It's hard to believe that I've been working from home for a month already. I haven't had time to be bored. It turns out that online teaching requires an incredible amount of time for preparation, especially with starting a brand new accelerated class online, so for the first few weeks I was definitely working more hours than I would have been during a normal week. The past few days, because of Easter Break, have felt like my first chance to step away from work for a couple of days, and it's been so nice.
Still, I've been making use of the newfound flexibility of working hours. Sean and I have been walking to Lighthouse Park on any day when it's not raining, and I've (begrudgingly) returned to running there in the morning/afternoon, too. They closed the park entrance to cars, so there's not usually more than a dozen people or so. Often I turn the "corner" onto the beach stretch to see absolutely no one, which is kind of amazing. Turn another "corner" and you see the lighthouse, its comforting, upright bulk silhouetted against blue sky. It gives me genuine pleasure every time it comes into view.
By spending so much time walking around the neighborhood, I've noticed so many things than I would normally have had occasion to pay attention to: the new bird songs, the cute house with a Siamese lounging in the front window, the number of rabbit hutches and chicken coops tucked away in backyards. None of these observations add up to anything, of course, but it's still a pleasure to notice. As someone said on NPR, "we've all become Transcendentalists overnight!"
It seems like everyone is reading books, as we look for ways to not have our eyes on screens all day. Carla told me she's reading Lord of the Rings for the first time, and Sara just finished (though she didn't enjoy) The Beautiful and Damned. So far I've re-read three of Judith Merkle Riley's books (The Serpent Garden, The Master of All Desires, and The Oracle Glass, moving chronologically). I'm not sure what I'll read, or rread next. I pulled Marcus Aurelius' Meditations from the shelf, but more in the rueful "I feel like I should have read this by now" sense than out of genuine interest. I do wish I'd been successful at finding a copy of Barry Lyndon. Rats.
The other development has been sewing! A couple of weeks ago I decided to try making a cloth mask for Sean when he goes to the store, using guidelines the NYTimes had published. Of course, with only shitty thread from a sewing kit and no pins (I had to use bobby pins, which are decidedly not an acceptable substitute), it was slow going, but the mask actually came out great, and I discovered that hand-stitching is pretty relaxing! Then when I went to Jen's this weekend for a social-distancing visit, she gave me her sewing machine and supplies, including good thread, an endless supply of needles and pins, and my mom's old pincushion bracelet. Now, this is an object that I probably would never have recalled the existence of on my own, but I recognized it immediately when I opened the box. My mom wore it all the time when she was sewing, quilting, or otherwise crafting. It's so tiny that it's super snug on my wrist, but it made me so happy to put on! My sister held onto the supplies but has really never used them, so it's possible that most of those pins were exactly where my mom last left them in 2006. Kind of amazing.
Speaking of the passage of time: Wednesday marks 20 years since my dad died, or as we call in this house, "double deathcade." It's hard to conceptualize that 20 years ago I was 14, when it doesn't seem that long ago...
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