Today is a lovely mid-May day, filled with sun and birdsong. The world has leafed out and is a spectrum of vibrant green hues. I’m sitting at the computer, listening to the outside world and drinking my daily cup of coffee.
After a cool, wet spring we have returned to warm and dry conditions, prompting a high fire danger warning for today. While the temperature right now is a lovely 70F, there are frost and freeze warnings for tomorrow tonight.
I’m still dealing with Long Covid inflammation and joint pain which seems interminable and is exhausting. Covid has exacerbated my Post-Polio symptoms so I am trying to understand how best to live gracefully and well with the new normal. Clearly, being well vaccinated does not fully protect one from the late manifestations of Covid.
On Monday, Jennie and I took a walk in a much loved reserve a bit away from our home. I took my Zoom recorder in hopes of capturing nature sounds, especially frogs and birds. We excitedly captured a wide range of sounds, only to discover, when we returned home, that the sounds did not record because of an error on my part. This reminded me, yet again, of the importance of checking whether gear is actually working when in the field…. At the moment I am recording birds in our back yard using less stellar technology but with considerably better results.
We’ve lived here for close to three years now and, as it is a Portuguese community, have had the great pleasure of eating many Portuguese meals. Oddly, given our love of international cuisine, I have not prepared any Portuguese dishes. That omission was remedied last night when I followed a recipe for Portuguese fava bean stew. The result was delicious, hot and aromatic, and we are still talking about it this morning. Fortunately, there are leftovers.
It has been a great few days on the food front, as Saturday evening we attended a fundraiser for the local Afghan refugee community. We are very fond of Afghani cuisine so drove a couple of towns over with great anticipation. The food was delicious, made more so by the great good fortune of bumping into friends with whom to share it. As it happens, these friends we had previously only met on Zoom! There was, in typical Afghani fashion, an abundance of food and we were sent home with leftovers!
There was a lively artists discussion at our table, something we greatly miss. Seemingly inevitably, the question of how can we manage our lives and do our art in an insane world came up. Of course there were no answers, just the age old recognition of an ancient dilemma. This morning brought word from a poet friend, Andrew James Murray, that he was about to have published his third collection of poems, along with his thoughts about just doing what one can in the faced of chaos. As he turns fifty: “Fifty Poems for Fifty years!”
An image from our walk a couple of weeks ago:
Please share your thoughts and join the conversation!