After college I moved to Atlanta. My boyfriend lived on Emory Avenue and attended Emory Law School. I had a room in an apartment shared with two women law students on Briarcliff Road. There was no bus between Emory Ave and Briarcliff Road, so when I got off the train at night I’d take a bus to one of the two locations (the buses stopped running at 6) and there I’d be. I was selling/writing classified ads for the Atlanta Journal Constitution and very happy to have a job with a salary, two weeks vacation a year, and health insurance.
Most nights, I’d get off the bus and walk down Emory Ave, past the house rented by Amy Ray, one of the members of the Indigo Girls. Sometimes they would be rehearsing. I didn’t have any money, so I never saw the Indigo Girls (or any other band) in a real venue, but we would go to an Emory dive bar, The Dugout, to hear them. One night I remember particularly a friend was visiting from out of town and we met at the Dugout. A handwritten sign on the door said the Indigo Girls would be playing that night. I was so excited, especially to share them with my friend. It felt like an utter gift. They were in no way a national act at that time, just the best local folk duo in town.
I lived in Atlanta from 1986-1988, and then I went to New York to get my MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. I wasn’t there a month when I heard on the radio—“Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls! It seems they were opening for Neil Young’s tour and hitting the big time.
I also remember a clear, beautiful spring day on campus. I saw a group of students sitting on the lawn singing a capella. Their voices, singing harmony, were beautiful. And I sat down on the grass, pretty far off, to listen to them sing “Closer to Fine” with great gusto. In the verse that begins “I went to see the master of philosophy,” they really tuned in, and nearly yelled the lines: “I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper and I was free!” It was 1990, and 30 years later I can see them and hear them clearly.
In 2005, I moved to Minnesota for a year as a resident scholar, and teaching at the School of Theology was the liturgical music powerhouse, Don E. Saliers. Everyone was quick to point out he was the father of Emily Saliers, the other half of the Indigo Girls. I enjoyed Don and learned so much from him that year, and also enjoyed the quiet beauty and kindness of his wife, Jane. She reminded me slightly of a woman who lived downstairs from me in that apartment building on Briarcliff Road. The elderly woman played the piano beautifully every day, and since the walls were thin, we got to hear her play. And when she left her house, she was always wearing a dress, with hose and low heels, and always wearing gloves. She was thin and elegant and drove a big car. I was not familiar with the Southern lady before I met her.
I recently interviewed Don by phone about music in the time of quarantine and a book he’d recently published. He told me he was listening to a lot of Indigo Girls music, and that their new album was terrific. So this morning, while making my mother’s apple cake, I asked Alexa to play the Indigo Girls on Spotify.
And all the lyrics and harmonies were right there. I could sing every word of “Closer to Fine.” I thought of that beautiful day at Sarah Lawrence. And then they played the song “Prince of Darkness.” I knew every word and did my own yelling on the lines, “There was a time I asked my father for a dollar and he gave it a ten dollar raise!” And of course, I thought of Emily and her theologian father, because I always think of this lyric when I hear the verse in church that asks, “What father, if his son asks for bread, would give him a stone?” The song begins, “My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark.”
It went on. A few live Dylan covers. I recognized “Gallileo” before a single word was sung.
And though I knew it, I had not ever really felt “Secure Yourself.” It opens like this: “Secure yourself to heaven, hold on tight, the night has come. Fasten up your earthly burdens, you have just begun.” And here I am struggling to put together an apple cake and yet also remembering my mother making apple pie and my sister and I sitting at the kitchen table eating the apple peels. Making poetry in my head as I prepare the cake. Here I am with my Stage 4 cancer diagnosis, which is held at bay and I’m doing fine, really, but also every day dying. I am dying. I don’t think about it, and I never cry. I haven’t cried since my diagnosis 4 ½ years ago, though I have tried. Eventually, though, I stopped worrying about it, because really my life is too beautiful and I’m happy. And over and over they sang, “fasten up your earthly burdens, you have just begun.” And that, for me, is the thrill I sometimes feel knowing that there is something beyond, and hard as it is to believe, it will be better. It will be some kind of existence that I will want to be in for eternity. Hard as it is to believe given the beauty of this earth and this life, even in grief and pain and struggle.
The cake takes two hours to bake at a low temperature. It is my absolute favorite cake, partly because you can eat a big hunk of it for breakfast. I don’t know how I came to know that fact, except that at some point my mother must have given me a big hunk for breakfast, like a ten dollar raise.
During that time I listened to the Indigo Girls, and remembered so many good things about my life, as I often do these days. I organized my spice shelf to put in there the new batch of spices I got from Penzey’s yesterday. I made pizza dough that will proof in the fridge for two days. I cleaned a lot of dishes. I reorganized the peppers and tomatoes on the counter though I did not chop them up to freeze them.
About midway through the national lockdown, I saw an article saying “prepare for the gas lighting.” Soon, the article said, we’d start hearing minimizing of Covid-19, being told we are overly concerned and overreacting and that really it is no big deal. I knew the article was a fair predictor of what was to come, but still it didn’t seem possible. Every business and school had shut down (except for essential businesses), no one had resisted, and people were staying at home to starve the virus. The news from New York, where the New York Times has reported about 1 in 370 people have died from the virus, is that closing down crushed the virus, and the measures taken were absolutely required to get a hold on the situation and turn it around. In fact, the Northeast is opening more safely than anywhere else, and having the same positive results as European countries. And no, they don’t have “herd immunity.”
Of course, the president and some of his most loyal followers had been minimizing the disease from the beginning. But we knew that it was worse than the flu, and we had Dr. Anthony Fauci at the podium continuing to give us the scientific perspective, the scientific truth about pandemics and what we needed to do to stay safe and “flatten the curve.” Science offered a clear way forward and told us what was needed: testing on a massive scale, masks as it became clear that “droplets” are the way the virus is spreading, and continued frequent hand washing and disinfecting. Testing! So we can tell who has the virus and isolate them, not isolate everyone because we don’t know who has it.
Many people seem to no longer believe testing is important. And yet yesterday Janet Malcom, commissioner for the Minnesota Department of Health, said that the only way the state got control of cases in congregate care facilities (nursing homes) was by widespread testing. Because people were asymptomatic and spreading the virus, both employees and residents, who were not getting tested because they didn’t show symptoms. But testing now feels like old news. It’s happening, there’s more of it, and states continue to try to ramp up and maintain high levels of testing. They are doing it with little to no procurement support or financial support from the federal government.
Masks became political. And though we’re told it’s about “freedom,” I think it’s actually about cognitive dissonance and denial. People who really want to believe that the disease is not so bad, that we’ve “done enough” and can go on with our normal lives now, are angry at those who are still in pandemic mode and doing something as simple as wearing a mask. The local meat market requires customers wear masks with large signs in the window, have marked off 6 ft distanced places to stand at the counter and registers, have plexiglass shields for cashiers, and have roped off an entrance so people circulate the store in one direction. However, on my last visit six butchers stood “shoulder to shoulder” preparing people’s orders, none of them wearing masks. It was such a sight. These men have expanded their community to include their coworkers and everyone their coworkers come in contact with, which might be many given the anti-mask attitude. So do I go back to the meat market?
And elsewhere I’ve read two long email posts that argue the virus just has to be allowed to run its course, that numbers will peak and come down naturally– even saying that New York’s numbers would have followed the same trajectory even without the measures they had in place to prevent spread. These emails are full of statistics, and claim that more people have died of cancer and heart attacks and other diseases than from the virus. One in 370 New Yorkers died of the virus in the span of three months. How is that not alarming? How does that not result in people taking the virus seriously?
Cognitive dissonance occurs when someone is committed to a narrative or set of facts that is contradicted by experience (reality). Depending on the level of commitment to their version, people will find science, find studies, find support in any form they can find it, to back up their position. I keep thinking about cognitive dissonance because I felt it so acutely during the drowning on the 4th of July. It was just impossible for me to think a young man had, in the midst of so many others swimming and floating on rafts, just gone under and not come up, and that other young men diving down couldn’t see him. As minutes ticked by, I found myself convinced he’d actually just gone to the restroom or somewhere else and would emerge yelling that he was okay. For a minute I was convinced, before reality sunk back in. No, someone has drowned. No flailing or gasping, just silently going under and not coming back up.
And so, without a clear national plan– or even messaging!– and with people convinced and arguing their various theories about the virus, I spend a lot of energy holding onto my truth. I look at the New York Times reporting of national cases and hot spots. The number of cases are going up, up, up, and the number of deaths will follow. Tuesday a nine-month-old baby in Minnesota died of Covid-19. There are people arguing that these numbers, particularly the death numbers, are overblown because people are dying of other things, dying “with Covid,” not “of Covid,” and being counted. Other people are saying that the actual number of cases is probably 10 times what is being recorded, because so many people are able to transmit the disease but are themselves asymptomatic. As for the deaths, it is a fact that for a long time only deaths in hospitals were counted, only deaths of those who had been tested and found positive, while people were dying at home, and in facilities where they were untested. Covid, which triggers organ failure in some people, meant that people were dying of heart failure– both with and of Covid, which does not affect all people in the same way.
Last week I received a mailer from a local state politician running for reelection this fall. We’re a very red district, and the postcard reflected that. It began by touting what a great job the state legislature, cooperating with the governor, had done to limit the outbreak. This despite the state Republicans constantly complaining about the governor’s decision-making and urging early reopening. At the top of the card, the candidate recommended three steps for staying safe. I just LOVE three-step instructions. What I want more than anything is clarity. His were: social distance, cover your cough, and keep up hand washing. I wrote to him, because covering your cough is not what I’m after. Wear a mask was the appropriate second step. In my opinion. Which I hope reflects science and reality.
I have also been thinking about March. When I was trying to decide when the virus would be here, and require me, a cancer patient whose lungs are compromised, to shelter in place. A reporter for Minnesota Public Radio talked to me about it. And he basically convinced me that it was here in Minnesota, here in my college town, where the students had just returned from Spring Break, and that was the day I stopped grocery shopping, stopped going off the farm, and started sheltering. Now I have ventured out, with my mask and hand sanitizer, not touching my face and washing my hands as soon as I get home. Now I have had one socially distant visit with friends, on our screened porch and sitting upwind of them, and have another planned for Saturday. We will sit six feet apart or more and eat the lunches we brought ourselves. We attended a funeral, masked and sitting in the back, and will attend another in a couple weeks. We’re still watching Mass online, though we might start going to the Abbey Church, a large church with few attendees as it’s not a parish church (the monks sit in their own section in the sanctuary). I’ve gotten used to (and somewhat dependent on) virtual yoga and zoom. I bought a kayak last week and have been going out by myself for recreation on nearby lakes. No mask required. I still think before I go into any business, which I do about once a week running errands and grocery shopping, “Is this necessary?” I’ve taken a few risks– at a local ice cream shop, eating on a restaurant patio when we were stuck for options away from home. Like everyone, I want things to return to normal. But those events were not worth the anxiety.
And I’m finding this stage of the pandemic really difficult, as I try to hold on and see the numbers and follow trustworthy advice, and seek leadership where I can find it. I am so grateful that I am not a teacher and not a parent, on whom the pressure for cognitive dissonance to relieve the stress and strain of living in a pandemic is so great. I am not judging those who are finding ways to support their own “freedom.” I just am not going to follow them. Because what I need now more than anything is a clear head.
I was in the water when it happened. I’d been watching the group of Black people at the beach because it’s unusual—this is a very white space. I was determined that before we left I’d walk over and tell them I was glad to see them at the beach and hoped they felt welcome. I want Black people to feel safe in all spaces, and especially in my favorite places, and this beach is one of my primary hangouts in the summer. In normal summers, that is, not during the summer of Covid-19. This year I’ve only ventured out there twice, first for my birthday on June 25th, and yesterday.
It was crowded and we almost didn’t stay. It was the 4th of July and even though there were gaps in the long line of cars parked along the sides of the road where the morning people had left, it being almost 3 p.m., there were large groups with grills and most places that would guarantee six feet of distancing were taken. But way at the end behind PJ’s Supper Club was a large empty piece of shade beneath a cottonwood, with only a group of teens sitting on the edge of the stone paver wall taking turns on two jet-skis, and a really beautiful Latin American Indigenous family, the three children swimming while the parents sat in front of us under the ample shade of the tree. They had a dirty jug of Kool-Aid on the picnic table nearby and though the children were fully outfitted, the parents did not have swimsuits or towels and sat or lay on the grass. We listened to the man talking on the phone, a mixture of Spanish and some other Aztec-sounding language.
The lake people were more annoying than usual. July 4th. Saturday, too. Lots of boats dragging tubes and jet skis, all coming too close to the swimming area given the size of the lake. The water was warm since it had been in the 90s for a week already, with talk of 100-degree temperatures in the week to come. When I was there on my birthday, in the same far shady end of the beach area (with only a Latina woman and her two children in front of me) the water had been clear and cold. Now there was detritus, and gasoline, on the surface of the water. I waded in next to the jet skis and got out a ways before I put my head under.
The beach has a quick drop-off. There is a small sand beach and part of the lake with a sandy bottom, and that’s where kids congregate. Then, after pushing through a line of vegetation, the water is quickly over my head. I don’t know how deep it is, as I’ve never tried to go down to the bottom. Out in the deep end there are fewer people, and pretty much all of them are on (annoying) rafts or in floating chairs, drinking drinks, wearing sunglasses, just floating around not really paying attention to anyone else. Everyone out there is white.
Even in the crowd on shore, the group of Black folks stood out. The father was a very, very large man. There were several young adults and teenagers, all happily interacting. I hoped they felt comfortable, and watched just to make sure everyone was nice.
Several of these folks waded out but stopped before the drop-off. Lots of people stay on the sandy area and just duck down to cool off, not wanting to traverse that weedy barrier or get in over their heads. But then there was a commotion. A couple white guys in their twenties swam out and started diving. One came up with something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. The Black father was talking excitedly to them, sort of directing them. My first thought was that they’d lost a Frisbee or a ball or something and the white guys were looking for it for them. Because the actual truth of what was happening was too horrible to consider.
I heard the man yell, “My son! My son! Somebody help me please!” The young white men were looking back, confused, helpless. Others standing around started diving, too, but they couldn’t see anything. Someone threw in a few pairs of goggles and they stayed with it. But each time they came up, they said they couldn’t see anything or get to the bottom.
“Your son?” someone asked. “What’s happening?”
And someone else yelled, “Call 911!”
The father spun and shouted to shore, “Call 911!”
“It’s done. We called. They’re on their way,” a woman answered.
The perplexing thing was how none of the Black people were going in deeper. But we determined pretty quickly that they couldn’t swim. And thank God they didn’t go in, because more people could have gone under and not come up.
A scrawny, skinny white dude came running all the way from near where I’d been sitting, running in and diving wildly. But almost everyone else was just out there, just there with their heads sticking up out of the water, saying: “Where did he go under?” and “I can’t see anything.”
My mother had told a story of a drowning at the lake she grew up on. She was a teenager. I’d imagined it in a piece of writing, the lifeguard blowing his whistle and mothers yelling for the children to get out of the water, and the children all sinking down like turtles with only their heads poking out of the water, wondering if the whistle was for them, or what they’d done.
And this was so much like that. The mothers were getting their kids out, and others were calling in their older children and teenagers. There were so many rafts, tubes, noodles. Rafts in the shape of giant unicorns and giant lollypops and slices of pizza, a big round four-seater, rafts tied together so people could float and visit. Such a frenzy of floating devices. No panic. Just quiet and slow movement to shore. Everyone on shore standing, watching. All of us hoping that he would be found, or better yet, he’d come walking over from the bathroom yelling, “Dad! Dad! I’m okay!” Maybe the father didn’t see him get out of the water? It was our only hope. But the father and other family members with him still pointed, almost like that terrible photo on the hotel balcony in Memphis after King was shot with everyone pointing to where the shots came from. “There, that area there, he went down there.”
I had gotten on shore by then and climbed the bank, all of us looking at each other wide-eyed, not knowing what to say, unable to do anything but listen for the sirens. People were spreading out and searching wider. They couldn’t get deep enough. It was murky. I kept thinking about something I’d read or heard—that drowning people could move under water a long way, sometimes looked like they were swimming underwater but it was just their body moving, whereas people expected drowning victims to flail before going under, to bob up and down a few times waving their arms. But no. It didn’t happen that way. Sometimes people went under once and didn’t come up—not even if they didn’t hit their head. And his body could have been traveling, in any direction, in the deep water.
I went back to my husband, who was talking to his grown daughter on the phone. Over on our side with the indigenous family, who didn’t know what was happening. I told Steve, “Someone is drowning.” Not wanting to say yet, though it had been what, 6 minutes? Longer? Not wanting to say “Someone drowned.”
After that it was sirens, and the first fire truck of responders with life jackets in shorts and t-shirts. Then an ambulance with masked (the only people in masks) attendants in crisp white shirts and black pants. A sheriff’s boat had pulled in over the spot and anchored and more officials were jumping off the boat to search.
Then everyone on shore seemed to spontaneously form a line, holding hands, all along the beach. They were not wearing masks and were not socially distanced. Images in my head of police lines herding and cordoning off protestors after curfew just a few weeks ago in Minneapolis came to mind. The people walked in slowly, looking for the body with their feet, as I knew people did, but they didn’t get far before, of course, the water got too deep to go farther. They broke up and turned back. It was all helplessness. Complete helplessness.
Next came a diver with an oxygen tank and a big bag, his suit. I felt voyeuristic and wanted to get out of there. We knew two of the firemen but didn’t speak to them, not wanting to be in the way even to say hello. Even the responders, though, looked at us intently, wide-eyed, as if we could maybe tell them something that could help, or just to silently say to each other: this is happening and it is terrible.
When the first truck had pulled up I’d put on my sandals and started to move toward the barricade (set up to keep cars off the entrance road and provide PJs with expanded outdoor seating space) but the truck just went up on the lawn and around the barricade, so I just stood there watching. Now a short, older woman came up to me and asked, “Is it a drowning?” I told her yes. She’d heard the sirens and come from her house to also help with the barricade—it was her lawn the truck drove over and she let me know she was happy they did that, she would want them to do that. She said she’d lived in this town for 54 years and there had been two drownings, one a child, and the other a man in his 60s who died by suicide. I asked how they knew it was suicide, and she said he had Alzheimer’s and was going to be put in a home the following week. And also, she said, he just walked right in and kept going under and never came up. “Still,” she said, “This is a dangerous lake and I don’t think people know it. It drops off so suddenly and so close to shore.”
She was a “real Stearns County” lady. She asked if I was from the area, and when I answered “St. Joseph,” she asked my name, wondering if she knew my people. I explained I’ve only lived here for 15 years. Her husband had owned a local trenching company, whose name I recognized immediately, and now her sons ran it. We were not social distancing, but after trying to back up away from her a few times and her just following me, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I couldn’t get six feet between us. I couldn’t get my mask out of the tote bag by my chair. She told me about her nephew, who had just died by suicide a week before. He had hit a deer on his motorcycle, not wearing a helmet, and faced with brain damage had hung himself. We talked about cancer—I thought it might make her back away from me a bit, give me some space. I was thinking about viral loads and exposure times and the mask in my bag.
The Black folks couldn’t swim. It’s too much of a cliché. It’s a reality. All those white people who grew up with swimming lessons and had all their flotation devices and, for anyone under 10, pricey life preserver vests.
I have hardly left my house these past months. And even the two times at the beach, I was always thinking about distancing, staying away from people, while watching and wondering if things were inching toward normal or there would be consequences for what we were doing, gathering at the beach even with so many feet of space between us. Thinking about droplets and viral loads and the sun and breeze and water and how the virus couldn’t live in the water, as I looked at the gasoline rainbows on the surface. Thinking in some ways of risk and safety and life and the 4th of July, of freedom, independence, looking at the families with grills full of food and umbrellas carrying on their annual traditions or maybe starting a new one, maybe just this year deciding, what with how bad a year it’s been and everything that has been happening, to go to the beach and spend the whole day, throw a ball around, cook out, enjoy the lake.
Update: This morning first thing, before I was fully awake, I checked the news for this story. The man, 20 years old, was pulled from the lake by a diver and given aid at the scene. He was airlifted– alive! after what had to be more than 30 minutes underwater– to a local hospital where last night he was in critical condition. However, checking news reports now, I learn he has died. He was 20 years old, visiting family from Chicago. It makes me think of the Lake Michigan beaches, where you can be above water for such a long way. It’s tragic, and terrible, and changes a family forever.
I said to a friend on Wednesday that I expected him to have a deep voice and a Southern accent, because in his letters he sometimes uses the word “y’all.” Robby was born in Baltimore but raised in rural Maryland and North Carolina. We’ve been writing each other for a long time, neither of us can remember how long but at least six years, before we both turned 50 a month apart.
Robby is on death row in Raleigh, North Carolina. We were connected by a nun who arranges pen pals for death row inmates in North Carolina who have no infractions on their record. She chose North Carolina because it had such a bad record for racial injustice in the criminal justice system. Not only has at least one person been released from NC’s death row since I’ve been writing Robby, there has been an unofficial moratorium on executions in the state since 2007, when the state’s medical board ruled that participating in executions violated doctors’ medical code of ethics. In other words, doctors (required by law to be present for an execution to take place) refused to participate in this barbaric practice. The harm to the souls of those who participate in executions was movingly portrayed in the film Just Mercy, (now streaming free on multiple platforms in the wake of the George Floyd murder).
When I was assigned Robby, I expected that the letters would be full of platitudes and perhaps even protestations of innocence. However, what I got was a well-written letter from an articulate man. He shared his memories of life on a family farm, the stories of his mother’s battle and eventual death from cancer before he was imprisoned. He answered my questions about his life. Finding out I was a poet, he sent poems by a fellow inmate. I learned about his friend Timmy, who he seems to take care of like a big brother, an important friendship for staving off the isolation of prison.
Robby, a Native American man, is guilty. The crime that he helped plan is heinous. He was not present at the scene when the crime was committed, but he is certainly culpable. The two white people (one his girlfriend at the time) who actually committed the crime were sentenced to life in prison. Only Robby received the death penalty. I do not know the details, nor do I need to. He has a pro bono lawyer working on getting his sentence commuted. Even to move to a different prison block would be a vast improvement for Robby. On death row things are 100% punitive. There are not enrichment programs beyond church services and an occasional religious retreat. Inmates are not able to work in any capacity, so cannot earn money. It became clear to me very early on that writing me was Robby’s job, how he could get food packages and a little cash to use to buy sports shoes, stamps, paper, and other items from the commissary. I can also send him books, and only books, and only from Amazon. Once I included a box of plain envelopes in the order, but they were confiscated. I learned my lesson. Once Robby wrote that they were having pizza delivered from a chain restaurant and it would be the first time in six years he would have pizza. He missed the last opportunity because he was sick. Prison is well known as a place of boredom and punishment, but those two things dominate on NC’s death row.
There are some blessings during this time of Covid-19, and the ability to meet with Robby for a 15-minute video visit is one of them. A week ago I got a letter from him saying that since in-person visits weren’t possible, they were arranging video visits. He gave me, as always, meticulous instruction for what I’d need to do to participate. This included an email address and phone number for the visits office. I’m glad I phoned because what needed to be included in the email request was detailed and specific. Given my experience with the NC prison system, the most surprising thing is that this service was free. I should mention it was only possible because I’m already approved on Robby’s visitor list. I had to get on that list last year to be able to continue sending him food packages and monetary gifts for his birthday and Christmas. To do so, I had to submit a copy of my driver’s license and other personal information I would rather not have given to the corrections department. But today it was worth it.
Today I spoke to my friend Robby, who was wearing a mask, for the first time. His voice is not particularly deep, but Boy Howdy does he ever have a Southern accent. And I could see him smiling behind the mask.
We talked about the things we talk about in our letters– my health and treatment, his health. The one thing that breaks up life on death row are medical appointments, which are often hard won. He is waiting for carpal tunnel surgery, which has been delayed by the pandemic as inessential. I have gotten the feeling over the years that doctors have been his best advocate, at times his only advocate, and have treated him not as a prisoner first but as a person.
He had also sent me a white handkerchief with an image of a wolf for my June birthday (above). Occasionally over the years he’s sent me bookmarks or special cards. This piece was made at the prison, and I thought it might be silkscreen, though I was pretty sure that wasn’t an option in his cell block. I asked him about it, and he said the guy had done it by hand with an ink pen, and he’d known right away that I would like it. Because of Robby’s heritage, the artist added feathers and an arrowhead. It’s a precious gift, mostly because I know Robby has so little, that he liked the image and asked for it specifically, and that he gave it so generously to me.
We talked about the protests for George Floyd and particularly about Minnesota. We talked about the outlawing of the confederate flag by NASCAR– a bold and difficult act that’s been the subject of battles in North Carolina for over a century. I told him a story he can repeat when he gets back and that made him laugh. We talked about our hopes for sweeping change. I said that if I was not in this cancer battle, I’d be putting more active effort into prison reform and specifically anti-death penalty legislation. I said I needed to find a way to connect with that effort at this moment, as people are “choosing their lanes” for reform.
But for now, this is what I’ve done. I’ve written to and been a friend of sorts to Robby. I’ve been consistent, and though my letters are less frequent than before my cancer diagnosis, they are long and detailed and include, when possible, pictures.
When we started writing, he sent me a photo of himself he’d had taken at the prison. He was a youngish man, long black hair and a white t-shirt. Clean-shaven, muscled, and not giving anything away to the camera. Today, he had short hair (got it cut yesterday specifically for the phone visit so as not to look too shabby) and the unfortunate mask. He is a slender, 56-year-old man, the age I’ll turn in two weeks. I would have liked to see his whole smile, not just the smile of his cheeks and eyes. I’m glad, though, that he got to see my smile. And I got to hear his voice, something I’d thought would probably never happen. And now I’m just wondering how long they’ll be having these visits, and when I can schedule the next one.
Last night we watched the documentary film Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, which is available for streaming for a $5 donation to a food charity through Memorial Day. Oudolf is the landscape artist behind the High Line in New York, Lurie Gardens in Chicago, and many others. He designs spaces that mix native and non-native plants in communities, as he says, as performers on the stage that he then lets do their thing for all seasons, complementing each other in bloom and color. The seasons go from fall through fall, definitely to help people see the beauty that is fall in a native plant community. In other words, it’s not just about the blooms.
In this way, he is part of an important movement, helping people see natural landscapes not just as about controlled and showy blooms but the beauty of seed pods, of grasses, of foliage changing shape and color. The palette, which includes plenty of purples and reds and yellows, also includes shades of beiges and browns and oranges. When you hit the second fall of the film, you’ve got it.
Here it is spring. And lucky me could come up after the film and see this stunning vision of sunset after a cloudy day from my window, the prairie and its paths.
This morning, a cool and humid one, Steve and I walked back to look at an area of “high ground” that is bordered by wetlands, which is full of prickly ash and other “invasives” that are on good enough ground that it could be reclaimed. Steve now has the equipment, a forestry mulcher, to clear that land, and as we turn our focus away from the more “lived” spaces of the farm to the wilder spaces in need of reclamation, it is exciting to see what is there.
There is a well-worn deer path, multiple ones, that demonstrate the habitat. And the deer come out mornings and evenings, along with turkeys and sand hill cranes, to a low, wet spot to chomp on horsetail, which we insensitively called “Indian puzzle” as kids. In that area there is also rocket cress and the first signs of flowering pants. In higher areas, the lupine and other plants are coming to the edge of their glory.
black cherry
In the woods are honeysuckle, black cherry, nanaberry (and the always distressing buckthorn), a combination of invasive and the beautiful. For Steve, it’s a project and when you’re out there, looking through the prickly ash at the wetland where the sandhills nest, the promise of that project, reclaiming a gorgeous acre and opening up more land for more explorable beauty, as if we need more than we already have.
honeysuckle
In this time of Covid-19, people are taking time to explore their local environments more deeply. They’re appreciating slowing down and looking at the plants, birds, and animals with whom we share the world. The birds sound louder, the animals feel (or are) closer, the air seems cleaner and the plants seem more colorful. In this week, patience with “stay at home” orders is getting thin, and the social situation feels tense and even, at times, mean-spirited. And our walk was marred by the presence of gnats, which swarmed when there was no breeze. I didn’t see any ramps or morels out there, and I’m not ready to eat horsetail or rocket cress (leaves are really small). In other words, the walk didn’t “give” me anything, except that most precious thing, beauty and a sense that the world is abundant and alive.
Here we are in the pandemic, confronted with the first view of a post-apocalyptic world. And it has partially hyped up and deeply affected our relationship to food. Way back in 2012 I wrote a blog post about how apocalyptic literature focuses in part on getting food. As we’ve been quarantined due to Covid-19, I’ve been thinking about that blog.
Surprisingly, some people’s response to the situation was to buy seeds for a new garden. Grow food. This is a great response, as is all the sewing of masks, and I think speaks well of our human impulses in a time of challenge. I hope more people take up growing food. When I went to place my ordinary late-season-odds-and-ends seed order, it was too late. The shipping times had extended to late May or June! Lucky for me, this is also a time when everyone wants to help out. A friend sent me some seeds so there can be melons in the greenhouse this season.
I’m very interested in food, from a growing and cooking and eating perspective. And all those areas are in great flux right now. Social media has been interesting in this regard.
I’m part of two online cooking groups. One is comprised of Grinnell alums from multiple time periods (roughly 30s through 60s) that share everything from what they’re cooking to the equipment they’re using to cook it. We’ve happily shared our kitchens, spice racks, pot and pan collections, and all manner of baking, preserving, smoking, sous vide-ing, instapotting and just plain cooking. If you have an ingredient and want to use it, they’re your go-to place for suggestions. It’s a friendly and a happy place to be.
A few weeks ago I was added to a group called Shelter in Place Cooking. I only have one real contact to this group, and he is an incredible gourmet cook. The early posts to this group were also very gourmand, and I felt quite intimidated. I also felt quite anxious– where are all these people getting all these fancy ingredients? How are they continuing to cook like this? The group continued on at this haute level until finally someone said something along the lines of “I’m sorry, I have to leave. This group reeks of class privilege. I thought it would be about stretching the pantry or cooking when you can’t go shopping regularly, but it’s not.” This person was not wrong, but his or her leaving kind of opened a floodgate to what people in the group (which is quite large) were actually cooking. Meatloaf posts and “favorite hot sauce” threads, back to celebrating eating and cooking.
What happened in that second group, however, is part of a line of thought that’s really hitting me this week. It’s about what has maybe changed for the long term as a result of the pandemic. Maybe we’ll release our hold on some of the “luxury” that has informed so many lives, particularly in the last several years. I’ve been uncomfortable, even as I’ve enjoyed and benefited from, the level of assumed luxury in our society, particularly among the white middle class. We eat like kings, we travel like kings, we consume like kings. We have supported a leisure economy the world has perhaps never known. That has been our Gilded Age. Gold leaf food, small plates placed on pillows that release their scent when you pop them open to eat. Getting up and traveling– more or less whoever you are– on a cruise ship or on a tour anywhere in the world. I enjoyed my cruise to Alaska last year very much, especially the food, and I’m glad I did it. We were surrounded by large family reunion groups, and though the class issues were clear and present at all times, they were more evident between the crew and customers than between the customers themselves. Before and after the cruise, I indulged in all manner of fantasy looking at the itineraries for more, longer cruises, (even though that would not be my preferred method of travel). If someone wants to write a book for our times now, it should chronicle a man or woman who has benefited from this golden age of travel– no, not travel, leisure— and end with that person on a cruise ship which a pandemic has made impossible to dock. Sort of A Gentleman in Moscow on a cruise ship. And a younger gentleman.
preparing a pork belly bowl for dinner, with garden radishes and store-bought spinach
Meanwhile, there’s also a crisis in our actual food supply. Here in Minnesota, farmers are killing their chickens and starting to kill their hogs. They are dumping their milk. The supply chain has broken down in serious ways. First, there’s the serious and widespread issue of schools and restaurants closing and thus shedding a “bulk buying” situation many growers and producers depend upon. It’s not possible to just start packaging for the grocery store and shift food supplies there. Among the stories I’ve heard is of food pantries that have no storage space and a restaurant in Chicago filling their walk-in with supplies for a local food shelf, and of a carrot farmer packaging up carrots and selling them through a farmer’s market or at the farm in 25-pound packages. “But I can’t sell 10,000 pounds of carrots that way,” he said. So he’s shifting his planting plans. Another farmer is trying to sell hogs at cost– assuming people can find a processor for one or two instead of 100– rather than facing the possibility of having to euthanize 300 hogs.
So where will we be, as the question of the week goes, “when this is all over”? I of course have no idea. There’s no real threat, I don’t think, to the food supply. But lots of restaurants will go out of business and lots and lots of people will lose their jobs and things will be tight. We will have to take care of each other for a long time, and we might want to take care of ourselves a bit differently as well. Maybe the most profound piece I read this week was this one by Gabrielle Hamilton, the longtime owner of Prune restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. I never ate there, but am sure that the restaurant where I ate what may have been my last truly wonderful restaurant meal in New York, is the “woman-owned and woman-run restaurant with an economic-justice mission that has eliminated tipping” she mentions in her piece, only a few blocks from Prune and Russ and Daughters and Katz’s deli.
Here on the farm, it’s a decidedly mixed bag. I put the alliums out too early and killed the onions, shallots, and leeks I cultivated carefully since February, the first plants. However, there are greens to eat more regularly from the garden, and we’ve even had a few radishes from there. I go out regularly and check to see if the asparagus is coming back– not yet, but soon! I managed to plant some potatoes in bags in the greenhouse, where I also just did the first pinching of blossoms off huckleberry bushes and a tomatillo plant. Still too early for them to be outside, but we’re getting there. I’m looking into the possibility of buying one of those pigs.
the gift of tomatoes
We’re eating well, thanks to a friend who dropped off more venison and a big bag of frozen garden tomatoes, our access to a local lamb farmer, and my well-stocked pantry. I’m finally figuring out, at least in part, how to order and get food through online ordering and sending my husband to fill the gaps.
Growing food, though, is a long game, which all those seed buyers, the ones who actually make it to the planting stage, will discover. And no matter how much you think you’re growing, it will only ever (unless you’re a homesteader) be supplementary to what you get in the grocery store. Still, it’s a good instinct, and I hope people enjoy it and have successes and some form of the Victory Garden returns. And I am looking to see what will happen, in a sort of halfway apocalypse, where there will still be scallops if you can get them, and maybe not a lot of $600/plate dinners for a while.
It is Maundy Thursday, and my evening didn’t go as planned. I wanted to make a feast and had planned to wash my husband’s feet, if he would let me, which is doubtful. I think it would have been a moving experience, washing each other’s feet in our kitchen at this time we are stuck in quarantine. I got out the bowl and the cloth and towel. Then I got so tired from my recent chemo that I went to bed for a long, long nap and barely managed some leftovers before coming back to bed.
I’ve always found the Triduum, which I never called that until about a decade ago, exhausting. As a kid I really deeply experienced grief on Good Friday, a day we had off from school and which we kept pretty sacred around the house, cognizant of Christ on the cross from noon to three. My mother said there was never good weather on Good Friday, and it seemed true.
When we were Catholic, before my mother’s conversion when I was twelve, we always went to the Maundy Thursday liturgy. It was long. It was really long. But mostly, the story was just devastating.
First there is the Passover dinner, the Last Supper, and the ritual washing of feet. But then, after that, Jesus and the disciples go to the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prays. And, to my great shame, although he begs them to stay awake with him, the apostles fall asleep. Sitting through that long liturgy as a kid, I knew that I, too, would have fallen asleep. Even if I’d wanted to stay awake, I would have fallen asleep. Jesus is so disappointed. But more than that, he is aware of his great loneliness, he is isolated in that moment.
And then there is that prayer. “Father, if possible, let this cup pass from me.” He doesn’t, in his humanness, want to go through with it. No one willingly chooses to suffer. Not even Jesus. Finally, the best he can do is to say, “Not my will but thine be done.” He doesn’t come around to the idea. He submits to what has already been put in motion, what must be done.
As someone living with cancer, I can say that by far the most excruciating time was the week between becoming aware that what I had was certainly cancer and the morning in the oncologist’s office where he laid out the plan for treatment. I knew what was wrong with me, more or less, but I had no idea what it would mean, how it would play out. The oncologist could tell me I’d be fine after treatment, or tell me that I’d be dead in three months. Either option was in play. In fact, when he said that the average life span for someone at my stage of disease was 2-3 years, I was relieved. That was enough time to treat, and there were treatments available, and I could live even longer, I knew. The treatment could be successful. I was going to die of this disease, but not soon– maybe not for a long time. There was a lot of hope in the specifics of treatment.
Jesus in Gethsemane is in that space of knowing but not quite knowing. What comes next? The hierarchy have been after him for quite a while, pursuing him, and now the time has come. He knows it, but he cannot know the details yet of all that will unfold. He prays, and the story is devastating to us in the pews, because although we have heard the story so many times before, we cannot make the disciples stay awake this time. And we know what is coming and how painful it will be for Jesus.
The next few days will unfold and I will engage with the story as I can. It is a devastating story, and yet we pass through it every year. And I will again, knowing that I will come through with Mary Magdalene and the women on Easter Sunday to the empty tomb, Resurrection, and the beginning of the story still unfolding today of God’s presence in the world.
I have had particular difficulty with Holy Week since my diagnosis. Even the two years I was in remission, I didn’t attend the special liturgies. This year, I’ve been doing an online retreat with Bach’s Passion of St. Matthew, reading the texts and listening to the music and reflecting. It is a retreat about grief and sorrows. And I thought it might help me to engage a bit with my own grief and sorrow, which are still inaccessible to me. But what I discovered the first day is, it is not time. It is not time for me to go to Gethsemane. It is not my time in the garden. I am still in the middle of things. I am still in the full living of my life.
I will know when it is time. There will be tears enough then. And I know the story, because this is the story of my faith. I will still read the story, and pray the story, and weep with the disciples over their sleep, with Peter over his betrayal, with Mary over her loss. I will pray for and weep with those losing loved ones this year at an alarming rate from the virus. But it is not my time.
Cornish Cross Broilers are an abomination. Seriously. They are disgusting beyond compare. Yes, those day-old chicks were adorable, but their true nature as genetically engineered eating machines has now been revealed, and let’s just say, no tears will be shed when it is time to transport them to the butcher for processing.
Which by the look of things, will not be terribly long. Now, I did know that this breed, this “meat chicken,” had its issues. We had a few from last year, gifts from my brother-in-law, in our freezer. And I was conscious of how large their thighs and drumsticks were, and know that was unnatural. But like so many Americans, I prefer dark meat. I knew that meant that if you don’t butcher them at the right time, they will actually break their own legs from the weight of their giant breasts on their giant thighs. That didn’t deter me from placing the order. Yes, I am part of the problem, and I acknowledge it. I got this breed mostly because we thought my nephew would be raising them and this is the breed he grows. When it was clear my nephew had over-extended himself and they’d need to stay with us, I wished I’d gotten a dual purpose bird, something that would grow at a normal pace alongside the layers where we could cull however many we wanted at the end of a strong foraging season.
I bought them too early. Not thinking about how quickly they’d grow, I ordered them at the beginning of March. It’s still too cold here in Minnesota– 15 degrees this morning and ice back on the pond– to put them outside, so they’re stuck in the barn for a couple weeks more. Since they don’t seem to be getting feathers on their butts and bellies (lying on the layers of straw and poop under the heat lamp??) they wouldn’t mange well outside. Did I mention they are disgusting beasts?
In the basement, I have the six Silver-laced Wyandottes growing at a normal pace, starting to put on their more adult feathers, and nearly ready to go out to the outdoor coop (with a heat lamp) and start their normal lives. The layers are not an issue. I do remind myself, coming away from a feeding in the barn, that my broilers would qualify as “free range” in this country because the barn space gives them much more than four square feet per bird. I don’t feel good about that. Broilers, seriously, are enough to put anyone off of meat.
I’m not willing or interested in becoming a vegetarian. However, I can change my ways. Raising chicken breeds that haven’t been hybridized into mutant disgustingness is an option. Eating more roasted chicken and ordinary sized breasts and legs is possible. Not this year, but next year, and forever after.
Meanwhile, on the vegetable front, the greens and spinach I planted in the greenhouse have put up sprouts and are also developing apace. The cold spell shouldn’t disrupt them, and I’m hoping for salad soon, if not a tiny one by Easter then shortly thereafter. And Good Friday is traditionally the day to plant potatoes. I have plenty sprouting in the storage bin, red and purple and white fingerlings, and if I can find some leaf mulch and compost around here I’ll plant at least the potato bags next week when it warms up. They can stay in the greenhouse a couple weeks, too. Then they get loaded on the six-wheeler and brought to the garden.
In my self-isolation I’m not in my car, not doing much that feels productive beyond my own house. The idea of moving dirt around, of getting that six-wheeler out for chores, even of getting the rider mower out and getting to work on the prairie paths and lawn, is invigorating. Spring can’t come too quickly for me, and with it the good work of the garden.
Getting these birds outside of my house will help, and getting those abominable meat birds outside will feel even better. Meanwhile, I just tend to their food and water and try to ignore the desperate tapping as they mechanically devour. On my list of daily tasks during this season of self-isolation, along with “move your body,” and “clean one space or thing,” and “reach out to someone beyond your home,” is “tend to a living thing,” which for me is plants and chickens these days.
Photo by Robert Gehorsam of the USNS Comfort arriving in New York City
Images of the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy hospital ships arriving in New York City and San Diego filled me with pride and hope. Even though these two ships will be used not for Covid-19 cases but for all the “ordinary” hospital stuff in order to free up hospitals for pandemic patients, they are nonetheless symbolic of what we are looking for most at this time– “Help is on the way.” Or even better: “Help has arrived.”
In New York City, in a mad dash to prepare for the onslaught of the virus, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center has been converted into a “field hospital.” What struck me about those images were potted plants next to the beds, someone’s attempt to make the makeshift hospital room more homey. Potted plants!
Room in Javits Center with potted plant and humidifier. (Gov. Cuomo’s Press Office)
Both images reminded me of an essay I used to teach my English composition students, an excerpt from Paul Fussell’s 1989 book Wartime. The essay is about World War II “type-casting,” how the different nationalities stereotyped both the enemy and their allies in the war they were fighting. Particularly, this quote:
“A sensitive German woman, Christabel Bielenberg, accidentally came upon an American flier hidden in a room in her small town. She instantly perceived that the war was lost when she observed ‘the general air of health and well being, of affluence, about him.’ What struck her was
the quality of the stuff his overalls were made of, his boots and the silk scarf which he had tied into his belt, and a soft leather wallet he held in one hand. Suddenly I felt shabby, old, dilapidated, and defeated. Everything he had on was so real: real wool, real leather, real silk– so real and he looked so young.
Paul Fussell, from “Creating America,” eds Joyce Moser and Ann Watters, 499).
It has been difficult in this time of sudden pandemic to think that we don’t have enough, don’t have the supplies we need, don’t have the equipment. When you see what a ventilator is, a complex and large piece of medical equipment, it feels impossible that we could make more in the quantity we need in time to save the maximum number of lives.
I think it is also hard to see that part of the burden of this war is falling on people who struggle in our society– grocery clerks and delivery people. The situation of physical distancing makes us worried about the most vulnerable in our society, the homeless and elderly and food insecure, as well as those living in situations of domestic violence. We’re looking at our “new economy” in a different way. It’s easy to feel weak and like we just might not make it– the losses, whatever they are, will be more than we can bear.
Throughout three rounds of chemotherapy treatment, I’ve always been aware of the kit used when a nurse accesses my port, the device implanted in my chest for blood draws and delivering treatment. The nurse opens a packet and unfolds it to reveal a pair of gloves and draping, as well as the button-style needle and tubing, and an alcohol swab like glue dispensers used for crafting to clean the area before the stick. I love that kit, its completeness and the way it lays out the procedure in its parts. It exudes, as do my nurses, always, that we know what we’re doing. I’m safe, cared for. There’s some little jolt of confidence I get from that kit and the way the nurses use it.
I felt similarly about the hospital ships arriving in New York City. A Facebook friend posted the photo above, taken from his 15th floor apartment window. It was the first time I felt we were not flailing, that we would win this war. New Yorkers sheltering in place, self-isolating, staying inside to save lives, watched as the ship arrived and took its place.
We all watched, on our screens and televisions, the image of this outsized, gleaming white ship emblazoned with red crosses, arriving at the city where the virus is about to hit like a tsunami. That city where someone had not just the time and access but also the inclination to place a potted succulent beside each bed in a makeshift ward. That ship, bringing comfort, bringing mercy, bringing hope.
I’m embarrassed about this post. But nature around me so often reflects the reality of my larger human experience, I just must share. Like contemplating weeds in relationship to trying to eradicate cancer, or its opposite, fertility and health and abundance of a harvest in a time of remission.
Yesterday I was struck by some animals in quarantine. First was during my errand of the day. I drove Steve out to Albany to pick up his newly painted truck. The guy who does the painting is also a dairy farmer. These two calves were bought earlier in the spring. Because they’re from a different farm, they were bottle fed and also need to be kept away from the rest of the herd so they don’t bring in any bacteria or disease from there. They have a very good view of the chickens that free roam, including this giant, shiny rooster who goes wherever the heck he wants!
The second example is, sadly, one of my new chicks. At the beginning of March I ordered six layers, my favorite breed, silver-laced Wyandottes, and to make a whole order, 19 Cornish cross broilers. They were so adorable!
The broilers, per their name, are meat chickens, bred to grow fast and eating machines. Within two weeks they were twice the size of the layers and we moved them to the barn, where Steve built them a cozy box house and they can have larger food and drink supplies.
They also are more closed in (under their heat lamp) and hidden from us– that’s my only excuse. Well, also, they are in a state of disarray as they shed their chick fluff for adult feathers, so they all look a little shaggy. We open their shelter to clean the floor and add more straw every couple days feed and water them twice a day. But Steve discovered this poor baby who was getting “cannibalized,” lowest on the pecking order. I tried putting her in with the Wyandottes, but they were overly interested in her bald spot.
So she is now quarantined in her own box with a heat lamp. She sits quietly, breathes fast when I come down with food and water and cooing in attempts to offer comfort. I’m so sad for her. I’m so sorry. But maybe this is her version of a ventilator. Which we had available. Wishing her good health. She can stay with these chickens, moving to the outdoor run instead of going back in the barn with the bullies. And we’ll keep a close eye to see they don’t pick out another victim. This girl could end up much bigger and more healthy than her layer friends, and so be safe. That is my hope, anyway.
my poor sick chick (I’ll be replacing that poop pad with real straw today)
These are mixed times. Hungry animals coming out even at times we don’t usually see them (daylight) to find food (keep putting out the food). Lots of mating birds. People noticing eagles returning (and sometimes, if they’re lucky, seeing them mating). Our sandhill cranes back and crooning. Turkeys starting to gather for mating season. Today the first little red finches landing on my balcony to visit their reflections in the patio door. These are stressful, and joyful, times for them as well.
Susan Sink talks about her writing process and new book of poetry H is for Harry at http://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings/interview/h-is-for-harry/
