Is it still April?

Good fucking grief.

It feels like we've been in solitude for six or seven months!

    Oh yeah.  That's because we HAVE been quarantined since people started putting pumpkins and bales of hay on their porches in preparation for Halloween back in the fall of 2019.....decades and decades ago. Jolynn's cancer diagnosis with her low white cells shunned us from society long before it was popular to wear masks and hide out in the house.  I'm not complaining.....just sayin'.  

            I want to frolic at a jazz festival on the river with thousands of people 
                 waiting in line at the same food booth with me, cutting in line, 
                           dancing in line, coughing freely into the air! 
         
I know, I took it one step too far.  But the sentiment bears acknowledgement, no?  

His disappointment that I wasn't a boy pretty much shadowed my young life.  My parents had five girls before they suddenly had 2 boys.  The same doctor delivered each of the daughters and my dad told the story of his somewhat humorous yet also very sincere response to the doctor to "take her back and bring me a boy".  Parents could get away with that kind of joking around back in the sixties. Today, they would be scorned and stoned on Facebook before they could even get to the hospital parking lot.  So I reluctantly had to learn things I really didn't want to know about when I was growing up as the oldest of 7 hooligans in a bizarre family. That's a whole blog onto itself.  I learned to drive a tractor when I was 3 and I could change cloth diapers with real sharp pins when I was 5 because I had to pitch in and earn my keep.  Approaching learner's permit age, I was given lots of leeway to practice driving - that's the good news.  The bad news is that I had to drive my dad's big truck with a huge truckbed and a stick shift.  I earned a driver's license the hard way but I wouldn't have it any other way.  I remember my dad telling me "When you're driving, always assume the other drivers are assholes" and I took him at his word.  That's why I'm a damned good driver to this day.  

We had to sneak out out of our home in Portland this morning to drive an hour for a few urgent errands.  They were URGENT, don't yell at me.  I drove my car, Jolynn drove her truck.  It was blissful.  As I was driving on the back roads and on the highways to the countryside, I remembered my dad's words and I was thinking that I had to assume not only that people were assholes, but also that they had the CoVid 19 virus. It was nerve wracking...all of those infected assholes driving around me, out to get me. 

I wonder if they were all thinking the same thing about me.

Aside from urgent errands (yes, urgent!) in town, we also had to go to our farm house that will be going on the market one day soon.  We ate our packed lunch on the porch with the pups and the rain.  Quite lovely.  I was thinking about my grandma.  Thirty five years ago I visited her at her trailer not too far from Pittsburgh.  She had a home when I was little but she had moved into a trailer at some point while I was off being a teenager.  Her place was always filled with plants.  This one day, before my daughter was born, she took me inside her cramped kitchen and gave me a tiny little tree in a pot.  The tree was the size of a palm, the palm of a hand.  Go ahead, look at your hand to see how short that tree was on that summer day.  Against all odds, with all of my odd moves, I was able to keep that little tree alive.  It now sits in the carport at the farm house.  It is sheltered because is is a sensitive tree so I have to water it regularly.  

Yes, that's my tree.  See how beautiful she is, growing in the carport!

Like I said, our errands were urgent.  We didn't touch anyone.  We didn't breath in anyone's breath.  We didn't stand next to anyone or wipe our noses on anyone.  

We are safe.  No accidents.  No germs.  No dancing in lines.  No dancing in the streets. 😊

Yet.


                                      Martha and the Vandellas!

                       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdvITn5cAVc