...And then the Pandemic Entered Our Home

Work was finishing up; meetings in San Pedro and the Boy's birthday party on Saturday. The blips in memory take us to Friday night, after putting the kids to bed. 

I got the piñata from the car, grabbed a knife, and carved an opening in the top. And the middle section, it turned out. The sweats were stronger than usual, and hunching my back to stuff handful after handful into the piñata got my joints cranky. Then achy.

Then my skin crawled. My brow moistened. Heat came to my neck like an Elizabethan collar as a shiver rattled bones.

All signs point to Nostril-Swabbing Time. Two lines showed in our home test. Lousy with virus.

Corrie planned to go ahead with the party the next day and I would come at first and set up, and then head home for quarantine. Six AM Saturday morning Corrie realized she felt worse than I did. Party canceled, bummer.

The days blend together, just like the first few weeks back in March and April (and May) 2020. The planned writeup of Legoland and Lizzie and Thomas's wedding wither in folds of grey-matter. Nights of bed-soaking sweats and teeth-chattering shivers commence.

Everyone's at home. The elevator breaks down, so every menial task anywhere becomes adventurous.

Nostril swabs, swabs, swabs all around! Some positive, some negative. What does it all mean? When can we go out? We HAVE to go out, so...?

Days trudge on. The cough lingers. For what it's worth, no brain fog in me yet, besides being tired all the time more than usual. 

Laughter returns. Attitudes light-hearted again. Are we past this? No, wait, what I mean is, are WE past this? Not the royal "we", but the more immediate, the every-single-day family "we." Are we finally going to test negative? 

And how do we, the royal "we" now, how are we going to actually get past this? I masked all the time at work for so long. I tested every week for 37 weeks; negative results for thirty-seven straight weeks. Now, one week out of work: positive---and sick.

Now two weeks out (maybe more?) and normalcy is returning. A drive to Texas approaches. Summer rolls on. 

And the memories of two weeks being blasted by the 'rona will fade like dysentery in the Lao jungle or driving a diesel Peugeot station-wagon around Sicily. Dreamtime out there, in the Now. Dreamtime...

Memorial Day Weekend 2022: An Intro

So...

My mom has been sending letters each week through the mail, and has since May of 2020. Those and the postcards to my kids are her noble attempt to keep USPS solvent. Most often the letters resemble the day-to-day minutiae of many of these blog-posts, and in them these letters have a relative.

The most recent letter has a summary of Memorial Day Weekend 2022, my mom's longest letter to date, a four-pager that seemed to be written all in a single session. It's probably better than anything I could write about this celebratory time. Things included:

• My cousin's wedding
• Spending all day one day at the ocean in Santa Monica
• A trip to Legoland in northern San Diego County
• Norm and his two boys staying with us in our apartment.

After reading the letter, I've been inspired to create a companion piece. That should be appearing here piecemeal over the next few days.

Pineberries, or, Unripened Strawberries

The other day at the grocery store, a clear plastic clam-shell in the berry section caught my attention. It was labeled "Pineberries", but they looked like this:

Unripened berries, and unripened fruit in general, are not deal breakers for me, as far as sampling is concerned, but while these here berries look like unripened strawberries, they cost eight or nine bucks.

They were tasty, with a flavor profile different from strawberries proper, but maybe not as close,in my opinion, to the pineapple, which is how they derived the name.

Then I started looking at cultivars of strawberries, and went down a rabbit hole. But, good news, that was a few weeks ago and I've forgotten most of it. In general, "musk strawberries" may be the oldest version of the strawberry as a human cultivated endeavor. They tend to be smaller and darker than what we buy today. Later the "alpine strawberry" became the cultivar of choice, and it remains popular in small villages in rural Europe. 

The alpine led to today's most sold and cultivated cultivar, the "garden strawberry." Pineberris followed, and eventually an array of colorful entries were developed. Those might just be colored versions of the garden strawberry, a bit of a novelty.

Anyway, here is a cool picture I lifted from the Internet:

Starting in the upper left with the dark berries, and then moving clockwise around the plate, we have musk, garden, alpine, and pine.

This missive will get lost to time...I think I planned on it to be a spiritual cousin to the Brassica oleracea piece. 

Anyway: they were worth the eight or nine bucks.