we planned to spend the week, but it needs to happen.

There has been a lot of cleaning house going on throughout our nation. Statues of treasonous and racist men are coming down. Men who did nothing for our country other than attack it. Comment on national websites point out that even Benedict Arnold fought for our nation in several important battles, long before turning against our country, and no one celebrates him in a public statue or named a military base after him. Laws are changing. White people are taking long, difficult, honest looks at their own privilege and insisting to themselves and the world that we can do better. As hard as these days are for so many and for so many reasons, this is reason to think we might actually accomplish some good in our nation.

My husband and I still get along fine with one another. We are sad sometimes. We nap too much. We worry about our children and the world. Too much. Half of a year and too much has happened to claim anything except hope. There is hope.

We have rewatched the first seven and a half minutes of the pilot of The Mentalist a dozen times in recent months. “Seriously, it’s not as bad as it looks.” And every time, we laugh.

How could I forget making chutney and two kinds of jam?

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