DIARY OF A SHELTERED WOMAN

I have been keeping several journals-- a reading journal, a very personal COVID-19 journal, my "centering" journal (early morning response to a poem). But this is what I have summarized from my calendar for public consumption. How one woman spent her days, mostly with one man and one dog. 

DAY 1

I do a live video for the Stark Arts Council, half an hour for which I have spent 10 hours

Paul and me hiking the Towpath Trail at the John Glenn lot

figuring out Facebook Live Video, prepping a lesson on ODES, and creating a blog to provide materials to parents and teachers, KENDIG WRITES WITH KIDS. Plus, hours worrying and deciding what to wear. It goes off pretty well, and from what I can see, two people have seen it, a former student who makes her daughter Maddie write a poem which is pretty good, "Ode to a Puzzle," and an Oberlin grad who hopes she can use the materials later.

DAY 2

I grocery shop like always, like never before. Usually I run to 2-3 places and shop for a week. This time, I went during senior hours (which killed me, spring chicken that I am) at our local grocery store and shopped for two weeks, getting some canned goods and frozen goods I usually don’t buy. I have bought a 5-day supply of soup for Paul and me (separate soups for our separate diets) in case one of us gets sick. That person will shelter in one bedroom and have one of our two bathrooms. And if that person is me, I do NOT want to be at the mercy of Paul’s cooking. Soup. I will live on soup.

Paul and I watch “Virginia and Vita,” which is awful, but it reminds me of a favorite Woolf quote that I can use for the book of poems I am working on: “‘Stay this moment.’ No one ever says this enough.”

CANCELED: My Writers in Residence work with Fifth graders at Our Lady of Peace (OLOP) I feel really bad about this. My two co-operating teachers were terrific.

DAY 4- My Poetry Group, "The 811's," Zooms! It seems so thrilling, reading & responding, seeing our six faces, smaller but closer. Still, we usually treat two poems from each person, but now find we can only get to one poem each. The lag time in speaking really adds up.

The vet is back a second time. I thought, for the second time in a year, that Robbie was on his way out, at age 13, but as he recovers from this bout of what? "being really sick" the vet called it, he is bouncing back and acting almost like a puppy again.

Day 7

Paul and I spend a lot of time noting how much this sheltering in place is just like our usual life: we get up, have breakfast, walk Rob, exercise ourselves (in Sippo! Among animals and lake and trees!), have dinner, watch TV or read, sleep well. Our health is good. Life is so very easy for us-- our retirement checks, small as they are, continue to come in, we can pay our bills, our health is good, oops knock on wood-- that I want to stay mindful of those whose lives were hard before, grow harder now: immigrants, inmates, our friends with hard jobs or jobs that just got harder, our friends (our neighbor) without jobs. I make a list of people living alone and plan to email or call them regularly.

CANCELED: My presentation to the local Unitarian Society! Damn!

DAY 8 – Another Stark Arts Facebook Live video, this one on JOURNALING: NOW IS A GREAT TIME TO BE JOURNALING. I reread a lot of my material on Anne Frank and fill this lesson with emotion-- that dissipates as the first 10 moments go awry, I can’t get onto the FB video platform and can see two Stark Arts people chatting about my incompetence. Ayayayay Canta y no llores. I keep at it, get in, get on, get up, and present my lesson. "Be like Anne Frank and the people of the Netherlands," I say, "whose leader told them that diaries would be important some day. Write about your last day of school, and for lord’s sake, write about toilet paper because NO one is going to understand what that was about."

DAY 9 

Cancelled: Day 4 of OLOP and a proposal for a literary festival that is itself cancelled.

DAY 10

The web blog I curate for the Cuyahoga County Public Library goes out today, for National Poetry Month, a poem and a prompt a day during April, a job I started in November, handed in on February 1^st and is posted at the library's website and sent to subscribers as“Read + Write: 30 Days of Poetry,” a small good thing for local poets and readers as we watch most other literary events cancelled out from under us.

DAY 12

In better news, my weight is holding steady even though I am eating an uncharacteristic three meals a day and making desserts, mostly fruit crisps from the blackberries, blueberries, pineapple, and strawberries I froze all winter when the prices were good. Probably because I continue to walk 3-4 miles a day, feeling the competition from Paul, who runs 7 miles a day. Competition that is nevertheless beyond me.

Day 13

Cancelled: I will not be writing in the window of Appletree Books today. Nor any day in the foreseeable future. Or the unforeseeable future, which is unseeable.

DAY 14

It has now been over three weeks since we returned from a trip to Tennessee, during which time we stayed in three motels and spent several days with a former student living in a halfway house for newly released convicts. Have we picked up anything? We have been mindful as we sheltered, the two of us, not wanting to have carried, to be carrying. Every sniffle-- and this allergy season-- every throat tickle, we worried, but we are pretty sure now we were not crowned with corona, we are not carrying.

DAY 15

My third and final Facebook Live video. This one on Ekphrastic Poety. (“Ekphrastic! It’s Elastic!”) After years of teaching online with a good platform that let me beam PowerPoints and blip to websites for the class to discuss and examine, this being stuck with one screen is hard for me, and ekphrasis was not the best choice as holding art up to the camera is…pathetic. I can hope that the accompanying blog carries me. And I am very grateful to my local arts council for the challenge. The Arts in Education director, Kimberly, is one of the two best I have worked with in 40 years of arts in the schools. (The other was Bob Fox, whom I miss.)

DAY 17

Paul and I debate whether my cleaning help should come, and Paul solves it by saying, “The thing is, she does clean a lot better than you.” Anybody does.

DAY 18

Canceled: My last day of six days as a poet in the schools at OLOP.  I should let go of my grieving over that lost job now, but in the words of Barbara Kingsolver's poem in the Sunday NYT ("How to Survive This")  are apt: "I'm not there yet."

DAY 26

I am invited to zoom with my former Massachusetts group, the Kitchen Table Writers! I haven’t seen most of them for 10 years! I am so excited! But the host forgets to send me the link, and I can’t get in the Zoom room.

In better news, I am invited to read with poets in an anthology of food poems I am in titled Heatthe Grease, We’re Frying Up Some Poetry. And if that book sounds fun, you can imagine the poets! We had a poet from Leeds, England (“He was live at Leeds,” I keep saying) and three women from the Bay area, several from Texas, where the editors (Karen Tardiff and Jennifer Taylor)  are, one from India who signed to read but never made it. Such fun!

DAY 27: Canceled: a classical guitar concert in Cleveland

Day 31

Paul and I Zoom for the second time with three of our former students. I can’t recall when the first time was, but I left the room that day concerned about all of them because of their jobs that left them at risk for contracting the virus or severe depression, but in the second call, I realized how resilient they all have become and always were. SUCH  good conversation. Paul and I also worry a lot bout the Nicaraguan asylum seeker we’ve been friends with for the past 18 months. He has a job out of Ohio now in management of the meat industry, a really really tough one. And then there are the inmates at Grafton and everywhere in Ohio, cut back to two meals a day and insufficient ones at that. K tells me her son reports that supper was 1 hot dog, 1 T. mayonnaise, and ½ c rice. Paul and I are sending what money we can to food banks and inmate and immigrant accounts.

Day 33

Paul's favorite line from the NFL draft going on right now: 

 "I'm the kind of guy who starts what I finish."

DAY 36

"The 811 Poetry Group" meets for the second time and we contemplate how we will go on meeting even after the sheltering order is lifted because the library where we meet-- and thus our name, 811, the Poetry Section of the Dewey Decimal System-- is banning all meetings for the seeable future and beyond to the unforeseeable future. Still, it’s a good session, good poems. I share my poem, “To the Deliverers” which I thought would be quickly publishable but have found that no, despite tens of publications announcing they want Covid-19 poems, my poem is not one of them. (We received 600, Rattle reports in the rejection. But they reported 700 the week before my also-rejected friend notes.)

DAY 38 Canceled: My dentist appointment. Yay!

DAY 39

Gov. Dewine starts a phase out of the shelter in place order but says we should all wear masks (note: within a day, he backed down on that) and we should all stay at home another month. And we say, yay.