On the last night of the Trump administration, January 19th into the 20th, the Santa Ana winds blew into our valley and took our back fence down. They also took down our neighbor’s fence. (The following is not a political endorsement. It stays to the facts as much as possible.) 

We had to wait another month and a half–into the new Biden Administration–to get a new back fence. It’s up now. We love it. In the interim, we got to know our neighbor who had been blocked from our sight by our old fence. And I got to talk to my next door neighbor about fences, the pandemic, and other things, and it was only after this second conversation that I sat down in my living room and realized that something had changed. My blood pressure had gone down, or something. I felt relaxed suddenly. Talking to my neighbor directly, from six feet away with a mask, was so much better than exchanging notes through Zoom. So much of my current existence is negotiated through Zoom that this interaction felt almost like the old days. It made me think that more of this might be coming soon. And it felt good. To be honest, as an introvert I was worried about mixing with people again. 

I’ve been noticing for the last month, as we’ve rounded the one year mark of this epidemic, that I’ve been anxious about things that I once would not have gotten to me. I have to say that it must have to do with the siege mentality we’ve been forced into. This has especially led to my awareness of how much our anxieties can be increased by too much social media interaction and not enough face-to-face community. I understand why many students and younger people (now that I’m 65 I’m using “younger people” more often) may be feeling tense and uncertain. 

I’m just hanging on. I assume it’s going to be good again. I think that if we stay with the masks and social distancing, the light might be there up ahead at the end of the tunnel. 

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In the meantime, if you’d like some reading that is not too taxing, I recommend short stories. Just read one story every night. I usually find them better than TV. 

If you’d like, I can recommend my book, which I haven’t been able to promote much except here and in social media: Subtle Man Loses His Day Job and other stories. Reading one story a night, you can finish in less than two weeks. Also, the stories, many of them, are linked in terms of character.

I hope you have a good spring.