Thoughts of Quarantine

I wasn't planning on mentioning the current pandemic thing happening, or the quarantine, or my feelings about any of it, but... I'm kind of grooving on how Mother Nature is using this time to do some repair work.

Tammie and I were talking about it this morning, how we keep reading about those folks who are busy mucking out closets, deep cleaning their houses, evicting every speck of dirt and filth and virus from their domicile. We, on the other hand, have not.

Once we got the master bedroom ready for her mother, we kind of slacked off. We did managed to clear out the storage shed in the back yard, which was a total bonus. We can actually get in there without having to tie a rope around one ankle first.

But other than that, we've not been doing the deep clean. We've been relaxing, doing a little healing of our own.

Ever since we bought the hat shop, we've been busy. I mean, not many breaks at all kind of busy. For the first three years or so, I was working full time at the school, then weekends and summers at the shop. It was exhausting. Then we brought my parents into our home and that dialed things up a notch or two. When they passed in 2017, we thought we'd catch a break, but there were legal things that needed attention: a house in Oregon to clean out and sell, and keep the shop running despite the horrible condition of the building (crappy landlords suck, folks).

What I'm saying is, there was no rest.

We kept going, trying to do it all and exhausting ourselves in the process. Then came the pandemic, Tammie's mom, and the lockdown, pretty much in that order. The shop was closed (in fact, the whole town is closed), and we were forced to stay put.

We looked around at all the boxes that need sorting, carpets that need cleaning, a yard that needs a nuclear bomb, and now a garden that needs tending.

And we've rested. The boxes are still full, the carpets are still funky (Tammie vacuums, but we have pets and we live at the beach, so there will be funk), and a yard filled with goathead stickers and sheep sorrel. The garden is being tended by Tammie, but the beauty of container gardening is the ease of tending. She waters, snacks on young leaves of radish, bok choi, and whatever the hell she has out there, and heals.

I've been trying to do some writing on book 3, beta reading a friend's manuscript, and trying to figure out how to print my manuscript on both sides of the paper (it flat-out refuses, no matter what settings I use).

We art around at the table, making cards to send out. We walk the dogs along the dirt lanes around our home, and revel in the relative silence. It's nature silence, you know? That silence filled with birdsong, the rustling of critters in the underbrush, and the sigh of the ocean.

So I don't feel guilty about not having a pristine house at the end of this, because this rest is doing more for me than a spotless house and manicured lawn ever could.

And I'm writing more, which heals my soul.