Light and Momentary

May 31

Today was Joe's 18th birthday, and Pentecost, and we always remember the Visitation even though Pentecost bumps it from its spot this year.

If you had told me a week ago that I would give a kid permission to go to a gathering of a thousand people here in town I would have thought you were talking nonsense. Of course, if you had told me three months ago what May was going to look like, I would have thought you were talking nonsense.

What a long strange month it's been. 

May 30

On the vigil of Pentecost, as the protests continue, maybe we can pray together:

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of your love.
Burn away our biases that we might see the image of God in our neighbors, whatever color their skin may be.
Illumine for us the places where our allegiance to a tribe has eclipsed our yearning for true unity in Christ
Inflame us with hunger for justice: true justice, enduring justice.

Holy Spirit, spirit of peace and renewal, pour out your grace on us.
Come in your power, in your goodness, in your glory.
Come with your healing -- pour it out like balm on the family of George Floyd and all those hurt by these events.
Come with your wisdom, and show us where to go from here.

Amen

P.S. In your prayers for those affected by these events, please include Bearing, whose home in the Twin Cities is near the heart of the unrest.

May 29

When I go back through my archives I often find posts that say "Can you even believe this is happening?" without referencing the "this." "Huh," I think to myself, "what was that about?"

So I am spelling it out for the future:

On this day in 2020 people gathered nationwide to protest the killing of George Floyd

and social media erupted with the usual "not all cops" arguments

and people in my town complained bitterly about being locked out of the library

and >1200 more Americans died of COVID-19.

It is strange and disheartening, the overlap between the people who say that compulsory mask-wearing must not be tolerated, because it is an infringement of their freedom, and the people who say that victims of extrajudicial execution should have cooperated more fully with the law, because good citizens accede to the demands of authority.

May 28

Part of the problem with the national conversation about racism is that people are working from different definitions of the word "racism," and the definitions are often associated in predictable ways with political affiliations. When two people use the same word to mean two different things, misunderstanding is inevitable. Sometimes it's funny, like my student who thought "detrimental" meant something along the lines of "excellent." Sometimes it's just confusing, like the RCIA class in which it finally dawned on me that evangelicals and Catholics don't mean the same things when they say "grace" and "salvation." And sometimes it entrenches us in hostility and an inability to move forward, like when we talk about racism.

"Implicit bias" is a useful and less volatile term. White people in this country are often carrying around some degree of implicit bias. Black people in this country are often carrying around the effects of living their lives in a place where implicit bias is widespread, and it seems to grind them down at a cellular level -- shortening their telomeres, for instance. Check out the implicit bias tests here. 

May 27

Last night was the first CSA veggie pickup of the season. And usually I love the start of the CSA season: sunchokes! garlic scapes! cilantro! sorrel! bounty and beauty and face-to-face connection with the person who is feeding my family! But last night was weird.

We had been instructed to come in masks and line up six feet apart. But some people wanted to leave more than six feet between them and the person in front of them. I'm fine with that -- I don't know what kind of risk factors they may be facing. What I don't know: are they worried if I'm standing a mere six feet behind them? Lines get long in a hurry if people are standing 12 feet away from each other.

In contrast to the folks who wanted more than 6 feet of space, there were the folks who did not really heed the 6-foot boundary. The women behind me were chatting, and they kept moving closer to me. One of them stepped right up to me to brush away a carpenter bee that had settled on my back. In a non-pandemic context, that's a neighborly thing to do. But in the middle of a pandemic, when Gladlyville has had a recent surge in its case count, I'd probably rather take my chances with the bee.

One of the things I usually love about our CSA is the way it pulls together so many different kinds of Gladlyville families. There are university colleagues and former neighbors and parents I met at preschool long ago, all coming together to support a local farmer and eat delicious sunchokes. There's also a crunchy-con contingent, and this is a weird season for conservatives of any stripe. One of the long-time CSA members, a guy whose #1 identifier might be "pro-life Catholic," got out of his van right as I got into line. "Looks like we're going to have to wear these dumb masks," he said to his wife -- but he didn't don his until after his up-close mask-free conversation with another guy from our church. (One of my high school friends told me that a gun shop near her home has banned mask-wearing. Which might, in other circumstances, cause me to roll my eyes and mutter about Darwin Awards. But instead I am thinking about the avoidable risk borne by the elderly loved ones of the store's staff and customers. From where I'm standing it looks like a peculiarly lethal flavor of political posturing.)

OH AND ALSO -- I suppose it was inevitable that a person who often finds reflexive phone use frustrating would find it especially so in this context. I'm feeling like we all need to pay a little more attention than usual to where we are positioned with regard to the people around us, and phones make that harder. When the line is longer than usual, I feel more impatient with people who are texting instead of moving forward. When a pandemic is raging, I feel more impatient with the people who are walking into me because they are texting.

So! Isn't it great that the pandemic offers us so many opportunities to grow in charity and patience? Do you love growing in charity and patience as much as I do? Have you been in a crowd recently, and was it weird?

May 26

In the fall of 2006 I put my two oldest kids in school-school for the first time, after four years of homeschooling. Off they went to the neighborhood elementary school, a small brick building a half-mile from our house. For fourteen years now I've had a kid at Neighborhood Elementary. 

This morning Stella and I drove down together to drop off the books she brought home in March and to pick up the items she left in the classroom. As instructed, we made a sign with her name on it to hold up to the driver's side window, so they could retrieve the right bag. After a brief exchange with the person who works at the front desk, we drove away.

I haven't been a very involved school mom. I volunteered in the classroom occasionally, but I never joined the PTO. In the parallel universe where there is no COVID-19 pandemic I would probably have been a little grumpy about the fifth-grade awards night, thinking to myself, "Seriously, people, we don't have to get all Sunrise, Sunset about the end of fifth grade." So I was surprised to find myself a little teary as we pulled out of the parking lot for the last time.

It seemed like such a huge change to send our kids there. And it was, I guess. Nobody was making them memorize The Raven at Neighborhood Elementary (seriously, Past Jamie, you were kind of a nut); there was a heavier emphasis on team sports and finishing all of the math problems on the worksheet. 

I guess any institution that's woven into your daily life for fourteen years is going to leave a space when it goes away. When we first became a Neighborhood Elementary family I was 36 and my oldest was 9. He raised his hand after the first test was returned and asked, "Can you tell me what the mean was?" The teacher told me about about this episode in hushed tones, saying, "Of course I told him we don't talk about that in this classroom." At the time I felt like such an outsider. Was there a social code in play here that I had failed to learn? In hindsight it seems more likely that she was not accustomed to being asked about mean scores.

As the years went by I felt less uncertain. I am thinking about the teachers who got my kids, who presided over classrooms where they could thrive. I am thinking about the occasional teachers for whom thriving seemed to be a lower priority than complying. I am thinking about the teachers with staying power, who have known all five of my kids whether or not they taught them. And I am also thinking about the day that Stella and I saw a surprise heron in the creek that runs past the school. Maybe the heron is a good reminder for today: life is full of unexpected loveliness, and every variety of temporal goodness comes to an end.

The girl who did not yet exist when we first sent kids to school is 11 now, and I will turn 50 this summer. It's always true, I suppose, that you don't know what lies ahead when you send kids off to a new place. But I've never felt it quite as keenly as I do this year.

May 25

Yesterday I was talking to one of my college roommates about bread, and she asked me if I'd share a favorite recipe. She'd been trying to use a recipe from the red-checked Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, but it told her to add the yeast to water that was 120-130 degrees*. She thought she had done something wrong when the dough failed to rise. But really, I don't think Paul Hollywood himself could bake bread with yeast that went for a swim in too-hot water. If, however, you have live yeast and some time to let it work, baking bread is pretty straightforward.

Step one: keep your yeast happy. Since I don't bake bread very often I usually check on the yeast first, combining it with warm water and a little sweetener. Five or ten minutes later it should be foaming busily, which tells me that it is up to the task of raising my loaf. If it doesn't feel hot and doesn't feel cold, the actual water temperature doesn't matter much. Would I bathe a baby in it on a warm May day? If so, it will work for my yeast. (If you prefer cold hard numbers, aim for 100-110 degrees.) Today I stirred 2 teaspoons of yeast and 2 teaspoons of honey into a cup and two-thirds of warm water. 

Step two: mix your dough. I used a King Arthur recipe as a starting point, so I used 5 cups of flour and 2 teaspoons of table salt as instructed. But I also chucked in 2 tablespoons of soft butter. A little fat makes for a moister, tastier bread. I added some gluten to the flour because we keep it in the pantry, but I am not really sure I can detect the difference. You have a TON of latitude in this stage if you would like it, or you can stick to the script if you'd prefer that. Throw in some whole-grain flour or some rolled oats in place of some of the white flour. Add some sesame seeds or some chopped herbs if that sounds good. If you want, you can proof the yeast in a smaller amount of liquid in step 1, and add an equal volume of egg to make a richer dough. But again: you can make delicious bread with just flour, water, salt, and yeast. No need to get fancy.

Step three: develop your gluten by kneading your dough (usually) and leaving it to rise. For a long time I thought you had to kick off the process of gluten development by kneading your dough. That's what I did today. If I'm in a hurry or if I'm making a wetter dough, I might use machinery for this. You can whizz it in the food processor until it forms a cohesive ball. You can smack it around with a mixer's dough hook until it looks like bread dough and not glop. But if you're in the mood for it, kneading is pleasantly contemplative. This morning Stella and I chatted about the birds at the feeder until I had a nice springy non-sticky ball of dough. I covered the bowl with a clean dish towel and left the dough to rise.

Step three, the alternate plan: It turns out that you don't have to knead your bread dough if you are willing to be patient and let it rise for a long time. This NYT recipe blew my mind when I first read it back in 2005 or so -- no need to knead? Who knew?? It's fun to try occasionally, but I generally prefer to work the dough and eat my bread sooner. 

Step three takes a while. Your yeast will be busy-busy-busy, eating and burping and tastifying your dough, and you are free to do your own thing while it works its magic. You have a lot of latitude in step three. Are you in a hurry? Put it in a warm place. Or don't, if you're not in a hurry -- a slower rise makes for a more complex flavor. Do you need to step away from your work email before you say something rude to that annoying coworker? Go punch your dough -- you will not hurt its feelings; you will only encourage it to do more eating and burping and tastifying. 

Most recipes will tell you to move to step four, shaping, after your dough has doubled in bulk. The easiest version of step 4 is just to plunk your dough into a greased loaf pan and cover it with a clean dish towel. If you're working with a recipe that calls for about five cups of flour, you'll want to divide it across two 4x8 loaf pans. The internet will offer you a zillion shaping options, and maybe an eight-strand braid brings you joy rather than frustration. But simple is A-OK. Do what pleases you. Today I shaped five buns for our Memorial Day brats, and turned the rest into a single freeform loaf.

Step five: prove. Allow your shaped dough to double in bulk again. If you've ever watched a Great British Bake Off bread episode, there's always a lot of proving drama. Will Colum use the proving drawer?? Will Paul pronounce Ethel's ciabatta 'overproved'?? Unless you are having Paul Hollywood over for dinner, don't sweat it. If you let your bread rise more than once in step 3, it will prove more quickly than the recipe suggests. It works best if your oven is hot when you reach the doubled-in-bulk stage, but let me say one more time: bread is flexible.

Step six: bake. You can fall down a deep, deep rabbit hole if you ask the internet for advice on how to bake your bread. Add steam! Buy a stone! Build a medieval cob oven in your back yard for the authentic bread-baking experience! (Which, dude. If I wanted an authentic medieval experience I would just go land myself in the middle of a plague or something. (Hey, wait a minute...)) All you have to do is apply heat to your dough until it turns into bread. A higher temperature gives you a better crust, but bread can bake happily at a lower temperature if you need to have something else in the oven at the same time. If you want, before baking you can brush it with egg wash for a shiny crust or milk for a browner crust. At the end of the baking time you can check the temperature with a probe thermometer if you'd like (interior temperature should be ≥190), but you don't have to. I dislike gummy bread, so I tend to bake it on the longer side of the recommended range and discourage people from slicing into it right away. Today I baked the buns for 20 minutes at 400, and the loaf for a further 20 minutes. I left the loaf in the turned-off oven for five minutes, and let it cool a bit before slicing.

Step seven: eat! Here is the most important bread-baking secret of all: people love warm starch with butter! I repeat, don't sweat it! If you combine yeast with flour and water and salt, you will wind up with a food that almost everybody likes even in its more imperfect incarnations. You will learn some things that will set you up to make a less imperfect incarnation next time. Happy baking!

*It turns out that one specific product called "instant yeast" will allow you to add water that's 120-130 degrees. A lot of American bread recipes are designed for efficiency, because the importance of speedy gratification is practically one of those truths we hold to be self-evident. But lockdown is a good time to embrace the slow, and you will never kill any yeast if you wake it up in 100 degree water.

May 24

Sing it with me, friends, to the tune of Yellow Submarine:

We all live in an entropy machine, entropy machine, entropy machine.

This house, man. I usually try to go more than 24 hours between arson threats, but let me say again: I might have to set it on fire.

At the beginning of May I made myself another habit tracker. May is the time of year when I am most energetic, and I wanted to use the days well. Many of my habit-tracker columns have worked out really nicely: daily read-aloud time with Stella, daily exercise, daily writing time, daily music-making. They are not lofty goals. I haven't tackled anything new and complicated on the piano, but I learned a fun easy version of Rule, Britannia, and today when I was tempted to feel a little blue about not being able to sing Hail The Day That Sees Him Rise at church, I just sat down and played it myself instead.

But one of my goals was to spend some time every day making the house a little nicer, and I am tired of that habit. I did a lot of small good things in the service of that goal. I painted the walls in the back entryway; I smote the mildew in the downstairs tub with a paste of bleach and baking soda. I fixed the hole in a bedroom wall from that time when someone opened the door too vigorously and the doorknob punched through the drywall; I fixed the hole in the ceiling from that time when the bunkbeds put a Gladly kid up too high. I cleared a lot of junk from a lot of places. But somehow there remains a lot of junk, and I have been losing steam over the last week.

"There's something to be said for moving every two years," I said to my husband today. "Ah, yes," he said sarcastically. "You loved it when we were moving every two years." [Reader, I did not love it.] "But it forces you to live a stripped-down life," I told him earnestly. "There's something to be said for that."

Joe went back to his boarding school for the last time yesterday, to pick up the stuff he left there in mid-March when they announced that spring break would last a bit longer than originally planned. He has been a whirling dervish of order and industry today. He cleaned out a closet, unprompted; he purged and organized his room from top to bottom. I suppose I should be happy that the kid who used to insist that I should save his toenail clippings came downstairs today to announce "I will NEVER be a hoarder."

Maybe one of the keys to avoiding burnout is getting help from other people in my family. Fighting entropy alone is a lonely job, but the kids have been great about noticing and appreciating the things I've been doing around the house. And I think, too, another piece of it is the habits/goals tension. It might work better for me to say "We are going to clean all the JUNK out of the basement by June 30!" instead of slashing away at random disorderly spots, one solitary stroke at a time.

We shall see. The habit-tracker I made on April 30 only had 23 slots, so I have spent this 24th day of May feeling free of pressure to tick any boxes. But tomorrow I will make another one, and perhaps I will figure out an approach that allows me to have less entropy and also less frustration. Are you braced for more exciting habit-tracking updates? Don't turn that dial!

May 23

So, you guys, I might have to set the house on fire.

Remember a year ago, when there was a garter snake in my herb garden? (I scrolled back through those comments and noted that Mandamum, who kept a jumping spider in her bedroom on purpose for a while, is also significantly more relaxed about snakes than I am.) Earlier this month I found a garter snake peeking out from under the viburnum bush. I did not shriek; I went inside and invited the kids to come see, and we watched him together until he slipped away. I felt very wise and mature! And then-- today happened.

Today was an excellent day, actually. Pete and I spent hours outside, tidying up and planting pretty sweet-smelling pollinator-attracting things. I got into the peony/iris bed and dispatched all of the bindweed tendrils along with all of the feathery woody-weedy things that also like to grow there. I was thinking about snakes while I was working in there, because I wondered if our compost pile might attract rodents which might attract snakes. But there were no snakes by the compost (or at least none that I saw, which is not the same thing, I suppose). I walked over to the garbage can to toss a piece of plastic that had been hiding in the peony/iris bed, and crossed back by way of the beds on the south side of the house. I was pulling weeds out of the vinca as I went, when suddenly I saw a small snout and a pair of glinty eyes, and yellow-orange stripes streaking down a black body.

So far so normal, right? A warm day, a nice patch of vinca to hide in-- sounds like snake heaven? But you guys, this snout was right at my back door. If I had opened the storm door I would have whacked this little guy on the nose. I do not want a snake lurking at my back door. 

Pete joined me, and I scooted the welcome mat away from the door, whereupon I gasped a small gasp. "Oh my word, I think it's a nest," I said faintly. It turned out that it was not a nest. Only one additional snake was hiding under our welcome mat, but their bodies were coiled and tangled. And the number of snakes I am willing to step over to enter and exit my home is LESS THAN TWO. (It is also less than one.)

We watched them for a while as they twisted and writhed and tried to figure out why their roof had suddenly been lifted off. The mat had been covering a bit of a gap between the sidewalk and the foundation. There are some dead leaves and vinca stems in the gap, and some funky heavily textured composite material in the section of the foundation right below the doorsill.  The snakes were gliding in and out of the crevices in the foundation in a way that made me wonder just how deep those crevices are. (In other words: are there baby snakes in the wall of my house? or heaven forfend, in my basement?? Surely the two snakes entwined under the welcome mat have a strictly platonic relationship, don't you think? Aren't all snakes celibate? I think they're probably just like mice in that regard.)

They were very curious about us, lifting up their heads to see us better, flicking their tongues at us, even inching a little closer to us. Eventually they slithered away to quieter places.

In the abstract I can appreciate the niftiness of a snake. So sinuous! So stripey! So very many delicate ribs! But I find that snakes are best appreciated at a remove, and that my capacity for snake appreciation is modest. I was FULL UP on snake appreciation after that encounter at the back door. So you will perhaps understand that this evening when I moved one of the bricks that encloses the herb garden and found YET ANOTHER SNAKE curled up beneath it, only a few inches from my own personal hand, I let out a small shriek. He did not appreciate being shrieked at, and hied himself away in search of a new hiding place.

I am all done for a while with being wise and mature about snakes, my friends.

May 22

Okay, let's talk about bubble-doubling. For those of you who are at average risk from COVID-19: how are you approaching the un-hunkering process? The questions that are most on my mind tonight: how are you making decisions about spending time with people from other households? If you haven't been seeing your parents, are you going to visit them sometime soon? Will you give them a hug? Will you sit across the table from them? If your kids have been isolated from their friends, how are you going to ease them back into contact with people outside the family? I am willing to accept some risk to allow people to be together again, because humans need community and Zoom is an utterly inadequate substitute. How much risk? That's the kazillion dollar question.

Please also tell me: how are you modifying your decision-making as businesses open back up? Under what circumstances will you go to a restaurant? Which non-essential errands will you indulge in? I have to say, I love the idea of nice browsy trips to the yarn shop (almost certainly safe: good-sized space, never crowded) and to the garden store (probably riskier but hard to assess: mostly outside in the sun (good), much more likely to be busy (bad)).

There is some disagreement among the adults in the family about how to handle bubble expansion. Let's suppose that Adult A wants to invite dear friends over for a barbecue, but Adult B says "I don't like it because they provide childcare for those neighbors who are always having people over." The specifics have been modified but the core idea is the same: people have been making all kinds of decisions during the lockdown, and those decisions will have unpredictable consequences. What's the best way forward? What are you doing in your family, and why, and how are you feeling about it?

May 21

Today Swistle posted about jumping spiders and grilled cheese, and I have some thoughts about both of those things.

I first noticed a jumping spider at the back door last week. I dropped the garbage can on top of it and left it until morning. (I did not mention to Elwood, before he moved the garbage can back to its usual spot, that he should watch out for jumping spiders. He did not get jumped on, but I still feel that I should have given him a heads-up.) Joe found a few of them in the basement while he was lifting weights. I found one in the bathtub. (I plunked the Comet can down on its head, but I forgot to warn Elwood about why the Comet can was in the bathtub the next morning -- are you noticing a theme here?)

I said I had some thoughts about the jumping spiders, but mostly those thoughts are EEK and also WHY? We don't usually have jumping spiders. Is it, like, a meta-plague -- a supplemental plague in plague-time, in case we were feeling insufficiently plagued? I believe that one plague at a time is more than enough. The Egyptian plagues sound extremely unpleasant but at least they were sequential and not simultaneous.

The jumping spiders are making it tricky for me to muster the motivation to sustain my "Pull-Up By 50" fitness regimen, which requires me to lie down on the basement floor. Joe said, "Mom, you should keep it going. I'll protect you from the jumping spiders." I said, "Do you mean that you will smite them or that you will say, 'Mom, you've been through childbirth five times; you can handle a spider'?" (What he actually meant was that he would find it amusing to say, "Hey, is that a spider?" when it was NOT a spider. Do the grownup ladies find that amusing? OF COURSE we do not.)

So: I vote no on jumping spiders. I also vote no on grilled cheese with mayo.

When I was a small girl I was an extreeeeeeeemely picky eater. I was embarrassed about my pickiness; I didn't like being picky. But I really couldn't help it. I still remember how awful onions tasted. It caused me genuine distress to put them in my mouth, much as I might feel about eating a live jumping spider these days. Going to restaurants was sometimes stressful, because the food was more expensive and I was expected to have my company manners on display. Once we were traveling through North Carolina and I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich at a restaurant. Grilled cheese had always been a safe choice in my experience, but something was deeply, badly, painfully wrong with this grilled cheese sandwich. It turns out that in North Carolina, many people think it is a special delicious treat to put mayonnaise inside a grilled cheese sandwich. At that point in my life I would probably have eaten spackle before I would have eaten mayonnaise. Even though I eat mayonnaise happily here at age 49, I had such a powerful unhappy response to that early 80s sandwich that I can't even hear the words "mayo" and "grilled cheese" together in a sentence without a shudder. Swistle's post was actually talking about mayo on the outside of a grilled cheese sandwich, but my "no" vote remains unchanged. No mayo on the grilled cheese, no jumping spiders in the house. End of discussion.

May 20

I need some new scripts, I think.

It looks like we're going to be living for a while with masks and social distancing, and there is already opposition to those things among a subset of the population. So I'm looking for clear, friendly ways to say "Hey, let's move six feet apart" and also "Hey, your mask doesn't protect anyone if it's only covering your chin."

(Okay, this may be an unhelpful digression, but I feel that I could approach the task of trying out new scripts with more equanimity if I understood it better. Like, sure, lobby for your business to be considered essential or for modifications of your state's reopening plan. Peaceful assembly and petition -- it's in the Constitution and we should all support it. But the idea that we have a right to infect our neighbors with a new and highly contagious and fairly deadly disease -- what "right" could that possibly be? And the ugly ageist ableist assumptions lurking in their eagerness to dismiss the mortality risk? Coming from folks who voted for Trump because, allegedly, protecting human life was their #1 priority? This does not make any sense to me.)

So when I go for a walk around a nearby lake and people are smack in the middle of the trail, making it impossible for me to stay six feet away unless I detour into the mud, I don't know quite what to say. I would prefer to visit the lake occasionally. I would also prefer not to keep tromping into the mud. And I worry that the politicization of our responses to COVID-19 means that a friendly "six feet apart, please" or "can you give me a little more space, please?" will be interpreted as "look, here is someone who probably voted for Hillary because she hates unborn babies."

Yesterday a guy came to take a look at our roof, which has been leaking around the chimney in the wake of the rain deluging the Midwest. It was an extremely annoying visit. We thought that our roof had a ten-year guarantee, but this guy is telling us we need to have some work done on the chimney to the tune of $500. My irritation is compounded by the fact that he always wants to talk primarily to Elwood. Inwardly I'm like, "Listen, buddy, I'm the one who scheduled the appointment; I'm the one who will write the check. This is not 1955 and I do not need my husband's permission to hire you." This would have been vexing under any circumstances, but yesterday I was further annoyed by his decision to wear a mask that didn't cover his nose and to stand too close to my husband. "I don't have any cooties," he said. "I see my doctor regularly." 

This is a new social situation, and I am not sure the old rules apply. Normally I would not start a dispute over science with a tradesperson in my home; normally I would not say "Back up, pal, because your doctor is not capable of telling you whether you're shedding the virus asymptomatically at this moment!" I did not do these things yesterday. But my decision not to push back niggled at me for the rest of the day.

Have I told you all about my hamster ball idea? I am thinking of starting a company that manufactures human hamster balls. If we all went about in hamster balls with a six-foot diameter, then social distancing would be effortless! Yesterday I also mused about a paramecium costume, with 6-foot cilia dangling all over. It would have an internal mechanism -- a switch or a pump or something -- that would cause the cilia to stop dangling and project outwards if you felt that someone nearby was failing to observe social distancing norms. One of my kids is observing that Soviet-era gas masks are available for only $20 on eBay, if I feel the need for a more emphatic statement about the importance of protecting one's airway.

What I actually need to be thinking about is how to be both clear and cordial. If I just say, "Could you pull your mask up, please?" and then let any eye-rolling flow right off my back, that's probably a better solution than manufacturing a spiky paramecium costume.

How's it going for you? Do you have stories and/or scripts to share? It's a weird time to be alive for sure.

May 19

I was thinking about knitting math this afternoon and I had a massive DUH moment. If I were figuring out the number of stitches in a non-mitered square, it would be easy-peasy: stitches per garter ridge x number of ridges, which is the same as 2x². It's a square! The area of a square is a solved problem! But somehow the diagonal construction of these squares, and the presence of a spine stitch, and the resulting weird numbers -- it made the math seem much more complicated than it actually is.

The whole time I have been making this blanket, I have wanted a formula to tell me when a square is halfway done. Whenever I'm doing something that takes a while, I like being able to quantify my progress. With a mitered square, you're halfway done when you've worked x² stitches, where x is the number of stitches on one side of your square. This falls in different places, though, depending on the size of your square. It's messy to add up the actual numbers (79 + 79 + 77 + 77 + ...), and I knew there had to be a way to express it. And there is! Are you ready, O ye few but mighty members of the Knitting And Also Math Appreciation Club?? Here is your formula, with thanks to my 20yo:

Let x = the number of stitches on one side of your square. Plug it in and you will get the number of completed garter ridges at which you are halfway done. So if you are making a square with 30 stitches on a side? You'll cross the halfway point near the end of the ninth ridge (y = 8.79). What if there are 12 stitches on a side? You're halfway done after 3.51 ridges.

This is probably the niche-iest of all the niche posts I have ever written in almost 16 years of blogging. But someday, maybe, someone will search "how to tell when you're halfway done with a mitered square" and Google will steer her here.

PS A bonus equation for those of you who haven't had enough yet, before I recycle the pages on which my 20yo and I scribbled notes today: if you want to know how many total stitches you've completed at the end of any garter ridge, it's 2y(2x - y), where x is the number of stitches on one side and y is the number of completed ridges. You're welcome!

May 18

I am working steadily on the lockdown blanket, and it has been growing apace. (Well, we might need to define "apace" loosely for the purposes of this post.) 

Two weeks ago:

And here's tonight's version:

Here, let me show you the couch for scale:

I want it to be big enough to wrap up in on a chilly winter day, so I have quite a bit more knitting to do. It is a hefty thing-- it will probably weigh three pounds when I am done with it. 

If you are able to zoom in on the couch picture (it is a sign of the times that I had to go back and un-capitalize "zoom"), you might be able to see a notebook page with a column of numbers and a graph. I was trying to figure out how the math works for stitch counts per square based on starting side length. Almost all of the squares in this blanket are mitered, so if I pick up 40 stitches on one side of the square, the first two rows will each be 79 stitches long (40 on the first side + 1 center stitch + 40 on the second side - 2 stitches consumed in the double decrease) and the next two will each be 77 stitches long.

I am mostly using up odds and ends of worsted- and Aran-weight yarn for this project, though I seem to be constitutionally incapable of getting through any project designed to use up leftovers without buying a little more yarn. The result of using odds and ends of yarn to knit up squares of varying size? A lot of yarn chicken. "Sure," I think to myself, "I can knit a 25-stitch square with this blob of yarn. Looks about right." And you know, sometimes I'm exactly right. But sometimes I'm biting my nails. WILL I MAKE IT? WILL I HAVE TO KNIT THE LAST ROWS OF THIS SQUARE IN A DIFFERENT COLOR? CAN YOU STAND THE SUSPENSE? 

Math to the rescue: it only took a few minutes of looking at the numbers to see that it was a quadratic function, and a few minutes more to figure out the details: if I cast on x stitches per side, the square will eventually contain 2x²-1 stitches. This way, see, I can knit up a quick 50 stitches and chuck them on the scale, and I can tell in advance whether I have enough yarn to finish the square I'm planning. 

...I am suddenly and self-consciously aware that this is a super SUPER niche post, and that the Venn diagram of "people who sketch out quadratic functions in their bullet journals" and "people who like to read knitting posts" might look like this:

So! Happy reading! If I were not in the middle of a May blogging streak this post would go straight into drafts, but here we are.

May 17

I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine.

Churches in Gladlyville received permission to distribute Holy Communion this week. We listened to the liturgy livestream in the parking lot, and then lined up: at least six feet apart, wearing masks, sanitizing our hands at the entrance to the church, moving briskly back to our vehicles to make our acts of thanksgiving there. I was not sure how this would go. All my life I have been a person who is cautious about new things, and this whole situation is one long concatenation of weird new things.

My lover speaks and says to me, "Arise, my friend, my beautiful one, and come!"

On the way to church I was reminded forcefully of two long-ago experiences. The first happened above Glasgow, on the September morning in 1998 when we arrived for our two-year stay in Edinburgh. The morning sun was dazzling, but below us was a heavy bank of gray cloud. I had been worried about moving to a rainy climate because the sun (or its absence) has such a huge effect on my mood, and I told myself firmly, "Don't forget, when you are down below those ugly clouds, that up here the sun is glorious and the skies are bluest blue. What you experience doesn't determine what is." 

The second happened in early 2007. It was the first year of my doctoral program, and I was worried: mostly about money, during that season when I was part-time and unfunded, but also about how to be a good mother and a good doctoral student at the same time, and about what an academic future could possibly look like for me. My oldest son asked me to take him to a local concert, where one of the performers was Vicky Beeching. One of her songs shook something loose in me, reminded me that I did not need to fret and be afraid. I remember thinking, "Oh, it's you! It's you! How could I have forgotten that you are always with me?"

I had that same jolt of recognition this morning: it's YOU, always present, only hidden for a time.

Let me see your face, let me hear your voice. For your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely.

This pandemic has reminded me that we are made to be together with other human beings-- to share their air, to make contact, to connect. This has been true from the very beginning of our existence: it is not good for man to be alone. I did not know how glad I would be to see our church family again, even briefly and behind masks. I did not know how glad I would be to come back to that beautiful consecrated space, where one day we will worship together again.

For see, the winter is past, the rains are over and gone.

I did know how glad I would be to receive the Eucharist again. I was worried that I would ugly-cry when our pastor placed the Eucharist in my hand (an advantage to mask-wearing, though, is that nobody can see if your nose is running), but I did not. I mostly kept it together until we were back in the car praying the Anima Christi together. "Suffer me not to be separated from you" -- that's the line that did me in.

The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines, in bloom, give forth fragrance.

During this season with no communal worship I have told myself again and again that God is not constrained by the sacraments, and he still desires for us to know his presence and receive his grace. I have tried to be diligent in prayer, to dig deeper into Scripture in these days when there have been no public Masses. Only two days ago I was posting unsympathetically about heedless demands for the return of public Masses.

But oh-- there is nothing like the Eucharist. I have been staring at this screen for a while now, thinking about how I might be able to explain that better, but maybe I'll just steer you to St. Thomas Aquinas instead. It is hope and strength and lightness of heart; it is the food that transforms us into the "aroma of Christ."

Let him lead me to the banquet hall, and let his banner over me be love.

May 16

Who else is reading Oliver Twist with me, or planning to start it? I am a little past the one-third mark. Oliver and Bill Sykes have just set out on their mysterious expedition. Bill has a loaded pistol in his pocket, and Oliver has been warned that he faces death at Bill's hands if he speaks a word.

The relationship between Bill and Nancy is striking me this time through the book. Nancy is an interesting character: more intelligent and more perceptive than a lot of Dickens women, but also thoroughly mired in her underworld life. How did she wind up with Bill? Was he less repulsive, once upon a time? Maybe human trafficking hasn't changed much across the last 150 years.

If Nicole the Victorian literature scholar is reading this, maybe she'll chime in: I'm intrigued but also annoyed by Dickens' apparent conviction that good blood trumps good breeding. I posted a bit about this when we read Bleak House -- I just don't find Esther's goodness persuasive. How could she be such a sunshiny kid after such a terrible upbringing? The same thing is true for Oliver. How would he know what's right? Why would he be motivated to do the right thing in these circumstances? Dickens seems to be saying "We must have pity on the poor! Let's send them some kids from rich families to show them how to be better."

Tell me what you're enjoying, or what you're annoyed by! If you haven't started, jump on in. Oliver Twist is shorter and faster-paced than the other AMDRAL novels have been, so there's plenty of time to finish it before June. Or if you're reading something else because Dickens isn't your cup of tea (I'm looking at you, Tracy!), tell me what's on your bedside table these days.

May 15

Well, this has been a good month to stay away from social media. I've been avoiding Facebook and Twitter since the end of April, and that appears to have been a prudent decision. Things I have learned from Catholics online:

1. The media is overhyping COVID-19 to pave the way for the Democrats (or should I say the Democrat Party, for the more authentic far-right tone?) to step into their new roles as wannabe socialist overlords. Actually COVID-19 is not that bad! People who die from it were going to die anyway! We're all going to die! What's the big fuss? Stop living your life in fear! [say the people who are posting about living in fear of an alleged Democratic plot to overthrow democracy in America]. 
2. Objecting to the idea that vulnerable people might die hideous deaths all alone is not a pro-life position, because the label pro-life should only be used in opposition to abortion and euthanasia. Words have meanings, and therefore "pro-life" does not mean "protecting the right to life." So stop saying that, because it makes people feel bad, like they shouldn't be arguing in favor of a course of action that will lead directly to avoidable excess deaths among the elderly and medically fragile. (This assertion sounds like it must have been cooked up by a Russian bot, because it is (a) breathtakingly illogical and (b) precisely the line of argument that caused 60% of white Catholics to vote for the most incompetent president in history, but no -- this is the actual POV put forward by a very popular Catholic mom-blogger.)
3. Our bishops should not be listening to public health experts. No, they should be listening to US, their sheep. Sheep who are committed to good sheepfulness usually tell their shepherds how to do their jobs. In fact, Jesus said he wants the sheep to be freeeee of meanypants shepherds. (An antidote to the madness, if you needed one.)
4. Science is overrated. In actual fact, COVID-19 is no worse than the flu, and we don't shut everything down for the flu. Except sometimes science is good, like when it says that receiving Communion on the tongue is no more likely to spread disease than receiving in the hand.

I have some thoughts about these assertions:

1. It is entirely appropriate to be worried about a disease that is more than twice as contagious as the flu and at least five times as deadly. (Also, if you're worried about a party attempting to pull a power grab in violation of the will of the people, it is not the Democrats whose maneuvers should keep you up at night. See: Mitch McConnell & Merrick Garland, and a whole lot of nonsense emanating from the Oval Office and culminating in this week's Supreme Court arguments).
2. I am going to keep using "pro-life" to mean "protecting the right to life," and "anti-abortion" to mean "specifically, narrowly opposed to abortion." The former term includes the latter, but I take a dim view of "pro-life" perspectives that explicitly exclude the question "How can I avoid spreading a painful and deadly disease within my community?" because the answer is difficult.
3. Bishops know more than laypeople about how to bishop, and public health people know more than bishops about how to public-health. The world would be a better place if more people who were tempted to say "I'm no expert, but..." just stopped talking after acknowledging their lack of expertise. (There is this one Catholic blogger who keeps railing against the alleged innumeracy that keeps people from seeing "the truth" -- that the COVID-19 numbers are no big deal and grandma was going to die anyway (that's why she was in the nursing home). It's making me bonkers. Bonkers! Access to a pocket calculator and a Blogger login doesn't make you an epidemiologist; it makes you dangerous.)
4. If you see people talking about a "study" in Portland that said communion on the tongue was A-OK, here is the real story: they asked two physicians for their opinions. That is not a "study"; that is not science. I say this as a person who strongly prefers to receive kneeling, on the tongue: I am not going to do that again for a while. It would require my pastor to get closer to my respiratory tract, and I just don't know what might be lurking there. If my desire to show reverence to the Real Presence in the Eucharist supersedes my desire to show reverence to the undeniable presence of Christ in the least of these -- specifically, in the elderly and medically fragile behind me in the communion line -- then my ideas about reverence are badly out of whack.

Huh, it is almost 11:00 and I am going to throw up this rather cranky post and go to bed. Is it a bad idea to toss out hasty and unedited thoughts about being Catholic in the middle of a global pandemic? It probably is, but I think I'm going to do it anyway.

May 14

We have been cooking up a storm here in lockdown. Dinner is a little bright spot: pleasure, variety, and, for me, capsaicin. I think maybe I'm chasing the endorphin buzz. A couple of nights ago Elwood made beef stroganoff, and I spooned a pile of chili crisp on top. That combination of flavors might strike some of you as very odd, but I'm here to tell you it was scrumptious.

A month ago I had never heard of chili crisp. But Sam Sifton wrote a chili crisp paean for the NYT Magazine, and I knew right away I needed some chili crisp to spice up my bland and mealy lockdown life. Amazon delivered the jar on April 25, and I have eaten it all. (Well, my 20yo ate one spoonful, and there is still a tiny puddle on the bottom of the jar. But I will eat that last little bit with my dinner.)

I have also been going to town on harissa. There was a Smitten Kitchen post about pantry staples that mentioned preserved lemon paste from New York Shuk. You guys, would it be insensitive for me to tell you how much happiness I derived from opening that box when it arrived? (I am conscious of the privilege inherent in having two portable jobs and, consequently, the room in our grocery budget to buy some goodies from NYC.) I ordered a jar of za'atar and a jar of harissa along with the preserved lemon paste, and OH it was a delight to unwrap them. I am using them all regularly, but the harissa most of all -- I've eaten about two-thirds of it.

We have also used up all of the chipotles in adobo (they went into the food processor to make a marinade for fajitas) and the last of a jar of sambal oelek (I mixed it with yogurt to coat chicken thighs). Happily we had a second jar of sambal oelek waiting in the pantry. 

Alex could not really know that I have been mainlining chili-pepper-based condiments lately, so it's a little surprising that his Mother's Day gift, when it arrives, will be four different jars of spicy goodness. I don't even know what they are going to be, but I am keeping an eye out for the delivery vans every day.

As usual, all of the Amazon links in this post are affiliate links. If you click through and buy some chili crisp of your very own, they will give me a few cents toward my next endorphin-buzz-inducing purchase.

May 13

It's been three years since we had mourning doves nesting in the corner of our porch. You might remember the story -- our neighbor's cat made an unexpectedly powerful leap and ate a fledgling in front of my horrified children.

We'd had mourning doves in that corner every year since 2008, but for a while it looked they wouldn't come back. This year we were surprised and a little worried to see a mourning dove pair taking up residence in that space again. The neighbor's cat is older now, but presumably he would still be interested in a snacklet of baby mourning doves.

Stella has been the most worried about the situation, perhaps because she was fondest of the cat and thus most horrified by his choice to go hunting on our porch. She mused about cat deterrent strategies. Perhaps we could stand at the ready with a Super-Soaker? 

Google told me about the existence of spiky plastic mats designed to repel marauding cats, and I decided that I could bring myself to spend $20 on anti-cat spikes. We have missed the mourning doves; we do not want the neighbor's cat to eat any more of their babies. Stella was counting down the days until the package arrived. "Two more days until Tuesday!" she announced on Sunday. "What's happening on Tuesday?" I said with a frown, worrying that I should know the answer to that question. (Does anyone else find that the bareness of a lockdown calendar means, weirdly, that it's easy to assume the day's calendar is empty when it is not actually empty? (And has anyone else shown up to a video meeting in pajamas as a result?)) "The mats are coming!" she reminded me. "Oh, right," I said.

Yesterday she said again, "Tomorrow is Tuesday!" "What's happening on Tuesday?" I said with a frown, worrying that I should know the answer to that question. (Maybe I was born to be a professor. I have the absent-minded part down pat.) 

The mats arrived on schedule and they are indeed spiky. I would not want to stand on them barefoot; I certainly would not want to try to make a big jump from them. They are very lightweight, though, and they blow around if there's any wind -- probably they are more useful if you are trying to train a cat to stay off the kitchen counter. We have tried a couple of different adhesives now to secure them in position, settling most recently on duct tape.

I hope the mama mourning dove appreciates our efforts on her behalf. Probably, though, she is just hoping we will stop fussing with rolls of duct tape nearby, and leave her in peace.

May 12

Bearing wrote a post about the relationship between her levels of pandemic fear and pandemic risk, and I nodded along; my experience has been pretty much parallel. I do not like uncertainty, I do not like novel threats, and I was in a STATE for the first few weeks of this. I also hate with a keen and fiery loathing the feeling that I should have seen something coming down the pike but failed to do so, and I could not stop thinking about the repeated conversations with my 20yo back in January, full of blithe assurances that we didn't need to worry too much about the news from Wuhan.

One of the silver linings of lifelong anxiety is that it keeps me aware of how bad humans are at estimating the gravity of a particular risk. I could not begin to tell you how many times I have freaked the heck out about something that seemed ridiculous in hindsight, or focused so narrowly on a hypothetical risk that I was blindsided by an actual event. Even when I think as hard as I can about the risks involved in a particular situation, two things are true: first, my feelings don't always fall in line with my conclusions, and second, my conclusions aren't always correct.

That's especially true with COVID-19 risks. We're all working with incomplete data here. I don't really want my kids using the running trail right now, because we don't have good information on how far plumes of virus-laden droplets might stream out behind runners and cyclists. How likely is it that they will pick up the virus if they were to get jobs at the grocery store? Nobody really knows, just as nobody knows whether my husband and I would be in the group of COVID-19 patients whose recovery is straightforward or the group that requires long-term mechanical ventilation.

When I left small-town West Virginia to go to college, Chicago seemed like such a dangerous place. Driving in the city filled me with dread and adrenaline. I still don't love to drive in Chicago, honestly. But it wasn't until we went back to southern West Virginia in 2012 for my 25th high school reunion that I could see how dangerous the West Virginia roads are. I'm a little surprised by the numbers, actually. Traffic-related fatality rate in West Virginia: >20/100,000. Traffic-related fatality rate in Chicago (across a slightly different time period): <5/100,000. 

I'm still handling mail cautiously; I'm going running on quiet neighborhood streets so I can avoid the crowded trail; I'm minimizing contact with people outside my family. And yet, like Bearing, I'm feeling less fearful even as the number of cases in my region grows higher.