A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #17

 

Welp, here I am, posting another pandemic periodical. In my last post, just a couple of weeks ago, I wasn't too sure I would be posting anymore about the pandemic. But with the way the delta variant is plugging up hospital beds in Florida and Nevada and, locally, turning all of the counties adjacent to Hood River County back into red wear-a-mask status. Oh wait, new update: Hood River County is also in red status. (Of course, this is the week our toddler starts daycare.) So, yes, we're in another stretch of pandemic anxiety and the thread of pandemic periodicals continues! 

Now onto wildfires...

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #16

 

The masks are off, the delta variant spreads, there are localized pandemics of the (mostly) unvaccinated across the country, the bees busy themselves around the spread-eagle heads of our sunflower flock. Pandemic news takes a backseat, you have to glance in the rearview to see it, background noise to other more-pressing news, like infrastructure deals and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Update: "We, Grits" is published!

 

My short story, "We, Grits" has been published today! It's online in As You Were: The Military Review, Vol. 14, by Military Experience & the Arts. I'm grateful to have worked with David Ervin, the Editor-in-Chief in bringing this short story to publication. 

Sometimes, it feels so good to have your work accepted for publication. Sometimes, it's hard to believe I ever wrote anything worthy of publication.

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #15

The roses bloom. The sunflower seedlings thicken. The tomatoes start to set their first fruit. It's raining today for the first time in, oh, I'd say, three weeks. Everyone says it's an unusual spring. Prognostications of drought find their way into our ears. Rumblings of a rough fire season ahead. Mostly, so far, we just need to make sure to water the lawn. 

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #14

 

I'd never seen a Stellar's Jay before, having grown up and lived most of my life in the eastern United States where the Blue Jay is the most common jay. The Stellar's all-black head and nape blew my mind the first time I spotted a pair of them at our feeder. The pair, I believe, is nesting over in the fir about 150 meters behind our house, or at least that's where I hear them squawking most of the time. Still, even after seeing them many times now, whenever I catch sight of one or both of them, I can't look away.

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #13

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. 

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #12

 

On a cool early spring morning in Washington, D.C., I spent the better part of a Saturday playing dead inside the United States House of Representatives. I was not there for a tour nor any official posting. Rather, I was roleplaying, along with several dozen other soldiers. 

It was a drill for a biochemical attack -slash- mass casualty event. 

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #11

 

So, there's a vaccine—two, actually. But not much has changed, here, where one river empties into another. It's easy to suppose that "major breakthroughs" are going to change the state of things. Yet as I look out the window at the fog closing in, at the silhouette of Mt. Hood darkening under dusk, as the snow across the western faces of the eastern hills becomes gilded like white gold... not much has changed. 

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #10

 

We've come to a new place: Hood River, Oregon, where the waters off of Mt. Hood, the tallest mountain in the state and a somewhat active volcano, drain into the Columbia. Every direction I turn, there is something photogenic. A cloud. A mountain. An ice-capped volcano. A line of evergreens. The Pacific Northwest is truly a magical place. 

But I don't know it. 

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #9

These past weeks have been something of a long goodbye to the woods. I'm trying to soak up as much of them as I can. Each sight. Each sound. Each smell. Each tree. Each insect. Each morning when the sun peeks over the mountain and the baby dances his feet over the shifting shadows of the leaves on the floor. 

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #8

Much ado on the mountain, lately. The pandemic, and our own little personal response to it, has panned out this last half a year, taking us on a long, steady, slow though not so smooth ride.

But now, for my wife, the baby and I, in our own little personal lives, the pandemic takes a sudden new course. Instead of staying at home, limiting social contact, thinking of our every interaction with a mechanic or grocery clerk, or wait-time inside a doctor's office, as racking up "exposure" points for that day, we are now shooting off into the sunset: we're moving. Across the whole damn country.

We're apparently not alone.

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #7

There are few things which speak summer to my eyes and ears in these parts as much as lightning bugs, or fireflies, if you prefer, and cicadas.

Not a week ago, I stepped out one morning—because it is the only time to be outside—and I heard it: that telltale shiver through the treetops, and I knew that the cicadas had come out of their earthy hibernation and scaled the barks of how many different types of trees, and molted, and climbed further still to a nice, high perch, then proceeded to buzz the bejeezus out of their tymbals—a special organ that cicadas and other species of insect possess.

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #6

A lot has happened in the past month any which way you measure it. The same is true, here, at J.G.P. MacAdam Online.

The past week has been especially eventful. I've completed a final structural edit of my science fiction novel, The Way Across, which is based on and taken from The Vallen, an earlier work, but completely reimagined and rewritten. I've also had two more short story publications added to my name, The Pickers, as Passengers Journal, and A Road Not Taken, at Apeiron Review. And what more the baby's toddling all over the house at this point and it's like having a little babbling penguin follow you around room to room.

But even more has happened in the past month—hasn't it?

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #5

This is a loblolly pine's male cone

There are things where you are which were before you and which will continue to be after you.

The road on the eastern edge of our property, the one parallel with the ridgeline of the mountain, is named Pine Grove, and wouldn't you know we have groves of Virginia pines on either side of our property. These pines are not young; they are not shrubby about the waist. Rather, they are aged and hairy in the head and their boughs lean with the weight of their years.

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #4

Things come and things go. There is a wind ever through our souls.

A baby cottontail now lives under our house on the mountain.

It is all open crawlspace under the house and only about two-thirds of it is sealed off with any sort of material. Anything—cat, possum, dog, bear, baboon—could crawl in right under the porch, and more than a few have.

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #3

The mayapples in the vinca under the pines have bloomed. They bloom only one white six-petaled flower in the crotch of their stem, practically unnoticed under the umbrella of their lobed leaf. But from this sole flower comes a sole fruit, a mayapple, though I don't think it's really edible. You'll just have to wait till the fall to get your apples.

A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #1

The strangest thing how quickly it can all change.

I know this neighborhood of Shannondale, situated on the cusp of Jefferson County, already the easternmost in West Virginia, a once-mountain-cabin-weekend-getaway with a man-made lake turned bedroom-community for Washington, D.C., is an off the radar sort of place, a Hillbilly Villa, a rural pastimes island amid the farmland being cultivated into developments, as well as more than a bit late in the swirl of events and closures and shutdowns sweeping from one end of the globe to the next. But the world's finally arrived and this is the end of my family's first week in what is by all signals likely to become our new norm: staying at home.