Enduring Words

I'd forgotten about blogging, forgotten that I'd put myself out here in print so long ago.  I don't even remember 2009, but there it is: pictures of my dogs, Christmas dinners and such.  So much has changed.  No more hosting holiday dinners, or any dinner for that matter.  Hardly any hosting at all.  I live in a different house, and it's not set up for hosting.  And the desire is gone. Zoey the yellow dog has passed on.  Puck remains, deaf and more willful than ever, but still an endearingly cute little shit.  I have remarried. I am a grandmother and an executive, or at least a middle manager and have grown soft from being more sedentary.  I am approaching retirement and contemplating how to conduct my "next best life." Time gets away.  I worry about looking back in regret.

This is is the year 2020, the year of the pandemic--Covid-19.  We wear masks outside and cannot eat inside a restaurant.  Non-essential businesses are closed, and, thus, businesses are closing. For Lease signs are appearing in more and more of the storefronts. People are out of work.

There are protests and riots through-out the country.  BLM: black lives matter. People are polarized and angry.  Extreme left ideology has given birth to cancel culture and is eradicating free speech in universities; even institutions such as Princeton and Yale have begun to censor diverse speech and to contemplate eliminating merit-based, scholastically competitive entrance requirements. Opinions are transformed into facts as they circulate through social media, the biggest social experiment of all time, with no checks or balances and with unknown consequences.

Our national goverment is in turmoil.  Donald Trump is our president and he is the biggest liar of them all.  All the politicians are liars, but his lies lack the decorum of everyone else's. We are due for a revolution.  The United States of America, once such a great nation, is in a state of decline.  Who will swoop down upon us and attempt a takeover? Who will step up and defend our nation? A nation of me and I not we and us.

California is on fire again. And now Oregon is too.  The fires have threatened some of our ancient redwood forests, charring 1,000 year old trees. It's not necessarily hotter, as I expected from global warming, but it's drier.  We watched a ligtening storm out the window of the cabin at the Russian River in early August. It was humid and close and eventully started to rain.  I don't remember weather like that in Northern California.  Not in the summer.

Miraculously, even in the midst of all of it, I stand unscathed: healthy, employed, married, housed, connected to small circle of family and friends for whom I am grateful.