March 21, 2020 - Dipatches from SIP - Saturday

It is spring, but it doesn't feel like spring; it feels the soft ground, about to give way, on the crest of the cliff just before the drop. It's been most of a week, everyone staying close to home. We are all on edge and either testy or terrified, in about equal waves. There is no end of gut-twisting news in the media about this invisible yet very tangible enemy that ravages bodies and spirits and businesses and stock markets. And there's all the bluster from the top, trying to overlay their absolute and abject failure to take this seriously from the beginning and thus magnifying the danger to all.

As David Brooks writes in the New York Times: Screw This Virus

Meanwhile, we hang tight. Our granddaughter is here to spend a few nights, while her parents recover from a week of trying to WFH with a four-year-old running about. Daycare, of course, is closed.  So this weekend, we get the pleasure of granddaughter time and they will get a much needed, though socially-distanced, walk along the coast.

So of course, we made Unicorn Cookies - from scratch. Now we are almost out of flour -- and so are all the stores around here. And the yeast is gone. Sheesh,  everybody's baking!


This afternoon the sun slanted in from the west, backlighting the just-leafed out mulberry tree in our back yard, which had been dropping catkins all week. Sitting on the couch in the living room, just catching our breath, my daughter and I could just see through the big sliding glass door, faint clouds of pollen poofing out from the tree-branches, minute yellowish bursts, like mini-fireworks or elfin cannons of pollen. They weren't being released by the force of the wind knocking the branches about, because there wasn't much wind, and the poofs didn't come all at once, but a burst here, a burst there.  Perhaps little capsules were finally ready and warm enough to burst and eject the pollen into the balmy air. Along the top of the fence behind the tree, a mockingbird strutted its stuff, fanning its wings and ducking and dancing. Moments I might have missed, if I weren't sequestered in the house, staying home.