What Matters

How are you doing with the distancing and the re-opening now?

What I've come to accept in this time of the COVID-19 Coronavirus is that it is going to go on for a very long time. I was a kid when polio (paralytic poliomyelitis) was rampant. Public places were avoided. Newspapers and radio let us know where outbreaks happened, locally and nationally, as did neighbors, relatives and friends. As a result of my mother's carefully chosen avoidance of those spaces and contacts, I didn't get polio, nor did my siblings. But I didn't learn to swim until I was 16 years old because I wasn't allowed to go to a pool until well after the 1955 Salk vaccine (a weakened poliovirus and wasn't wholly protective) immunizations began. Even afterward, public space avoidance was often still a part of our lives since not everyone was yet fully protected (herd immunity not yet accomplished) and there were cases. It wasn't until 1961 that the Sabin vaccine (inactivated poliovirus) was approved and widely administered that the public space avoidance started becoming memories. Everybody knew someone who had had it or succumbed to it. I still know people who were crippled by it.

So, we are figuring this all out again. How to do it, how to plan around it, for it. We can be proud we have already learned what to disinfect, how to set up procedures and precautions that mitigate exposures, and continue learning about different ways to conduct daily life. There's plenty of space for innovation now and in the days ahead. Plenty of space to help each other. Plenty of space to lift our spirits because it's tough being unable to touch and be present for each other as life presents passages we once gathered to celebrate or mourn. Yes, we'll join in attenuated ways until some still indiscernable future we will notice, COVID-19 Coronavirus cases, physical distancing, and public gathering avoidance are slipping away into memories.

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Here's what works: Shared photos, music, texts, phone calls, email, writing, cards, music, animals, drawing, fresh vegetables and good chicken legs delivered "curbside" at the farm market, a successful bread bake and, not least--seeing family and friends "distantly". And walks where the friend who walks with me is our beautiful natural world.

This whole thing bares the bones of what matters.

Aidan just before social distancing when one of Wendy's goats surprised her with babies birthing. The red light is from the heat lamp. It was still cold then.

Wendy and V and W.

John, by this time was working from home.

Picasso Luckibird helping John distance work. I wonder, is he's now on the payroll?

I happened to have been completing a walk around the perimeter of the farm with Aidan when Wendy emerged from the barn yelling to us that baby goats were birthing. A total surprise their mama was expecting. Aidan ran up to the house to get the Birthing Boxes she has for such occasions (usually it's a planned goat parenthood). A countervailing experience that served a mighty distraction from the impending pandemic for all the weeks since.

Toby maintained a quiet vigil as the goats were birthing in the stalls a few feet away...

Aidan with V and W during one of their first forays outdoors.

And later with W and Miss Florence the Friendly Chicken.

Keoni returned from Juilliard right after it closed (as well as NY Phil where he had some scheduled viola weekends), and just before everything in NYC shut down.

Soon he and Aidan sent this...

So good  talking with Keoni when back from school he surprised me showing up toward the end of one of my farm walks and we could converse for a bit, albeit at distance.

Aidan has been home, too from high school. His Junior year and maybe part of his Senior year have become a "gap year". Some transition class work but he is focused more on the farm activity, distance cello orchestra and lessons, even continuing to give his student virtual lessons, and baking gorgeous desserts. Keoni has spent up to 7 hours a day with Zoom classes. Both of them have been practicing and recording auditions for virtual summer music institutes and camps.

Sister Susie, two months ago, began recording pandemic-related video. Here's a sample of one of many she posted on YouTube at her channel SusieFM. This one was when John Prine came down with the virus...



Over in Utah, young Kingston got to try out his Christmas bicycle at the local park...

Go, Kingston!!!

Valerie was able to return home to NM for a couple of weeks and sent a selfie while enroute...

One of those super masks in flight, too...

...and a shot of the nearly empty plane. 

She had to quarantine when she returned to Utah to help out and be with the family. Tim continues his VA work in Albuquerque.

Dimetrios is enjoying brotherly love, too...

...from Elijah...

...and Kingston

The weather has often been cloudy and lots of rain fell. A warm winter, there was only a snowfall before December. Walks at Dock could have been bleak but the forms are so beautiful...

Paula and Carl in Tucson learning of my missing the desert southwest springtime, went to work and sent these from their backyard...



...all but two photos, the one of them and the rainbow one, were from their yard. All were their individual photos which I recently learned how to assemble into a video for viewing.

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I hope you enjoyed some of the counter-balancing imagery and digitation here, for the many hard news stories bombarding our space this past week have brought me to tears. Reviewing the wonders and beauties that still, regardless, abound, is soul-soothing and restorative.

There will be more from this mini-archive in the days ahead. I look forward to setting them out to share with you.