2020 Hindsight

If I'd had any inkling back in January how 2020 would unfold, would I have done anything differently?

Well, I certainly wouldn't have wasted so much time trying to plan a student trip to Manhattan, a plan that went out the window in early March. I suppose I could have stocked up on toilet paper or placed bets on the results of the Presidential election, but I'm not a hoarder or a gambler so I'd probably just do exactly what I did: scramble to adjust to circumstances as they arose. 

Looking back on a year of blog posts, it's clear that 2020 was a time for struggling in front of a computer screen and running away to the woods. The two activities are linked, of course: getting out into nature was my primary method of coping with the craziness caused by the Coronavirus, so it's little wonder that posts record a remarkable number of trips to Lake Katharine plus occasional forays further afield.

In 2020 I've written 159 posts--plus this one, for an even 160. That's fewer than some previous years but I'm doing my best. My blog attracted 48,000 views this year, with three posts attracting the most hits:

When the virus hits close to home (264 views)

Some (rejected) options for teaching this fall (176) 

I've taught online before--why is this time different? (152) 

Clearly, the 'rona played a big part in my blogging this year, crowding out other concerns. I wrote very few book reviews this year, my favorite being the review of Amit Majmudar's What He Did in Solitary, and my love for writing doggerel came to the forefront very rarely. (There's a good New Year's Resolution: less whining, more doggerel.)

I tried a few new things this year: editing a volume of essays on teaching comedy (submitted to the editorial board; awaiting reply); attending a local Black Lives Matter protest; attending drive-up church services in my car; feeding birds right out of my hand. In July I spent 24 hours in the hospital, suffering from a bad case of probably nothing wrong but let's run some tests anyway, and in October we relocated our Jackson residence from a parsonage to a lovely rental house in the woods, where we did a whole lot of painting and got accustomed to going to the laundromat.

And of course I learned to Zoom--with my classes, of course, but also with family, celebrating my grandkids' birthdays remotely before we widened our bubble in May. Considering that I'd never Zoomed before March, I had to get my skills up to speed really quickly when our spring classes moved online--and there followed a whole host of posts dealing with the demands of pandemic pedagogy: obsessing over annoying questions; setting up a workable home office; preparing multiple versions of classes; needing help when everyone else needs help too; figuring out social distancing in the classroom; missing the social interactions that make work wonderful; trying to prevent dangerous behavior; getting probed by the pandemic; and dealing with dreams that unmasked my anxieties.

But wait--there's more! It's kind of alarming how much I wrote about teaching under pandemic conditions this year, but sometimes writing was my only way to exert some control over an overwhelming situation. Writing and hiking and birding and canoeing: ways to find peace away from screens and anxieties.

I posted a lot of photos this year, very few dealing with teaching or coronavirus concerns. I seem to have spent some happy time sitting outside by the butterfly garden, helping my grandkids bake cookies or go sledding, and looking at birds and wildflowers and woods. Someday I hope those happy times will loom larger in my memory than all the angst of 2020, which is why I'm spending the last day of the year lingering over photos of places I've been and looking forward to the time when I can go there again.

Criteria for a winter walk

It takes quite a lot to lure me out into the woods this time of year:

A few days with no rain or snow so the trails can dry up.

Temperatures above freezing so the trails won't be sheer ice.

A brief hiatus between gun season and muzzle-loader season so the woods won't be full of deer hunters.

Mild temperatures that merit wearing the bright blue fleece jacket instead of the deer-colored Carhartt jacket (because not all deer hunters obey the rules).

A trekking stick to keep me steady on the steep slick spots and the places where snow has been stomped down into ice.

A new canister of pepper spray to reassure my loved ones who can't deter me from hiking alone but want to be sure I can handle whatever creatures I encounter.

A stretch of time when nothing else is required of me--no painting, no cleaning, no prepping of classes, no laundry, no cooking, no pressing deadlines for anything.

That's a lot to demand but when it all comes together, there's no better time to enjoy a quiet walk in the woods, where icicles sparkle in the sunlight and woodpeckers chatter in the treetops and my mind is refreshed by the stillness and solitude.

New boardwalk through the wetlands!

Who leaves a mask out in the woods?

 

 

Making a list, chucking it out

I'm sitting in the kitchen watching birds flit back and forth to the feeder and I'm trying not to think about The Lists.

You know The Lists I'm talking about: The List of people to whom I need to send thank-you notes. The List of holiday stuff that needs to be stashed away for another year. The List of household chores to get my house shipshape before the semester stars. And of course, The Most Daunting List of All: everything I need to do to prepare my spring semester classes. Normally I'd be halfway through that List by now but our extended winter break gives me more time: classes start January 18 but meetings start before then, and where did I put The List of essential meetings?

I don't want to think about it. Looking at all those Lists feels like walking away from Christmas way too soon, while carols are still playing and tinsel is still sparkling. Instead, let's take a look back at some moments I'm not yet ready to relegate to my mind's attic:

For days our oldest granddaughter kept begging for a white Christmas--"I've never had a white Christmas in my whole entire life!!" (She's seven.) And she got her wish: snow began to fall heavily on Christmas Eve, just in time to make driving to the evening church service treacherous, but we all made it home and watched the snow fall from the safety of a warm house, where the kitchen was brimming with cookies and eggnog.

Next day we opened gifts, of course, with the other set of grandparents observing via video call. Gifts were thoughtful and unexpected, from a lighted magnifying glass so I can read recipes in the kitchen to a roof rack so we can carry the canoe on my husband's newish car. Not a bathrobe in sight. 

I'm glad I remembered to bring over my boots because all that snow was beckoning the grandkids, who found that eight inches of soft, fluffy snow did not make the idea surface for sledding but it was fun all the same. Afterward we warmed up with hot chocolate and before you know it the house was full of people napping--on the sofa, on the beds, even a few on the floor of the living room. The evening got raucous again when we played a round of Poetry for Neanderthals, with the grandkids expertly wielding the No Stick to beat up anyone who used words of more than one syllable. Just a bit of advice: if you're trying to get your team to say the word "syrup," saying "Comes from trees" is probably not the best place to start. 

And then the next day they all went away, taking their Legos and snow pants and baby dolls with them. The house is tidy and quiet now, which allows the demands of the next couple of weeks to loom large in my mind. Which comes first: writing thank-you notes, cleaning bathrooms, or setting up online gradebooks? 

I think I'll just sit here and look at the birds.

Lifting, leaning, learning, loving

This morning I learned that, despite my cranky joints and declining upper-body strength, I can carry a squirming two-and-a-half-year-old up a flight of steps. Score one for lifelong learning! However, I'm definitely hitting the Aleve bottle more than usual this week, thanks to the heavy lifting three grandkids require.

Lifting and leaning: helping kids dress and put on coats and wash their hands and wipe their bums requires leaning my back at a certain angle that, over time, causes severe pain. I don't recall having this problem when my kids were little, but then my joints and I were a whole lot younger too. 

So having the grandkids here is a pain in a whole lot of ways but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. They bring so much joy and energy and color into our quiet lives, and I'm not just talking about all the candy sparkles that ended up on the floor when we decorated cookies. We baked cookies! They took turns with the rolling pin and the cookie cutters without a single bit of fuss! They spent close to an hour standing outside watching Grampa chop wood! They had foot-races on the beach at a local lake! And I love to hear the oldest granddaughter giggle as she reads Shel Silverstein poems out loud!

After such a painful year it feels right to have some pain at Christmas, but it's also great to have a good supply of joy and laughter, the greatest analgesics of all. Merry Christmas to all! And to me, an Aleve.

A little Christmas crafting.

Putting some muscle into it.

More sprinkles!

Getting some sunshine before the storm.

Sometimes you just need to run around in circles.

 

 

 

The calm before the chaos

Why does insomnia strike when I am most in need of alertness and energy? Here I am with a house full of grandkids, one of them potty-training, and I'll be the only adult in charge until late this afternoon but I really want to go right back to bed. This has happened before: when the kids are in the house without their parents, my subconscious goes into constant vigilance mode and refuses to relax. It's just for a few days so I suppose I'll survive--but I predict a nap in the offing.

First, though, baking. Today is my husband's birthday and the grandkids want to bake him a cake, which I hadn't been planning to do (because we're already overwhelmed with sweets) but why not? I found an easy recipe and I have plenty of sprinkles so the grandkids can decorate the top, but one problem: the recipe calls for blackstrap molasses but all I have is a jar of sorghum molasses. Okay to substitute? I guess we'll find out. 

They also want to go for a walk in the woods today but the weather may not be congenial to hiking. Yesterday on the three-and-a-half-hour drive here, we drove through constant gray skies, fog, and rain, except for a three-minute period when the clouds opened to reveal a rainbow. It felt like a good omen after hours of bleakness, though what it might portend is beyond my ken.

Right now the biggest grandkid is coloring quietly beside me while the two younger ones sleep. When they get up it'll be time to rev up into full Grandma mode and get the mixer going, but until then I'll relish a few moments of quiet before the chaos. Day one of the grandkid adventure--and I'm eager to see what the day has in store for all of us.

 

Still chaos after all these years

I'm home alone on the morning of my 38th anniversary, but that's okay. The Bearded Wonder drove over to our house to do some chores and pick up the mail while I stayed in the house we're renting in Jackson to do the final preparations for the grandkids' visit next week, but we'll be back under the same roof by this evening, when we'll have plenty of time to celebrate our anniversary before starting up a whole new round of complicated events over the next week and a half.

This is the life we've built for ourselves: always going places, sometimes in the same vehicle and sometimes separately. We share time between two houses and follow two very different career paths that demand attention at odd and unpredictable times, and we devote ourselves to spending time with far-flung family, although that's been difficult during the pandemic. For the past couple of weeks we've shared the chaos of house-painting and next week we'll enjoy a more joyful type of chaos when we'll have the grandkids here without their parents for three days, but after 38 years, chaos is part of the DNA of our relationship. Maybe one day we'll have to slow down and resist the urge to engage in various forms of chaos, but for now, it's what we've got and we'll enjoy it.

But not at much as the starry-eyed couple in the photo is enjoying driving off to their honeymoon in a 1970 Dodge Dart, a car that stumbled and sputtered and looked like a dumpster on wheels but that took us to interesting places. That car is long gone but we're still going places 38 years later, and with luck we'll keep going a few years more, albeit a little more slowly.

 

 

Putting away the paintbrush, putting up the tree

After weeks of taping woodwork and painting walls and moving dropcloths from one room to another, today I have the delightful task of pulling up the last bits of masking tape and putting switchplates back on the walls in the kitchen as my husband stashes away all signs of the massive painting project we've completed.

Well, maybe completed isn't the right word. We haven't painted inside the front coat closet, and the vaulted ceilings in the kitchen and living room are painted only as high as we could reach with a stepstool and a long-handled roller. We'll have to borrow a ladder to paint the really high spots, but we're happy to postpone that chore until after Christmas. It's time to put away the paintbrushes and put up the tree.

Yesterday we were painting the kitchen and I needed to wipe up a drip, but the box of paper rags was in the other room and I didn't want to walk over there because I had wet paint on the bottom of my sock (because of course I did), so my adorable husband, who has a magical ability to avoid stepping in wet paint, went to the other room and brought me back a rag. Just one. Because after 38 years of close observation of my klutziness, he believes one rag will cover all my paint-wiping needs. Clearly the man is blinded by love, or something.

But together we finished the kitchen in record time, him on the stepstool tackling the high parts (because I have a hard enough time avoiding catastrophe while standing on a level floor) and me using the cutting-in brushes to do all the fiddly bits around the sink and appliances. The furniture was squooshed close together and piled high with plants to keep them away from the paint, so last night at supper we had to share the one accessible spot at the dinner table to enjoy some celebratory cheese and crackers after the second coat of paint had been applied.

And now we relax. Sure, there's plenty of work involved in getting ready for Christmas, especially with the grandkids coming for a visit next week, but holiday preparation won't require the paraphernalia of painting. It's not quite gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but if the first gift we receive this Christmas is the absence of paint, tape, and dropcloths, I'll accept it with pleasure.   

A small tree but festive enough.

Someone will have to scramble up a ladder to paint above the cabinets, but that someone will not be me.

A little disorder is part of the process.

 

There's a reason they're called "honorifics"

"So I hear you're not a real doctor," said my old friend (in jest!), and I wanted to say, "No, but I play one on TV." 

So many clever people have already said so many clever things in response to the ridiculous column in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Dr. Jill Biden ("kiddo!") has no right to use her academic title, so I'll just add that the editor who thought it was appropriate to devote so many column inches to such a poorly reasoned argument ought to be sent back to Journalism 101. Can all those clicks possibly offset the amount of derision the article earned?

This kerfuffle reminds me of a former high-level administrator who consistently referred to male Ph.D.s as "Doctor" and female Ph.D.s as "Professor," a distinction that apparently meant something in his warped mind but struck his listeners as bizarre. And way back when I was the a brand-new junior member of my department, a senior colleague (now long retired) used to treat female faculty members as if our gender had tainted our credentials, and I remember what a tremendous rush of joy I felt when I learned that this patronizing old fart had never finished his Ph.D. Of course I continued to show him the respect appropriate to his position, but never again would I allow him to intimidate me because I knew I'd achieved something worthy of respect.

For twenty years I've been fortunate to teach at a college where this kind of invidious distinction is rare, a place where respect is the rule. My colleagues who graduated from Ivy League schools don't look down their noses at my degree from Bowling Green State, and our students may come straight from high school accustomed to calling all their female teachers "Miss" but they soon adjust to the titles their faculty members prefer, whether Dr. or Prof. or whatever. The title is not a weapon, but it does serve to remind students that they're being taught by experts who have earned a level of respect.

And respect is exactly what's missing from Joseph Epstein's notorious Wall Street Journal article. What do you do with a person who demands a level of respect for himself that he is unwilling to extend to others? Ignore him and walk away would be my plan. But what do I know? I'm not a "real" doctor.

A bird in the hand, and another and another and another

If I had to pick my favorite moment of the day so far, I'd have a lot of moments to choose from: sitting on top of a hill on a bench having a private picnic lunch with my oldest grandchild; hearing my four-year-old grandson say "Let's do spoonerisms!" as we drove down the road; or seeing my youngest grandchild gently pat some pussy willows while saying "Fuzzy-wuzzy fuzzy-wuzzy fuzzy-wuzzy."

We went to F.A. Seiberling Nature Realm, where chickadees, nuthatches, and titmice will fly down and eat birdseed right out of your hand. The two-year-old enjoyed watching her brother feed the birds but she was a little leery: she clung to Mommy and drew back when a chickadee flew near, and the first one to land on her hand inspired a horrified expression. It didn't take long, though, before she was relishing the feeling of birds dropping into her hand, grabbing seeds, and flapping off into the woods. 

Which is what I'll be doing tomorrow--not flying but driving off into the woods to get back home. How have we packed so much joy into three short days? I'll take that joy with me, along with the hope of being together again as a whole family at Christmas. (Pandemic permitting!)

 

Unbeatable birthday

Most years I'm proctoring or grading final exams on my birthday, but a pandemic-compressed fall semester leaves me entirely free of academics this week and I have never felt more relaxed. My sweet hubby made me a delicious birthday breakfast near the kitchen window that looks out on my new birdfeeder, and then I drove north (through very little traffic--apparently people are staying home as requested) to spend some time with the grandkids. The last time I saw them face-to-face was in June, way too long ago. We've been reading books and playing with play-dough and going for walks and eating a chocolate yule log with peppermint filling (yum!) and tomorrow we're heading out for a hike. Yes, there have been presents, but the presence of beloved family members is all I need today to make me happy and to give a good start to the final year of my 50s. 

They made me a lovely card.

My creative daughter made a gingerbread birdhouse.

She says "Smoosh, smoosh, smoosh."

Chocolate yule log with mint filling. Yum!

My kind of birthday gift.