Category Archives: Telling Stories

COVID-19 Era Pages: Doors and Windows, Keys and Funnels

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” ― Mary Oliver

Doors and windows. Life and time. A chance remark and a door opens; stories fall out.

Farmhouse, windmill shadow, trees and barn. © Moo Dog Press

Light and shadows; windmill, trees, time. Near South Windsor, CT.

Can I call you back? Planting in Connecticut, handheld technology and communication.

Like an Etch-A-Sketch toy, each line connects and together reveal the mechanism behind it all.

Twitter is like a raging river of news, thoughts, wishes, quotes, aspirations, information (choose the right sources), images, information. Choose. Business, technologies, history. Books, authors. Some commentary will fire up outrage; funnel that energy to write. As the words flow, pivot. Produce.

What are you willing to leave unwritten, undone, unsaid? Write about that. Those stacks of photographs in a box with no context — but you know some of the people and places they depict? Write about them, put names to faces and places. Who took the photographs, give them credit for the work. How did these pieces of time come to be in your possession?

Windows and doors can open both ways, present to past and on to the future.

Books. Recommendations from those who read, read voraciously and look for more. Writer Ed Yong is exceptional reading. He shares books, authors, resources along with insight about COVID-19, medicine, science.

Worthy follows (life is for learning):

As a season shifts from snow squalls in May to sun and green pollen showers, trees shedding as they leaf out, there is news of Waterbury Regional Food Hub. Garden centers busy as people want beauty and food to grow. Social distancing and masks on, new rules for life to protect all. Your freedom ends where mine begins; so measures stand and must be respected. Having been a regular visitor to a healthcare center where elderly and those recovering from major surgeries lived, life can be fragile. Once you've seen how easily it can be lost, eyes are opened.

Then a visit to the emergency veterinarian center on a Sunday morning; a dog immobile. New protocols in place; call from the parking lot to provide information, know the cost and insurance steps. Then coordinate handing a pet in pain to a vet tech. Wear your mask. Others are here with pets that need help; each going is through a battle. Science and medical knowledge, testing finds solutions. Diagnostics invented by someone and a business that provides those tests. There are parallels to the ongoing virus and solutions by science and medicine that go through my mind on the return home with my dog held in arms, seatbelt on. Medicine given, there is relief. She's resting. Each day is a little better. Science and medicine, human efforts to help others seen in real time.

Writing prompt. Write promptly.

Having lived in many places across the USA: Northwest Florida. Texas. New Mexico. Southwest Virginia, then a winter in the western corner of the state, a place of great natural beauty where author Donald McCaig chose to live on a farm by a river. Old apple trees, mountains, walks and cattle on pasture, hollows and farms. Airstrips, fences. Another chapter in Tidewater Virginia, where history abounds and groundwater is inches below the surface. Mosquitoes that must be seen to be believed, and Walter Reed's birthplace. Seeing a live thread of a heartworm (a filarial worm) leap from a (deceased) young cat's heart during an autopsy. Why did this healthy feline collapse and die, a veterinarian wanted to know, and at the time as a vet tech assisting him, found out in the days before cats were known to contract heartworm disease. “Did you see that?” he asked. I nodded, yes. (By the way, heartworm disease is transmitted by mosquitoes; literally clouds of them in Tidewater Virginia.)

Down the road from the hospital, Civil War-era earthworks in parks, interpretive signs that led to more reading history to understand the region; books, maps. Yorktown, double and triple layers of human stories. Connecting Wethersfield in Connecticut to this coastal national park. Williamsburg and folk art. Walks, drives, rides. The world turned upside down, the field where the surrender happened. Alongside my father, visiting the NPS center and his asking “Do you think that really is the outer covering for Washington's tent?” Ever the skeptic, looking at the covering preserved in a controlled environment. A stop in the gift shop for a book about Yorktown, which he inscribed and said “Some day it will make you sad to see that.” He was right; the time between his words and the sadness were short indeed. He was gone from this life months later, sleep he slipped from life, a shock to all but him. It is good not to know the future, but the best way to spend time is like it's running away. Decide what is important and act upon that decision.

Southern Maryland. Upstate New York. TDY travel to Arkansas, Louisiana, places with local news and local ads unlike any other locale.

Doors and windows.

Discovering there was no flood control for the Roanoke River as it roared out of its banks and destroyed much of what was in its path. That libraries could be private and charge membership fees, limit how many books could be checked out. Don't take anything for granted. Learning, learning. Reading. Listening, asking questions. Work in so many sectors; that would pay dividends being a writer. Drinkable clean water is not a given. Sulphur, iron, a dug well close to the surface. No fluoride in the water and seeing stains and pitting of teeth because of that. Town dumps that were picked clean of any possible recyclable. Seeing a fist fight between middle-aged women over who had picking rights to any beer and soft drink cans. Chiggers, ticks, fire ants. Mantises the size of birds, being chased by one under lights near a convenience store. Each place has pluses and minuses. But to return to Connecticut, and see a familiar place with new eyes. Rich soil. Stone walls, geological time. Lilacs and apple blossoms. Transplants. Libraries, interlibrary loans, research potential in all historical society holdings and collections. Medicine and science. Instead of an hour's drive or more one way, minutes. Interstates to Boston, trains to New York. All on hold for now; there is a virus storm that has changed life as we knew it. Adapt and shift. Foreward.

“Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?” — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mud dog, May garden.

To be continued.

Resources page (formerly for events) linked here. Previous pages about dandelion wine (a lock-down experiment in progress, updates to be shared as how the fermentation process goes); elderberries, PPP, and COVID-19-era life.

“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” ― Susan Sontag

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