Catherine Redmond

We are entering the second spring of the Covid-19 Pandemic. We are changed in ways that will take years to recognize and assess. As much as we want to return to the Before-Time, it isn’t possible.The future is always new but now we are conscious of this with more dread than usual. The hens peck for new worms and don’t care.  They just enjoy the fresh green of the grass and the fact that they can spend the day outside.

 

Last night, like always, I looked up at the stars

The dogs’ last visit to the run before we go to bed.

A new storm was coming in the morning.

Weather has become tiresome.

Up there Orion was where expected

His eternal trip around the sky.

We humans form patterns

Out of the random.

 

Suffused with longing for spring and yet an almost gasping consciousness of the spare beauty of deep winter.

Ours is a long season, longer and more expanded by the pandemic and isolation.

Longer and more shocking as memories of the Insurrection vomit up

On the clean snow

As we wait for more.

 

 

 

 

That time when the clouds are full and the air smells of it

Every living thing knows that something is

about to happen,

The colors seem so full of themselves

I rush to get back to the house

The flock fed and

watered

The house will feel

just right.

Everywhere are arrangements to be seen and noticed.

An extraneous proof of a new print

A window, a view into another world

The edge of a paper cabinet

A perfect rectangle

A favorite book and

Always the plugs

Inside a hermit

though always connected

to the juice.

We are deep now in the pandemic, many of us straddling two domains. There’s the world of our isolated lives and the world of the media. Our personal lives can be anything depending on circumstances, ingenuity, curiosity and the ability to reflect and learn, whereas our media life is filled with death and suffering and the continual sideshow. Hope now must be self generated. Learning about the people we’ve elected is sobering.   I have concluded that many in Congress are marginal and ignorant.  Perhaps this explains why they don’t understand the basic tenets of science and stand instead as beacons of ignorance. This governor of Florida looks like he would have been incapable of success in any other business he tried. Poor fellow, politics was probably the only home he could find that paid his bills.  As to Trump, lugging a long record of failure behind him, only politics was available to him.  At least he has been consistent.

One of the gifts this time has given us is the chance to remember and reflect.  We have gotten in touch with people we forgot about or had a spat with and the reconnecting feels good and mends.  This reminder of last chances and wanting to have a settled heart has been a benefit of this scourge.

The land is ever filled with beauty and solace.  The moon shines down on my studio.  The coyotes howl.  The deep winter is on the doorstep.  And, at least for today, I am safe.

I hope you, Dear Reader, are too.

 

 

 

Last night I came back from the studio and as I walked up the back porch steps, I saw something dash away. Shining the flashlight I saw these two kids peering at me from the tree (see the enlargement to see them up in the branches) beside the plant shed.  The young siblings are sharing in Nicky’s cat food. More critters for the homestead!  I’m thankful for them and those adorable little faces.

 

Homage to Bonnard’s The Cherry Tart, Virginia is as lured as is Bonnard’s Dachshund.