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| Smooth fringecup |
It's been over a month since my last post and what a month and more it has been. The baby is not a baby anymore even though we still call him "the baby"—he be full-blown toddler now. He runs, jumps, slides, swings, throws little tantrums, asks for what he wants, screams for what he wants, knows colors, colors with crayons and chalk, has preferences of what he likes to watch on TV. I don't think I even watch TV anymore, I just watch kid's shows.
Perhaps most pressing is reintroducing him into some form of daycare. Our daycare of choice that we're not signed up for yet continues to have pandemic protocols in place. Parents cannot go in the building with their kids. Meals must be packed beforehand. Masks worn by the children if possible, it seems. Though the daycare workers have been vaccinated, which is a bonus.
I, also, have received the first of two shots towards my vaccination. I got it before many of my age because I'm a veteran and I signed up to be notified by the Department of Veterans Affairs when they would have a shot available. Which they did well before any local hospital or private healthcare provider otherwise would have. So that's a bonus, too.
People are talking about the light at the end of the tunnel in this pandemic but still having a lot of tunnel to get through. When we go out—which is, to say, when we drive from one place to another in the car—we always see people who are walking the streets, stopping in stores, sitting at dining tables without masks on, drinking beers shoulder-to-shoulder with half a dozen other people, dogs sniffing and being pet, joggers huffing by, children leaping, screaming and playing across imagination stations and jungle gyms, whole extended families exiting happy and full from one of any number of restaurants.
We always shake our heads a little at the choices other people are making, even with the light at the end of the tunnel finally within view. But those are our prerogatives with baby and our own health concerns. Given other circumstances, who knows what choices we'd make.
The case count, though high and in the red but a month or so ago, is now in the orange to middling yellow moderate in Hood River County. I'm not sure that's made much of a difference in anyone's behavior though. People who were going to bars before, what bars were open, are still doing so. People who were hiding in their bomb shelter in their backyard with a million dollar virus-proof ventilation system are still doing so. People with jobs are still working. People who lost jobs are still out of those jobs, by and large, it seems.
But the plans are percolating, absolutely. Summer vacations, summer camps, spring getaways, weddings, rehearsals, even outdoor concerts—they're all being thought about and planned and scheduled and rented and money put down. Traveling in airplanes again, even. I think come this summer it will be like a light switch was turned on and people will be bustling with all that pent-up energy, case counts high or low, vaccination or no.
You can feel it, almost. In the air. Like a whiff of spring, a thawing of the ground, buds poking through the earth. Things are about to explode.
And where will we be, yours truly and family? Most likely keeping our distance still. It's easy when you have a toddler who's still very young and no one really knows the longer long-term consequences of infection. Easy to say, "Let's stay in today," or "If anything, let's go for a hike in a place not many people frequent and then let him run around in the grass."—amid the blooming wildflowers.
I've spotted biscuit root, grass widow, a couple of different mosses, desert parsley and smooth fringecup (pictured). All painstakingly identified by my wife, of course. The grass widow are perhaps the most interesting. They reminded me of a purple crocus only these are wild and they spring out of the pale green grass and earthy cakes of dead grass cloaking the knobby scabs and hillocks of dark rock. A few sharp leaves and pops of purple scattered across a slope, basking in the sun or hiding in the shade like a handful of constellations hidden behind a cloud.
Almost weekly now, the baby and I go up to where the old Rt. 30 used to be. There's only a paved biking trail there now. The fir forests slant up to the top of the gorge. There are sections of black oak and berry tumbles and, if I'm not mistaken, maple and birch copses tucked along the edges of any open spaces. But the firs dominate and everywhere, wherever they sink their roots, moss, lichen and ferns proliferate in their shade. It is cool under the firs on the southern end of the gorge, where the afternoon sun has already set. Frost may not even melt in places where the sun does not touch.
The writing is going well. I am in emails right now, back and forth, with an editor concerning a short story I've submitted for publication. It seems I will have another short story coming out this Memorial Day, titled We, Grits. Stayed tuned and I'll be sure to share a link.
I've decided to totally rewrite my novel. That first chapter I tried to capture the attention of literary agents with... sigh... it just wasn't up to snuff. Most of the book isn't. I developed a new game plan in response to this failure, which has partially defined the beginning of my year for me. I will focus on the veteran writing, those short stories and collections of short stories, moreso than on a novel for which, I now realize, I am not wholly qualified, you might say, to write. What do I know of economic, political or technological systems and the effects they have at the individual and societal levels? What do I know about writing dystopias, or any science fiction for that matter even if it is sci-fi-lite? I am not a science fiction writer, I've decided. If anything, I'm a veteran writer. That I can say with confidence. I've determined that my most likely path to publication and perhaps *notice* in the literary establishment may lie along that "veteran writer" designation. So I now intend to pursue that.
Anyways, those are the thoughts from this past more than a month. A failure and a new direction in the writing biz. A new focus. A reimagining and a rewriting. A growing baby, the cool arrival of spring and, in the far distance, the end of a pandemic.
And that's all this perhaps weekly from where one river empties into another.