World Turned Upside Down: On the Up Side

Mah Bay-bee!

Husband has the kind of job and profession that mean the stay-at-home orders have had little effect on his day-to-day work habits. He still goes to the office every morning, because foot traffic in a self-employed CPA's office is usually by invitation only. He maintains social distancing and wears a mask so even in my shrieky germ-phobic state of constant panic that causes me to never answer the doorbell, I'm not worried he'll bring the pandemic home with him.

But our New Normal has caused one slight bit of friction: Every day when he comes home from tilting at the tax monsters and slaying the PPP loan requirements, he asks the same question he has asked daily for 36+ years: "So, how was your day today? What did you do?"

In the Old Normal I'd have plenty to talk about. I worked, and I had meetings, and I met with friends for lunch or coffee, and I free-lanced, and I...well, you get the picture. Now I stay at home. Period.

For the first few weeks of lockdown  when he asked me how my day was, and what I did, I stared at him as if I were posing for an I-don't-know-the-answer meme. People, no more!

(Please read the following as if you were Tom Hanks dancing around a fire in Castaway.)

I have made sourdough! 

As a farm girl I have known how to make bread since I was old enough to stand on a stool next to my mother and knead a piece of dough. But despite multiple tries I have never before successfully cultivated my own leavening using only the yeasty particles floating around in the air.

It's a process that is not so much difficult as finicky, requiring persistence and and a certain amount of waste. In other words, it's much like parenting, and for most of my adult life I was spending all my parenting energy trying to keep four boys from throwing rocks at the cars stopped at the stop sign next to our house. (True story.)

Now, though, with all of those rock-throwers staying at their own homes in four different states, I decided I had the time and bandwidth try starting a starter once more.

Friends, raising children to adulthood was a piece of cake compared to the neediness that is a piece of sourdough bread. I had to add a half cup of flour and a cup of lukewarm water every day to a jar of flour paste I kept in the oven with the light on for the precise degree of warmth. Then the instructions called for the half cup of flour and cup of lukewarm water to be stirred into the sullen glop twice a day for several days, long enough that I was quite certain I had somehow ruined the mixture and would be throwing it out. Only the mutters of "feeeeed me" I heard when I opened the oven door kept me going.

But apparently those were the sourdough equivalence of the teenage years because one day I peered in the oven to find that the mixture had matured! It was bubbly, yeasty-smelling, glorious sourdough starter!

In the week since the starter became an actual living presence in my refrigerator I have made crackers with the goop you normally throw away at feeding time:

Yummy, basil-y deliciousness

Then I made pizza dough and topped it with homemade pizza sauce, the final ham left over from Easter (don't clutch your pearls; it had been in the freezer), and fresh pineapple from the produce share program.

You are not wrong that this dough appears to have risen beyond my expectations. It was the deepest deep dish ever, with the crust depth outpacing the toppings by a ratio of about 10:1.

But that was to make up for the only true failure I've had with this recipe, which would be the bread. It looks okay, doesn't it?

That will teach you to judge a bread by its photo, because it was approximately two inches high. I mis-read the instructions and seriously underkneaded the dough, which resulted in such a soft loaf it couldn't rise up and only rose sideways.

And frankly, that could be a description of me after this many days of baking. I'm getting softer and softer, and beginning to rise sideways. But what did I do today? Now when Husband asks that I don't even have to answer.

I just shove something sourdough in his mouth.

World Turned Upside Down: My! What Big Ears You Have!

The original title I had planned for this post was "What I Did During the Pandemic." It would be useful, I thought, to remember what occupied my time during these days of sudden stay-apart. No meetings, no coffee with friends, no work schedule...what in the world did I do?

Well, as we all have discovered, it is quite possible to have meetings, coffee with friends, and work schedule even as we observe the social distancing guidelines. Hello, Zoom! My calendar has proceeded to fill up with appointments that do not require me to comb the back of my hair or worry about a pedicure.

But there also is time for other activities that have fallen off the priorities list for years. One of those activities is puttering around in the yard.

When we moved to Small Town three decades ago, a friend who lived here gave us outstanding real estate advice. "You'll find all kinds of houses, and there's a house there you're going to love," he told us. "Just be aware that there's a slum on every block." We weren't exactly sure what he meant until we began looking in earnest and discovered he was right--the pristine lawn of a a gorgeous Victorian could exist cheek-by-jowl with a lawn overflowing with car carcasses on blocks.

The House on the Corner was somewhere between those two extremes: certainly not pristine, but we did try to keep the cars off the lawn, at least until the Boys were in high school. At that point we had seven cars for six people and every inch of curb space was occupied when everyone was home. The lawn was showing the effects of being on the corner of two drainage streets that spilled across the corner in heavy rains, so nothing was growing except weeds.

We had become the slum on our block.

But then the tide began to turn as the nest emptied and the fledglings took their cars with them. With the help of our genius landscaping guy we've started to push back, one year building up the corner landscaping to divert the floods, last year improving the soil and re-sodding the back yard. The front yard is next on the list, but this year it's still been a riot of dandelions and chickweed.

"But this year I have time to spend in the yard every day!" I crowed to Husband. "I'm going to get rid of all those weeds without getting within six feet of anyone! Plus, it's too early for mosquitoes so I won't even need to use the Off."

That last statement is known as foreshadowing.

Last Thursday, after a refreshing rain the previous night, I happily spent the morning stooped over a dandelion digger, filling a full-sized garbage can with the leafy results. I was tired but happy as I looked at the lawn, still raggedy but less appalling than before.

That's when I came back into the house and looked at my bare forearms and shins.

They were covered with tiny blood spots--what I had thought were harmless clouds of gnats were actually swarms of tiny biting flies, and they had jumped on me like, well, like flies on poop.

Within hours I was a seething mass of itch. Originally I was determined to not scratch, but the gods laughed. Every place that had been touched turned into a hot, torturous welt. My already-substantial ears swelled until they were solid masses, as hard and plastic as Mr. Potato Head's. (Today's illustration is frighteningly true to life, except that I was wearing a shirt, and my mustache hasn't quite reached that stage. Yet.)

It's been three days now since I lost half of my total blood capacity to the gnats. I've learned that while itch creams and Benadryl claim to be effective, cold washcloths are the only remedy that even approach relief. Time also helps; after three days, I'm still covered with welts but I am hopeful I will not actually go insane from the itch.

I may go out and work on the weeds again in a couple of days, but I will be slathered with bug repellent and wearing long sleeves and jeans.

My ears may not be able to survive a beautiful lawn.

World Turned Upside Down: It's About to Get Ugly

I feel as if this post needs to come with some trigger alerts.

Did you ever see a pair of scissors on the edge of the bathroom vanity when you were four years old and think "I wonder how sharp these scissors are? Would they cut hair?" then a few minutes later see the horrified look on your mother's face as she realizes you no longer have a pixie cut, but a demented frankencut that would ruin the family portrait that year?

Did you ever think to yourself "My bangs are really getting on my nerves but the rest of my hair seems to be okay. I'll just trim off a little," then hear your hairdresser say "Don't ever, ever, ever do that again. Ever."?

Did you ever think "How hard could it be to cut boy hair? Let's see, four boys times $15 per cut would save me...Holy cow! $60 a month! I'm rich!" and then have to put up with actual tears when you made them go back to school for the first time?

It will shock you not at all to know that I am the person in all of those scenarios, so if you've had similar experiences it will also shock you not at all to know that in the fifth week of the pandemic beauty parlor shut-down my hair hit the tipping point of driving me crazy. That coincided with finding our old Wahl Homecut system in the sewing room last week, as well as a pack of my mother-in-law's bobby pins that for some unknown reason I had kept when we cleaned out her apartment.

And in spite of my past history with do-it-myself haircuts, that seemed like an omen, because this morning I looked in the mirror and saw this:

Whoops. That was where the trigger alert should have been. Even the Singing Butler's umbrella-holding maid behind me seems to be overcome by...shock? Horror?  My hair, which is thin and fine, is normally cut much shorter and product-ed into a semblance of normal style. But in my defense, because my hair is thin and fine and I'm not seeing anyone except Husband, my hair style technique has become "Don't look into mirrors." Also in my defense, this was post-workout and pre-shower.

I've trained for this moment for years, though, by watching countless Facebook videos of women cutting their own hair and then looking at themselves with appalled eyes. Also, I actually owned, and used, a FlowBee.



I always knew I'd regret selling it at a garage sale for $2, but since none of the Boys had let me near their heads with it for at least a decade, I thought the shelf space could have been put to better use. The packrat in me is grinning smugly and saying "Told ya so."

So this morning I decided I'd had enough of the situation on the top of my head, and set to work with the shears and fancy comb out of the clipper set. I wet down my hair with the spray bottle that lives next to the ironing board, then bobby-pinned back the middle section and started around my face, making the tiny diagonal cuts the pros use in YouTube videos. Obviously those barbers don't have two bum shoulders each, though, because by the time I'd finished with the bangs and ear areas, my technique had changed drastically. Here's the new technique:

1. Use hand mirror to check the back of my head.
2. Grab a medium-sized handful of hair.
3. WHACK!

It was much easier than all that fiddly-fiddly snippy-snippy stuff. And do you know what? Not only do I not have to look at it, no one on any of the half-dozen Zoom meetings I have every week is seeing me from behind.

Here's the "after," in which I'm giving thanks that even though my hair is thin and fine it also has some natural curl, and Tresemme Flawless Curls mousse is a miracle product. Also, I've shifted photo studios to the downstairs bathroom where the light is better.

It feels much better and the umbrella-holding maid isn't saying a word.

The World Turned Upside Down: I Venture Out

Easter morning. For two people.

Is it just me? Or are we transitioning into the section of the New Abnormal where it kind of begins to feel like, well, Normal?

On Easter Sunday, for example, it did not feel completely alien to wear a flower-patterned face mask while playing "Christ The Lord Is Risen Today" in a sanctuary containing only eight people. And while I haven't quite managed the proportions of cooking Easter dinner for two (64 dinner rolls may have been excessive) there was a certain relaxation in knowing that if the roasted asparagus was overcooked (which it was) the only other diner was the most non-judgmental of dinner partners.

I have gotten the routines of stay-at-home internalized, and for the first time in my life am enjoying exercise every day. I'm reading the local library's group-read selection, knitting with soft yarn, and watching all the Masterpiece Theater in the world. I've had time to cover and uncover all my about-to-bloom peonies and geraniums and lily-of-the-valleys against the threat of a late freeze and I'm ready to be done with that, if you please, Mother Nature.

Zoom has become my new BFF, and pretty much all the appointments now on my calendar come with a link. In fact, yesterday I taught my very first piano lesson via Zoom, and it went fairly well. It helps that this is the nicest kid in the world and his mother had contacted me to see if I could pick back up the lessons we'd barely gotten started at semester break. I'm pretty sure this was partly through self-preservation: If he actually was practicing an hour each day, which I absolutely believe he was because he's the nicest kid in the world, his mother was probably ready to gouge her ears with knitting needles at one more day of "The Campbells Are Coming." Anyway, it was delightful to see and hear him.

This morning I made my first foray into the outside world in a couple of weeks (Sunday's piano playing at church excepted).

It was weird.

The only thing I can compare it to was when I joined the Peace Corps and first landed in an international airport. I was exhausted and overwhelmed and everything seemed vaguely threatening, even though no one else seemed alarmed. 

It didn't help that this first trip out was a doctor's appointment. a foray  into what is possibly the most germ-laden arena possible. As it turns out, the natural aging processes do hot hit the "pause" button just because the world is in a medical crisis. Some vague symptoms I've had for a couple weeks were diagnosed as high blood pressure so I have a new prescription and appointments for follow-up.

But one observation on my two-hour excursion into the outer world: Women are better than men when it comes to wearing face masks and observing social distancing. In the waiting room were two men (unmasked and seated somewhat close together) and two women (both masked and sitting so far apart six inches more would have put them into separate parking lots). Who knew that common sense and following of pandemic protocol was a Y-chromosome-linked trait? I will let you answer that one for yourself. Of course, this does not apply to Husband, who patiently dons the masks I've made before he goes into the world of humans. He's a great hand-washer, and has learned to Zoom meetings like a champ.

Now I'm back in the safe confines of the House on the Corner again, and all surfaces that went with me on my excursion have been wiped down and sanitized.

All is Normal again and that thought is comforting, if surreal.

World Turned Upside Down: Cover Up! Stay Away!

Nearly every day of this New Abnormal I find myself saying something I never dreamed I would say. A few days ago that something was "Huh. I'm not too bad at making masks for use during a pandemic."

It seemed perfectly normal to be talking about digging out the fabric I had planned to use someday for craft projects and jerry-rigging facial coverings I hoped would keep my family and friends from dying.

I mean, we all see the absurdity of this, right? That the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world doesn't have enough medical masks, so all of us housewives are chipping in as if we were melting our cookware down for bullets like they did in World War II?

Hmmm...someone seems to have a little anger mixed in with her worry this morning.

Part of my anger, I have to admit, is directed toward those who do not seem to take seriously their own responsibility in flattening the curve. Again, I fully own that my part in this effort is easier than most people have it. We natural introverts aren't chafing as much at the thought of puttering around the house and sewing a few masks before spending an hour or so in the back yard picking up the spikey pods our sweetgum tree continues to shed. 

Do I have any right to criticize the mob of kids (and their parents) I see playing on the community basketball court? Or the un-masked older folks I see peering over each other's shoulders to watch videos on a shared phone?

Well, yes. I believe I do.

There's a lot we don't know about this virus, but one thing we do know is that you catch it by breathing in the virus an infected person has breathed out, or touching a live virus on a surface and somehow getting that into your mouth, nose, or eyes. We also know that a person can be infected, and infectious, without showing any symptoms. So all those kids jostling each other on the basketball court? Could be infecting all the families involved.  And those phone videos? Almost impossible to be head-touching close without sharing at least some breath.

And don't even get me started on the churches that aren't cancelling Easter services, and the spring break trips, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

We know that the health care and grocery store workers don't have any choice but to be out in this flurry of germs so that we can get medical care and eat, and we know that those workers are catching the virus and dying.

My dad is 93. Baby Wonderful is four weeks old today. One of my sons has a heart condition. Husband and I are in the age and (for me) health categories that make us candidates for the higher death rate among those who get the disease.

Wear your masks. Cough into your elbow. Keep away from everyone you don't live with.

Do it for yourself and your family, for me and my family, for the health care workers and grocery clerks and pharmacists.

Do your part or I will yell at you. We're all ready to be done with the New Abnormal.

World Turned Upside Down: My New Normal

Pre- and post-mulch. 

I had several blog posts running through my head during the decade that has been March. Have you ever seen time come to a screeching halt at this rate? From dashing from day to day we suddenly have fallen into a temporal pool of bewildering quicksand* in which we are worrying about having enough toilet paper but have all the time in the world.

What even is this?

In two weeks we have gone from "you might want to wash your hands" to a mandatory stay-at-home order. So how do we react when there has been a seismic shift in well, everything?

I can only speak for myself, of course, but after about a week of flailing around and pandemic baking (scones, cinnamon rolls, two kinds of cookies) I am seeing a glimmer of settling into a routine. That is a good thing, since this is not going to be a small blip in our lives. I mean, judging by the rate at which March passed, we may have gone into the year 2507 by the time April is over. We will need a new normal.

My new normal is this: Do some stuff every day.

That's it. My whole plan. I mean, except that I am a two-time loser in the endangered category game (age, clotting issues that led to lung issues), I am the person least affected by the pandemic. I am not a health care worker--sincerely, God bless them. I am not the parent of small children now trying to keep them socially distanced and occupied. I am not the sole provider who has been laid off of a job. I am not the minimum wage retail employee who can't work from home, but still has to figure out child care. 

In spite of my how easy this should be for me, that first week when we discovered how bad this is was really crappy and I felt the oily black fog moving in around my feet. I spent a lot of time panicking, and I binge-watched all of "Tiger King."**

So now I am working on my coping methods that include prayer and exercise and writing, and I'm doing stuff that I honestly did not have time for a month ago.

This morning I pulled out an old piano book and worked on a Bach two-part invention and one of my mother's favorite songs ("Narcissus") that she would play while Much Older Sister and I danced around the living room. How long has it been since I worked to play the piano better just for the sheer joy of playing?

Husband and I spent Saturday morning spreading two pick-up loads of cedar mulch in our formerly desolate back yard. Our genius landscaping guy's crew had laid sod back there in the fall but in the shaded area around the maple tree he recommended mulch, which we hadn't anticipated we'd have time to install until at least after April 15. Guess what? Already done!

My oldest and dearest friends are working on a project that has us writing an essay every day, with the prompts working through the alphabet. We're already up to M. (Or N, if you don't take weekends off, which I do.)

I've planned a cleaning schedule that will go into effect...soon-ish? And I have a stack of t-shirts that I'll be making into my seventh t-shirt quilt. I've learned how to Zoom meet-ups with friends, and now have three of them scheduled each week. In addition to my regular exercise bike and walk routine I've added a Silver Sneakers Live Facebook session three times a week. Highly recommend.

So I'm doing stuff. It helps.

What are you doing? Is it helping you?



*Here I'd normally insert that meme that says "When I was a kid I thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it is," but you've seen it, and if I were that meme's creator and obeying a stay-at-home order I'd spend all my time looking for people I could sue for copyright infringement. 
** No regrets on this front, although I was ready to break stay-at-home to drive to Oklahoma to extricate my Boy#4 from that state. But it was worth spending those hours with my jaw dropped full open just for the memes. No, I'm not going to link the memes. You can Google that yourself.

Dear Baby Wonderful: The World Turned Upside Down

Dear Baby Wonderful,

Before you were born I had imagined a whole new world with you in it. I imagined how just knowing you were here, with your brains and your personality and your potential, would change my entire outlook. I imagined the books I would read to you, using different voices for every character and not even caring if you decided to turn the pages right to left instead of left to right. I imagined tucking you in and singing "I'll be loving you, always..." to lull you to sleep just like I did your daddy and uncles. I imagined a clean junk drawer in the kitchen.

(Not really on that last item. But two weeks ago I was suddenly struck with the irresistible urge to organize the drawer under the coffeepots that has always been the repository of birthday candles, the upstairs hammer and pliers, pizza coupons, picture-hanging paraphernalia, gum, and other miscellaneous stuff. For years that drawer hasn't opened except under duress, but that day I had HAD it with that mess. Seven hours later I saw your face for the first time. Nesting: It Isn't Just For Parents.)

(Also, since we're being all parenthetical now, the reason there's a picture of the junk drawer instead of the one we got yesterday of you grinning in your sleep and wearing a HI! onesie is because your Dad and Mom are understandably reluctant to share the innermost workings of your life with the internet. I think that's an excellent decision, but may lead to some interesting illustrations.)

Anyway, you were the big news that day but since then you've been knocked off the front pages by...what do we even call this turn of events? Circumstances, let's say.

The very day we kissed you goodbye and headed back to the House on the Corner we began to find out that the scientists had been correct, and shockingly, the politicians had been wrong when they told us there was nothing to worry about from that virus clear across the world. (Here is your first bit of English instruction for today: You notice the word "shockingly" in the last sentence? That's known as sarcasm, and you'll find that your grandmother fights her tendency to use sarcasm but that the sarcasm often wins.)

The very next day we started washing our hands every time we saw a faucet, and since then we've stopped hugging, kept our distance from other people, and now are having lunch with our friends through the Zoom app on our computers.

It's been quite an adjustment for me. Schools have been cancelled, so I'm not working. All of my regular groups and clubs are not meeting. Music contests and lessons were called off.

I vividly remember taking out my phone and deleting every event on the calendar, one after another, for the next two months.

Your parents have been wonderful about FaceTiming every evening so we can see you--what a beautiful boy you are! And five whole ounces above your birth weight! (Your doctor said you're a "champion eater," so we know with certainty that you're part of our family.)

You're often asleep during those video sessions and every once in a while you suddenly throw out an arm, or kick a tiny leg. I understand this is quite normal, as your nervous system begins to figure out the world.

That kick, that startled jerk, is what I've been feeling as we begin to figure out our own new world. Our schedules, the daily-ness of our days, was the womb that was nice and tight around us to make us feel secure. (That, dear one, is a metaphor.)

We're figuring out life, just as you are. It's still spring so it's lovely and bright, but there are times when it's quite scary and we have to train our reflexes. In this case, we're taming the impulse to be social so that we can get back to the parts of the world we miss--the hugs, the handshakes, the smiles.

We're fighting the impulse to be scared.

The "before" world we had just a few weeks ago has been turned upside down, but the "after" will be a world with you in it. You'll come visit the House on the Corner and we'll read books and bake cookies and I'll let you get a piece of gum out of the junk drawer as soon as you have teeth.

The snuggles and hugs with you will make all of this staying apart to stay safe worthwhile.


And I'll be loving you, always, 

GrandmaQueenBee