The View from the Hermitage, Day 196

We aren't far from 200 days. The husband and I have finished one of the two bottles of champagne I was given on Friday. I told him we should open the other on the 200th day of this pandemic recounting. I don't know why I initially thought the pandemic would be over quickly. I certainly never foresaw it lasting the 28 weeks it already has. The joke is on me, I guess.

Older son took down some more boxes from the mountain of boxes in younger son's room. Several contained books on knitting, crocheting, or felting. I'm putting them on lower shelves below where I will be putting my yarn stash. I need to put something, anything, on lower shelves to deny the family cat access to my wool. One of the boxes had some notebooks I sort of remembered but hadn't looked at in two or even three decades. One was the journal I kept in Spanish for a bus tour of Southern Spain we took the summer I studied in Madrid with a group from another university. I glanced at that long enough to know that it would take me a while to read it since I would have to use context to translate a lot of it. 

Another journal I found was one I kept from August 1989 to July 1990, the year we spent in the Netherlands where I gave birth to younger son. I worked from this journal to craft weekly letters that got printed, copied, and mailed to family members and close friends back here. I kept a copy of each of those as well. Talk about a cascade of memories. It appears I was quite honest in those letters about the feelings of isolation, only having the husband for adult conversation and older son for not-so-adult conversation. He had been in day care when I was working, so that year was the first time I'd been with him 24-7. I had forgotten just how interesting he was at the age of two. It was especially interesting to read the last entry/letter, a summation of the year. Among other things, I noted the number of nights we had at least one guest in the house and, being a data nerd, the number of guest-nights reflecting that we had, at least once, three visitors staying with us the same night.

It was interesting to read my writing as something of an impartial reader. I have been told, typically in business settings, that I write well, and I usually just dismiss those compliments. They make me uncomfortable, especially while writing the next thing I write. Expectations can weigh heavily on one's shoulders. Reading that last journal entry and some of the others, I can see why people have told me that. I would tell the person whose writing I was reading that she writes well.  

Continuing in the forgotten writing vein, I also found a notebook that contained assorted poems I wrote in the 1970s as well as various essays I wrote for freshman English in the fall of 1973. I did not read the essays, but I did read the poems. I was surprised that I wrote some of them. They sounded, well, not too bad. Needless to say, many had been inspired by people or events in my late high school and early college years. Another rush of memories. I will have to spend some quality time reading more of all this found writing and get reacquainted with my younger self. 

The park was foggy this morning and seemed to get foggier as our walk there lengthened. Here's a shot on the arrival side of the visit, at the start of what turned out to be a three-mile walk.

And here's one on the other side, on the way back to the car.

Driving home post-walk, it suddenly cleared. By the time we got home, the sun was out. Mother Nature likes to keep us guessing.

And so I have successfully avoided discussion of the broader world. It was a good day, and not watching the nightly news might keep it that way. We shall see.