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The Glow

I got a new daybed in my house. The bed is minimalist for a small but important room: the room has the sacred palm in it. I’ve reupholstered the furniture to fit in this new house. I’ve had pillows made. Lamps are set out. Pictures hung. Bedding added. Charging stations rigged up, carts assembled, rugs cleaned and laid on their mats....

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Optimist, Pessimist, Life, Death, Life

Saturday, and it’s raining. I’m eating dry Cheerios with raisins because I haven’t any milk. A hurricane is once again approaching, and the naming system is so worn out, all it can generate is Beta. RBG is dead, as are 198,000 Americans from COVID-19. I made a pot of white rice so I will have something to eat until my husband the...

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My Best Reader has Left Me

Mother at her 90th birthday party Marguerite Virginia Price Van Hecke died on May 29, 2020, following emergency surgery. Virginia was born on June 9, 1929, on the Road of Remembrance in Jackson, Mississippi, as the second child of Maggie Mae and James Murray Price, a little girl who was to have been named George William. From the start, she never...

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That Which Soothes When All Begins to Crumble

Though I welcomed—after our terror subsided—the stillness of our shelter-in-place life, we who had been circling and circling for years, the last few days I have felt as if I might crumble, my “dust to dust” having become friable, my feet of clay exposed, a descending that was not helped when the priest who understood me and yet encouraged...

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A Virus is Not Godzilla

A virus is not Godzilla. Its takeover of the world is not inevitable. Nor is a virus an act of God or a hurricane or tornado or anything else we have to passively accept as bigger than ourselves. A virus can be stopped. How? Quit giving it hosts. You can quit giving a virus hosts in two ways. First, you can let the tipping point of your population...

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We are Not Experiencing the Same Virus

One of the hard things about this time of coronavirus (there are so many) is that people are not in the same place. Not physically, not geographically, not psychologically. Some folks are blissfully learning to make their own pasta while reluctantly training themselves to spend 24 hrs a day in close-company with their spouse. Others, like me, are...

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What are We Talking About?

What are we talking about during this coronavirus? Is it the same thing we’re always talking about, just folded and stuffed into the container of the virus? What I’m asking is, are you riding your normal hobby horse—Trump has the analytical ability of a third grader; Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have the sense God gave a rock; the main...

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Where Go Our Dreams?

Today my grief is for the dreams. The coronavirus brings new feelings each day. For me, fear is primary among them. But today, my heart is breaking for those who have built dreams—a fabulous restaurant, their own plumbing business, a profitable bookshop—only to watch it shutter. Closed. No customers. Quiet. I grieve, too, for those who stand...

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Surgery in the Time of Coronavirus

I sat in the early-morning dark of the hospital parking lot, my phone clutched in my hand. I’d been in the lot since 3:30 am. The charge on the phone—my lifeline to my husband—was running out. No one else was in the lot. A fluorescent streetlight blinked. Was the pain in his leg a blood clot? Was he in danger? My gaze flickered between the...

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