roulette

Headline tonight: Ontario schools closed until May at least. There are a total of 8,505 (7,427 yesterday) cases of Covid-19 in Canada today, with 101 (86 yesterday) deaths to date.

A kind of hush all over the house today… Yes, I did make 3 more masks. No, there was no swearing, but there were emphatic appeals to slow down. I seem to have a very heavy right foot - the foot that controls the speed of the white Mephistopheles. 

I had just enough elastic to finish them off. My fabric supply held out. My bobbin didn’t run out of thread in the middle of a run. The sun came out from behind the clouds. It was with no small amount of relief that I put the dreaded machine away in it’s cupboard.

For lunch I whipped up an Instant Pot enabled curried lentil soup with lots of vegetables. It had a nice spicy warmth and felt healthy and filling.

The grocery list was getting long, so with a newly sewn mask in hand we ventured into the scary wilderness. Carm geared up and went into the store with a disinfecting wipe in hand, while I waited in the car. 

While I was waiting a car pulled in beside me, the woman went into the store and was back before Carm. I watched her get into her car with her giant purse (think virus sponge), she pulled out her phone and played with that, fixed her hair and touched her face, then, without hand sanitizer or a seatbelt, drove away. A risky game of roulette.

Carm appeared at the back of the car with bags of groceries, carefully pulled off his mask, then got in the car - he hadn’t touched anything without using the disinfecting wipe but still used the hand sanitizer. 

Safely in the car, we went for a drive. Oh, it was so nice to get out and see different scenery! For a grin we went past our old house in Limoges (25 years ago!). We had to laugh that the statue of the Virgin Mary was still center stage in front of the house.

Back home Carm prepped the brussels sprouts and mushrooms while I got the rest of supper ready. Garlic Noodles topped with Chinese Brussels Sprouts were in our bowls tonight. The noodles were a new recipe and gosh! they were good.

It was a productive day in my little square of the plant. Much like driving in the car, life seems to go on beyond the glass, distant and yet close. I feel that this reality is becoming normalized, nothing about it seems shocking, just inevitable, although my brain can’t really process what is to come in the weeks and months ahead.

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”

~Helen Keller