Week 7 - Day 43. Wandering in the Berkeley Hills

Humans adapt to their surroundings and I’m no exception.  I have adapted to staying home.  In fact, there are several things that I’ve come to really enjoy about our new life.  First, I really like the lack of pressure the slow pace of life gives me.  Days are so peaceful and relaxed.  Second, I love the walks that Bob and I take each day.  They remind me of the hikes he and I took before we were married so many years ago.  How I used to love those hikes!  Now I love our wanderings in the Berkeley Hills.  In fact I’ve come to realize where we live is wonderful for walking.  It’s taken 40 years and a pandemic, but now we are loving our walks in the Berkeley Hills.  Today’s walk was one of our best.  We take turns setting the route and today was my turn.  I wanted to go by “the tippy house,” a house on nearby Fairlawn Street that has an addition that looks like it is set at 45 degrees from level.  (See the photo below).  We found it right away and delighted in the optical illusion the house has.  Then we walked straight down the paths until we reached La Loma St.  It was fun, we’d see a path and take it, not knowing where it went exactly.  As we started our hike, I spotted the beautiful display of blooming roses on our fence in the public path and said “this is the week for roses.”  Last week on our walks, the Rhododendrons were at their peak.  This week, I looked for roses.  I didn’t see very many,  probably because the paths and streets in the hills are so shady.  But as we dropped lower and lower in elevation, I decided I wanted to go to the Berkeley Rose Garden.  So we headed west to Euclid, then north a couple of blocks to the Rose Garden.  Amazingly, it was open and clearly at its peak.  Each rose blossom looked more beautiful than the one I’d just seen and photographed.  Yellow, gold, purple, red, pink, white, oh my goodness, their glory was astounding.  After becoming sated with their beauty and color, we headed out and up.  We had 750 feet of elevation to gain to get home and most of it was accomplished by walking up the steep paths that go straight up the hills.  We walked up from Euclid to Grizzly Peak just using the public paths.  It was hard work, but so much fun!  (The red line on the map shows today’s route.  The purple are our past walks.)

Day 38 - Earth Day

April 22, 2020 is the 50th Anniversary of the first Earth Day.  Back in 1970, I was young, 7 months pregnant and teaching biology half time at a private girls’ school, Day-Prospect Hill, in New Haven, Connecticut.  A Yale graduate student had contacted me about participating in the local Earth Day events.  We, the students and I, took the walk on the warm sunny day, led by the Yalie, down at the New Haven Harbor.  We saw the terrible smelly pollution, greasy blobs on the water, decaying trash all around, dead birds and rats,  as we walked on the docks.  We came away having seen how mistreated our Earth was.  In those days, the by-word was “the solution to pollution is dilution.”  Pollutants from around the home were just dumped on the yard and they soaked away into the ground water.  Chemicals were dumped in the harbors and rivers of America.  Trash was just thrown into the water.  To be sure Rachel Carson, the The Silent Spring, had raised awareness of poisons in our world in the early 1960’s, but mostly no one thought a lot about pollution.  Twenty million people attended festivities on the first Earth Day.  It created mounting pressure to do something and on December 2, 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was created by Congress.  For nearly 50 years, it has provided teeth in the Environmental Movement, that is until recently when Trump has defanged the Agency to help businesses.  Awareness led to a change in thinking about pollution.  We could do something about it and we did.  Air in Los Angeles got cleaner.  You could see the mountains once again there.  Water got cleaner.  No longer could poisons be dumped in public waterways and land.  Brown pelicans successfully bred once again.  Condors were seen.  And where are we today?  World population has more than doubled in the 50 years since 1970 from 3.7 billion then to 7.8 billion today.  With the population increase has come new dire threats to the Earth.  Yet few speak about that threat.  Instead we now face the threat of Climate Change.  We’re starting to see bigger, more powerful storms, terrible droughts, species extinctions and huge wildfires all attributed by scientists to climate change.  As most of the world population sits sequestered at home and the world economy has mostly shut down from the Coronavirus pandemic, I think about the Earth on this Earth Day.   The United States had begun to reduce our emissions under the Obama Administration.  But once Trump whooshed into office, he immediately began reversing everything Obama had done, including the rules and regulations to cut greenhouse gasses and pollution.  We aren’t working with other nations any more to do our part.  But this pandemic has stopped most everything.  I wonder if world leaders, scientists and the world population can find a way to lower our emissions.  Can we see on this Earth Day, we don’t need to travel as much?  Zoom meetings work.  Will changes come out of this time that will shift the curve for greenhouse gases ?  Big things are happening and even though we can’t see what will come, I hope that some good will come out of this pandemic.  Things will not go back the way they were.  Maybe it’s not all bad, especially for our Earth.

Week 6 - Day 36 A Scare

Yesterday I woke up with a scratchy throat.  “Yuh, ohh, I thought.  Is this one of the symptoms of COVID-19?”  I drank hot coffee hoping it would soothe away the scratchiness.  It didn’t.  I began to imagine all the possible outcomes, my imagination growing bigger and darker by the moment.  Before long I was wondering what kind of case I’d have?  I wondered how did I catch it?  Was it from the time last week when I went to Home Depot with Bob?  I didn’t think so.  We were super careful.  Standing in the line outside, we stayed more than 6 feet apart from all the other people.  There were squares on the cement marking the proper distance and everyone was wearing a mask.  Inside the store, I literally was never near another person.  No one seemed to be buying plants but me.  I chose the plants quickly, no one else was in the plant department or at the plant check out desk.  I was back in our car in less than 5 minutes.  What about other people I could have infected?  Do I notify them or wait for other symptoms to appear?  How do I quarantine myself from Bob?  Is it even possible when we’ve had such close contact?  So many questions went through my head.  When I mentioned my scratchy throat to Bob, he immediately said “Oh I’ve had scratchy throats on and off for the last month, but I don’t think there’s any problem unless there is fever associated with it.”  Poof.  My bubble of anxiety was burst, just like that.  No, I had no fever.  And by the end of the day, the scratchiness was gone.  False alarm.  But it showed me how underlying my veneer of calm is a huge reservoir of fear and anxiety and dread.  Now when I wear my mask (or bandana) on occasions when I leave our house, I’ll think with renewed clarity how I’m keeping others safe from my potential infection as well as protecting myself from theirs.  Yup, masks are here to stay for a long time to come.  I’m grateful and put my vivid imagination out to pasture for a rest.

Day 34 - Little Kindnesses

The pandemic with its shelter in place guideline grinds on with little prospect of letting up in the near future.  Summer events are now being cancelled amidst the uncertainty of when we will be able to gather again.  The grim statistics of number of new cases and deaths continue to grow and my persistent sadness grows as well.  The disease has caused enormous economic damage as well.  We are most fortunate to escape the havoc wreaked in this time, so far.  Here, it has been very quiet this week.  I’m getting almost no emails or calls from friends.  I guess there just isn’t anything to say.  Nobody is doing very much different each day.  With the family, we talk about our menus and things like Paul’s sour dough starter he’s growing from scratch.  Maybe everyone has just moved into a state of suspended animation.  I guess no news is good news is the rule of the day.  This week, I have been cheered by little kindnesses.  A Botanical Garden friend brought me a plant she had grown from a cutting for my garden.  We stood at the appropriate 6 foot distance at all times and traded news of our families.  I was happy to see her and to receive this gift.  Little gifts seem like big deals now

.  Yesterday in a church zoom meeting I mentioned how I’m hoarding dish soap because I can’t find any in the stores.  Another participant offered to give me two bottles of her large stash.  This morning I picked up the bag on her doorstep and left two jars of my homemade jam in trade.  Her generosity seems a big deal to me.  It is so easy to focus just on ourselves seeing as we have so little interaction other than zoom and FaceTime meetings these days.  It’s hard to see how I can be of help.  Maybe the answer is in little unasked for kindnesses.

Day 30 - Tired

Today, Bob and I had a really nice hike to Lake Anza in Tilden Park.  It was downhill all the way.  The empty parking lot, picnic areas and beach seemed a bit dystopian on this beautiful day, but we soon passed all that and found the trail going by the side of the lake.  There was a skinny young teen fishing most contemplatively.  We didn’t bother him.  There were two or three groups of two that walked by us as we sat on the bench and admired the serene lake.  After a time, we headed off to find a path back.  We walked by the side of the lake and admired a big turtle swimming by holding his head up out of the water as he swam.  Eventually we discovered a wide flat path decorated with buttercups, poppies and purple Brodaiea and took it.  We didn’t really know where we were but that didn’t matter.  It was a nice morning and we had all the time in the world.  Finally we came out to a road and recognized it as Wildcat Canyon Road.  We were halfway to Inspiration Point.  Oops.  From there we knew the way back home on the roads.  Everyone we passed was friendly and chatty.  We talked with a man who passed us twice with his Whippet dog, a smallish greyhound shaped dog.  When a motorcyclist with loud calliope music on, passed us by and the woman riding in back gave me a friendly wave, it truly felt like a holiday to me.  Maybe I need to think of this time as a holiday, a break from my regular routines, chores and duties.  I am after all, fully retired.  I am very tired of thinking about this pandemic.  I am tired of fearing the dire predictions and worrying about the future.  I am tired of Trump playing politics with this crisis, making it all about him and holding back the government checks so his signature can be on each check.  I need a break and I guess it’s up to me to take one.

Week 5 - Day 28. Easter Monday Musings

Yesterday was Easter Sunday.  Our family celebrated the holiday pretty much in the same way they would have before the pandemic.  On Saturday, we received texted photos of the grandchildren dyeing eggs.  On Sunday morning, we got texted photos of them hunting for Easter eggs.  I made a special breakfast—-Huevos Rancheros and cinnamon rolls which we enjoyed at our leisure.  We viewed the Virtual Easter Service of our little church.  It had lots of special music and art work by the children and a sermon that skipped the Resurrection altogether and focused on sightings of Jesus on the road back home.  After lunch, we went on a really long walk pushing ourselves beyond what we’d done in the past.  It seems we walk further each day.  After we came home, I cooked a really nice Easter meal.  In recent years, it’s just been Bob and me so that wasn’t different for us.   Our children had nice meals too.  The Palo Alto family went over to their other grandmother’s house for waffles and a second egg hunt, while the E. Lansing folks had a special meal of soup and bread prepared by Paul.  We chatted with both families on FaceTime.  For me, it felt like what we’d do on any other Easter Sunday, except of course not going to church.

Life isn’t normal, though.  The pandemic roars on, over 22,000 people have died of it so far in the United States.  We will likely be sheltered in place for another month, even though there is quiet talk in the news about beginning to ramp up the economy and return slowly back to normal in some parts of the economy.  But there was a cautionary article this morning’s SF Chronicle about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.  It told how too soon removal of restrictions caused a second wave of the disease that killed twice as many people as the first.  I struggle to understand the meaning of Easter in light of the current pandemic.

Out in our patio, there is a dwarf peach tree I stood before this morning..  It was a gift from our neighbor Kate many years ago probably in the mid-1980’s.  She got it from the Botanical Garden where she volunteered as a propagator.  It was a seedling from a peach tree that was originally brought back as a peach pit in the pocket of a soldier from China in World War II.  My tree has flourished and blossoms profusely each Spring with gorgeous magenta flowers now made even more beautiful in contrast to the blue-gray lichens covering it’s limbs.  After the flowers fade and the leaves come out, one sees it’s diseased.  It has a terrible cases of peach leaf curl.  After I remove all the badly infected deformed leaves and it leafs out again later in May.  But it also suffers a bad infection of scale too.  The little insects swell with the sap they suck.  I try to pick all their sticky round bodies off as well.  And the tree survives year after year.   I take off the many peaches it sets as I think they take energy from the poor little tree.  And if those plights aren’t enough, there is a family of moles that live amongst it’s woody roots. This year I sprayed the barren stems with a copper solution to try and kill the leaf curl fungus.  It mostly worked.  Today plucking off the little peaches and scale,  I thought how amazing this tree is.  Each year after enduring

it’s Spring diseases, it thrives.  It’s new leaves grow long and deep green.  It’s deep roots provide enough nourishment for it to recover and thrive.  So it will be for us.

Day 26 - Surprises

Yesterday Bob and I went for our walk in Tilden Park.  We don’t usually go into the Park, but it called to us on the sunny warm Friday.  We walked on the Shelby Trail, where we used to take Bridget, passed the green painted water towers, going over the hill to Golf Course Road.  There were so many cars in the parking lot across the street, we walked down the road toward the Tilden Golf Course.  On a whim, we turned right into the level wide shady Golf Course Trail going into the Park.  We walked along through the dense forest of eucalyptus trees.  I dawdled by wildflowers, taking photos of blue-eyed grass, yellow buttercups and even a pink Sidalcea.  At the fork in the trail, we headed right, going uphill on the Redwoods Trail.  Coming around a corner, into the sunshine, there were amazing purple bush lupines as well as bright orange California poppies.  But the biggest surprise was found coming around a bend to the old unused cement helicopter pad.  There someone had made a labyrinth out of medium size stones and bricks.  I was entranced with the gift of this surprise.  Labyrinths are to be walked and this one was no exception.  How wonderful to find such a spiritual gift right there on the Redwood Trail in Tilden Park.  One never knows where gifts will be found.  I want to keep my eyes open and receive the gifts that come onto my path.  What a great lesson to get just before Easter Sunday when the biggest gift and mystery of the year is given.  

Day 25 - Hope

This morning as I lay in the blissful half awake state, I vowed today, today I’d look for hope.  Yesterday several things helped me to realize I’d been seeing the glass as half empty.  First, there was a zoom meeting with a friend who told me that she is more hopeful than me about the future. “Good things can come out of this time,” she said.  And then an email from a docent friend with a link to poetry of Kim Stafford.  He’s writing a poem everyday during the pandemic.  You can find his poetry by googling—-pandemic poems project.  Years ago I took a week long workshop with him and I do love his poetry.  The poem below abruptly sent a burst of hope through me, like a flash of light from a firefly or the bright vision of something beautiful.  Yes, we will get through this.

Dr. Fauci’s Smile.  By Kim Stafford

     Now we live for the day

    The good doctor can stand

       At his microphone, his

     Furrowed brow softening,

A modern renaissance beginning

As a wistful Mona Lisa smile

   Slowly ghosts his face, and he

       Speaks the four-beat line

        We got through this.

What does it take to get there?

  Shelter in place.  Lead a simple life.

       Learn how little you need.

           Prepare to smile.

We will get through this and hopefully we will have learned some important lessons from our time of confinement.  Yes, all the deaths and the suffering of so many is hard to bear.   But people are learning ways to cope and even to thrive in the midst of all this.  There are so many heroes among just ordinary common folks—-store clerks, at home mom’s teaching children, friends telling the truth of what they see.  I have begun to see heroes all around me.  We help each other out by sharing what is working for each of us.  One person’s learning can be just what another needed to hear.  And for me suddenly there are many flashes of light out there.  Hope is alive.  Like Emily Dickinson wrote two centuries ago “hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul....And sings the tune without words.....And never stops.”  Hope is there for each of us.  It lies deep within each of us and can come into our awareness if we but call it out and look for it.  I found hope and comfort in talking with my friend and in reading beautiful new poems.  

Day 24 - Random Thoughts on a Thursday Morning

There’s a piece circulating on the Internet sent to me by a couple of dear people.  It basically says that when we look at the empty streets, think about all the empty classrooms and shopping malls, we need to see it as love in action, as people sacrificing for the common good all over the world.  As I think about the motivations for our collective behaviors, I think there’s probably a big dose of fear and self-preservation in the empty places.  I hope most people are understanding their sheltering-in-place as a sacrifice for the common good.  I yearn for a leader who inspires us to feed the better angels of our nature in this time of crisis, like Obama did.  In the meantime, my world has shrunk to just our house and neighborhood.  I find the psychological effects leave me thinking of mostly myself and Bob.  I miss any opportunity to help others.  Maybe sheltering in place is our helping as is sending calm, positive, loving energy out into the anxious uncertain world.  I still wake up and think all this pandemic news is just a bad dream.  I can’t believe it has happened and happened so quickly.  I am grateful here in the Bay Area where there are whispers in the news that we are flattening the curve.  In the meantime, I am buoyed up by our walks, distracted by weaving and needlepoint.  Bob is back in his shop all day long.  We are living with a new normal, that I am afraid is here until a vaccine is discovered and distributed widely.  In the meantime, signs of Spring still cheer me.  I saw a big flock of birds fly out of a liquid amber tree across the street.  Might they have been Cedar Waxings?  In the meantime, discovering new Berkeley paths delights me with each new find.  In the meantime, zoom meetings are my link to others, as they too are sheltered in place in their own little kingdoms.  In the meantime, exercise continues to ease my anxiety.  In the meantime, I am looking to our collective better angels and hope there is love out there for each other.  In the meantime, I am wearing a mask even though it rubs in my eyes and probably does more harm than good.  In the meantime, I am searching for ways to enlarge my world.  In the seemingly forever meantime, we all carry on as we learn to live into an unknown future.

Day 21 - Week 4, Masks

It was a cold rainy weekend.  I measured 2.1 inches of rain.  Good for the plants, but not so much for my mood.  I felt low and sad, “taxing myself with forethought of grief” as Wendell Berry so beautifully said in a favorite poem of mine —“The Peace of Wild Things.”  I think three weeks of isolation has everyone feeling stressed and worn out.  Not knowing how long this will go on is definitely taxing my composure.  I read 8 or 10 more weeks of sheltering in place,  but no one knows.  The experts are making this up as we all go along.  Yesterday I did find some things which lifted my spirits:  exercising, going on a short walk and reminding myself to take one day at a time, that tomorrow is another day.  This morning the house is filled with the fragrant smells of cumin, garlic and chili powder from the big pot of black beans I’m cooking.

Friday, the Berkeley Health Officer sent a text to all Berkeley residents urging us to wear masks whenever we are outside in addition to social distancing and incessant hand washing.  I have a mask phobia.  The thought of wearing a mask on our walks oppresses me. Nevertheless on Sunday afternoon when Bob and I went out for our walk, to support the collective effort to prevent the spread of the virus, we did put on our cloth masks.  My first observation was that fewer than 10% of the people we passed had on masks.  Second, I noticed wearing the mask, I felt very separated from everyone.  I did not look at anyone or meet anyone’s eyes.  I could have been a thousand miles away.  For me, wearing a face mask is social distancing in the extreme.  It might be good for disease prevention but it is bad for my spirit and emotional state.  I suppose I’ll just have to get used to it.   Reports tell us, we, old people, will likely be wearing masks for a long time.  Maybe I’ll try a balaclava or a bandana, then I’ll feel more like a kid pretending to be a bandit.  There’s not any restrictions left to impose on us.  We wait searching the newspaper and internet for statistics from our county.  We wait and with horror see the rapidly increasing numbers of cases and deaths around the country, around the world.  We wait and hope this nightmare will be over soon.

Day 17 - 18. Teddy Bears

As the days flow into weeks, soon the weeks will flow into months.  Not much happens here.  I fear our kind children who FaceTime call us each night are quite bored by our lack of anything new to say.  It’s just the two of us here and while we love our walks, our days aren’t easily differentiated from each other.  Should I count the new blossoms on the apple tree and report them?  The newspaper always has bad news headlines.  What I want to know is how is the pandemic affecting our town.  There is little new information about that .  What is new is the number of jobless.  More than 10 million now unemployed in the United States.   A record 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment last week.  It’s so alarming, it calls to mind the Great Depression.  I cannot comprehend how awful this uncertainty must be for the young unemployed people with small children at home or for anyone fearing their job won’t return when this is over.  My generation, now the oldest ones around, has never seen such a scary time.  To be sure, the  polio pandemic was very scary when I was growing up.  I have friends who were quarantined with polio.  But I only remember we couldn’t go swimming in the high school pool.  I think back to my parents were young and back beyond to my grandparents.  I remember the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was formative in my father’s life.  His only sibling, his sister Beena, died from that flu.  Soon after, he and his parents emigrated from England to the United States and soon afterwards his parent’s divorced probably from the stress around the pandemic.  Our parents all grew up in the Roaring Twenties and came of age in the Great Depression.  It marked and formed each of them in very different ways.  I think about how this coming Depression will likely affect my grandchildren and change their lives.  I don’t expect to live longer enough to see the full recovery from this crisis.  Perhaps our world will be reformed in ways we cannot even imagine now.   Maybe things will be better.  I cannot discount that possibility.  Yesterday  our long beautiful walk,  I saw a teddy bear in a window and surprisingly it cheered me up.  I love to think about the ways we are all taking care of each other in this time of uncertainty.  It cannot be said too often, we are all in this together.

Day 15 - 16 Week Three

This morning I stepped out into my garden.  The air was cool, but the sun was warm on my face.  I noticed immediately the dew on all the flowers and leaves looked like jewels, like prisms, in in the angled morning light.  It highlighted the tiny hairs on the purple Mexican Salvia flowers.  The orange pansies were covered with dewdrops. There was the raspy call of a Scrub Jay not far off, alerting me to some unknown emergency.  Then, I heard the voice of a father asking his child to point to the yellow flowers (they’re outside our fence in great profusion just now).  I relaxed and took a deep breath.  In that moment, I was free of the burden of anxiety and stress I carry all the time without even being aware of it.  I hear such terrible stories of misfortune that breaks my heart.  A story of a fellow docent whose knee replacement surgery has been postponed indefinitely, whose husband has throat cancer that can’t be treated until he has dental work, which is postponed indefinitely.  I think of all the families with small children now home until the summer with no school.  I think of the stress the confinement puts on the mental health of us all.  I think of people whose coping strategies have been limited or who don’t even have coping strategies for extended confinement.  Even in the terrible unknowing of what is going to happen, I feel grateful.  I have all I need and I am safe.  As the days go by, there’s little different or new that happens. The big excitement a few days ago was an AC Transit bus that got stuck in the road in front of our house.  The driver was on her first day on the job and took a wrong turn, going up our street instead of veering left and continuing on the main road.  I had to move my car.  She drove the bus back and forward, over and over inching the wheels to turn until finally she could turn the whole great big bus around and head off down the hill.  I’m still talking about this event.  The order to shelter in place has been extended another month in the Bay Area with more restrictions to keep us apart.  I am thankful for Bob’s and my daily walks of discovery to new areas in local neighborhood.  I’m loving the shady little paths between streets.  Dire predictions of the number of deaths due to the pandemic in the US fill the news: 100,000 - 240,000 IF we keep to the strict order of keeping away from each other, otherwise they say millions might die.  And so we sit in place, occupying ourselves with tasks to keep fit, nourished, busy and entertained.