Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

Rain Soon it will be consistently warm. We may even get to the point where we complain about how warm it is. Maybe it will be so sunny that I will not be able to tolerate sitting by the big picture window at the kitchen table and I will have to retreat to the cool isolation of the basement. But those days aren't here yet. I'm still wearing my down vest and feeling like Marty McFly in Back to the Future  when Biff the bully mistakes him for wearing a life preserver. I wear my vest and reach down behind me to touch the radiator, to reassure myself that the heat is turned on, that maybe I will grow warm. Running water on Dry Hill. When I first moved to Amherst, we lived in a two bedroom apartment in Colonial Village. We had electric heat and were frugal graduate students, so the heat remained off, or nearly off most of the time. Maybe it was on just enough to keep the temperature above freezing. The good thing about a small apartment was that it did not take much to hea...

Like a Fish Out of Water It is funny how images come to inhabit certain spaces and become like a theme for the day. Perhaps because I mentioned fishing last night, this morning's poem ended with a fish gasping air on the floor (deck?) of an aluminum canoe. And today, when I was talking to Tom, he told the story of being a child and going fishing in the distracted way that kids who are not interested in fishing go fishing, and spending his time curled up on the floor of the boat until one of his brothers would tease his line so that it looked like he had hooked a fish. But the poem this morning wasn't really about fishing, it was about breathing. Gasping for breath. Seeking life and living, maybe.  A couple of tall dead trees on Mt. Toby. There are moments of excitement that we look forward to, like turning 10 years old, a first kiss, a concert, meeting a literary hero, playing a particularly satisfying gig, a really great writing stint. More recently, it is the p...

Morning Ritual As long as I can remember, my father has been a morning person. He was always awake before anyone else in the house practicing violin, going fishing, or making breakfast. I was never a morning person growing up. Even in my fishing heyday, it was always a torturous thing to wake up in the predawn air and make my way down to the lake. I've never asked my father about his mornings, but as I've grown older, I have come to enjoy mornings more. It may have started with when the twins reached middle and high school age and their bus came early, picking them up in Leverett, nearly an hour before school started. After making sure they were awake, packing what meager lunches I could assemble, and facilitating breakfast, I would have a span of time before the grade school bus came. There was enough time to sit at the breakfast table and work on a poem, feed the chickens, and drink a cup of coffee before waking my youngest child. It was a pleasant period of meditation...

Alligators and Resilience It is, once again, rainy and cold, though flowers are out, the neighbor's trees are in bloom, and the daffodils have their bright yellow petals open inspite of the weather. This weekend, I Zoomed with my kids, and all three of them are wrapping up classes in the coming weeks. One it taking classes to prepare for applying for graduate school, one is graduating this year, and one is finishing up her sophomore year. They have all navigated this transition with varying degrees of resilience, and I am proud of them all. Daffodils on a sunnier day. It is hard in the best of times to wrap up a semester, finish up final papers, and to take a slew of final exams. But this semester is so enmeshed with the COVID-19 pandemic that the challenge quotient is even greater. It makes me think about the resources we have and turn to in times of stress and crisis. Clearly, one of the things I used to always turn to was food. I was an avid chip eater for years and...

Gatherers of Salt I am lucky to work at a college with so many dedicated and compassionate people. I was at a meeting today... which, in the era of the pandemic, means, I was on Zoom with a group of my peers who were all in their respective homes accompanied with their children and partners and pets, and together we talked about things that impact our students. The Sawmill River I started the meeting by reading Neruda's "Keeping Still," which I shared an excerpt of yesterday. You can read the whole poem here . It is a beautiful poem, and I was so moved that I almost could not finish reading it out loud. Life has been such a sustained frenzy since the start of work from home, that I choked at the idea of us stopping, even if only for a moment, and pausing in all the commotion so that "the gatherer of salt would look at his hurt hands." I have been insulating myself in the cloak of work, the role that I play for the college, for faculty, for studen...

Dreaming of Pickles I suppose I'm on a culinary kick. Perhaps that's one of the side effects of a pandemic quarantine. Today I splurged and opened the little bottle of cold brew coffee I had in the fridge since the pandemic started. I originally purchased it for a meeting at the college. For some meetings, I'll go to the bookstore, or if I have time in the morning, stop at the Co-op and buy some drinks and snacks, maybe a box of pastries. This was one of the leftover drinks that didn't get chosen and it sat in my office fridge until it was time to leave and I decided to take it with me.  My delicious coffee. So this morning, instead of my usual black tea, I filled a tall glass with ice, made a single serving of simple syrup, mixed that with the cold brewed coffee, and topped it with slow drizzle of half and half. It was wonderful watching the hue change, and then I gave it a little twirl with a chopstick and presto, my own beautiful fancy coffee drink. I actu...

Turkey Day Dear friends,  I had a wonderful post, one of those one that just roll off the keyboard and build and crest, and wash over you like an ocean wave. But it didn't save, and perhaps, like the ocean wave, it is lost back into the sea from which it came. I don't know if I have the stamina to recreate it today. I see now, all day (I leave my blog page open all day to collect different articles I find) it did not save.  Feeling sad and forlorn. Here’s an attempt to reconstruct what I lost: Last November Debbie's employer gave every worker a frozen Turkey. I thought this Dickensonian beneficence was marvelous. I loved the idea of being given a great round bird of heft. But since we were travelling to spend Thanksgiving with relatives, the bird was tucked into our freezer drawer nestled under frozen peas, frozen bananas, and nestled with the occasional pint of ice cream. This Easter I felt inspired and decided to make a marvelous Easter quara...

The Theory of Possibility It snowed this morning. Which makes me feel like April really is the cruelest month. The wood stove is still going, though I almost let it burn out again. We are starting to run low on a few staple items. I finished the last of the cranapple juice, which has been my guilty pleasure... one of my guilty pleasures over the course of the pandemic. I think we are supposed to treat juice like soda or sugar cereal these days, but damn, I love a glass of juice poured over ice. My favorite photo of Julie Graham. I was reading this morning about how we write to explore things we fear, that we often turn to writing out of sorrow or loss, or when we are seeking solace. I suppose there is that for me, but other times, and this happens with music too, I am merely a conduit, whatever is drifting around in the atmosphere combines with what I had for dinner last night, and maybe a dream that was interrupted by my alarm, and whatever curry that makes, emerges on the ...