"Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things—an atom in a blade of grass."

Back near the end of February, I helped Nathan figure out how to use his library card to download audio books, so he could listen to stories while running and weight lifting. I gave him some suggestions of things he might like, but told him to search and see what spoke to him.

A few days later he told me he’d downloaded The Gunslinger by Stephen King and wondered if I’d ever read it. We were texting so I didn’t expound much, but yes: I’ve read it.

In the 80s, when I was a teenager, I was discovering books. I had always been a reader (I don’t think anyone who really knows me could separate reading from my identity) but in my teenage years my relationship with books changed. They weren’t just stories or a way of spending an afternoon in sunlight, or even a place where I went to find friends anymore. Reading, I was beginning to understand, was a way of saving myself. It was as if all the answers to all the questions had been scattered into all the books, and all I had then were questions and a world full of books at my feet.

I’ve been looking for answers—and finding them, often, in books—ever since.

My dad was a devoted fan of Stephen King and likely read almost everything he wrote (until his last illness took reading away from him). In those teenage years, I also loved Stephen King. I don’t know exactly when I read The Gunslinger. It was published in 1982, but I don’t think I read it when I was ten. My guess is I read it in 1987, when the sequel, The Drawing of the Three, was published. My dad bought the first two books, and what piqued my interest in reading them was listening to him chuckle to himself as he read Drawing. He liked to read lying on his side on the floor of our front room, with a cup of coffee for company. I asked him why he was laughing at a Stephen King book—as everything I’d read by him had been scary and I hadn’t noticed any humor—and he read me a little bit of the beginning, where the lobstrosities attack Roland. He wasn’t really laughing because of humor, he told me, but because he just admired King so much. “That man can write a story,” he said, and then sipped his coffee and went back to his book.

I read, and discussed with my dad, the first three books of The Dark Tower series. Even years later, sometimes he’d just say “did-a-cheek?” or some other lobstrosity sound at me, and we’d laugh just a little bit.

The Waste Lands, which was published in 1991, was probably one of the first fifty or so books I bought for myself. That was the year I was dating Kendell and trying to create my adult life. I was still living at home and there is another memory of my dad lying on the living-room floor, talking again about King’s genius, because in this book he managed to make a train into a malicious monster, and wouldn’t it be great if we could also have a billybumbler?

There was a long gap between the third and fourth books, and in that time, I changed. I got married, I had Haley, I went to college. By the time Wizard and Glass came out, in 1997, I was pregnant with Jake and in my last 18 months of my English degree, buried deep in critical literary theory, classic British novels, Greek mythology, and writing techniques. My dad bought the book, and handed it to me after he finished it, but I only read the introduction (which reacquainted me with the story at least) before setting it aside. Precocious little book snob that I was, I thought it would be a waste of time.

My dad continued on the journey with Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake, but I did not.

So when Nathan asked me “have you read it?”, all of these connections passed through me. Remembering how much I loved the first three books, and how ashamed of myself I am for not reading all of them with my dad, and how I’ve thought about rereading the series every time a new book has come out, but it didn’t feel like it would be the same. No one I know now would respond to “dad-a-chum?” with anything other than a blank stare. I told Nathan that, and he said “well, how about you read it with me this time then?” and I said “done!”

(He lost interest and didn’t finish the audio, but that is OK. One of the things I have learned from books is that some books must come to you at the right time, and sometimes your initial interest in a book doesn’t spark an actual affection, because the book isn’t the right one for you at that time.)

Rereading books that were pivotal to your younger self is sometimes a dangerous proposition. You might find them empty or shallow instead of brimming with knowledge and beauty. You bring a different self to the story; you know different things and have been changed by your experiences. You might be disappointed.

So I can say: I couldn’t read these first three books with the same innocence I had when I read them the first time. Parts of The Gunslinger were disturbing to me. I didn’t understand feminism or rape culture or the persistency of violence when I read it at fifteen. Did Roland rape Sylvia Pittston with his gun? Even if he is the protagonist and carrying on the noble tradition of eliminating evil that disguises itself as religion—I can’t forgive this scene, and it was so startling to me. How had I forgotten it? I also can’t decide: is his depiction of Detta Walker in Drawing racist? He spells it out that she is like a caricature of representations of black people, so he is using the imagery that white people have created about black people in a sort of sardonic way. But he also calls her (not the depictions) evil. (I cannot imagine anyone writing a character this way now.) She hates white people, but is also evil, so I don’t know how to balance that. And, over it all: this is a violent story. There is so much death.

On the other hand: I know so much more now than I did when I read these as a teenager. I didn’t understand the archetype of the hero’s journey, and the way quest novels influence our society. I hadn’t read Tolkien so I couldn’t be delighted at the way the story nods its head across the universe toward the fellowship. I know the lines of poetry that get slung slantwise. I recognize almost all of the songs that are referenced (although I had to look up “Velcro Fly”).  I even can pick up some of the Easter eggs from other books.

Here’s what I didn’t expect, though.

I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about how we don’t always understand the impact of our choices. I am certain there are choices I’ve made that have altered my life in ways I will never completely understand, ever. It is easier to see how other choices altered my life. It’s like…maybe one day, seemingly at random, you decide to drive a different route to work. You still get to work and you move on with your life, but what you don’t know is that if you had taken your usual route, you would’ve been in a horrific car accident that left you missing your left leg. (Or whatever else you can imagine.) You never lived the life that could’ve been made by one random choice, so you don’t know that life, and you don’t even really know that you missed that life. Except sometimes I think you bump into it anyway. (In my head I also carry half-formed images of who I might’ve been if I had made different choices.) I bumped into this…this doubling of possible outcomes, I guess, several times as I read. Like Roland with his doubled memories of his story with Jake and without Jake, and the same for Jake with Roland. I couldn’t see, of course, so clearly as they can. But there is something of my alternate selves in these books, and I didn’t expect to find it there.

This concept forms the backbone of the story of The Dark Tower, at least so far as I have gotten. (I finished The Wastelands this morning.) The rose that Jake crouches next to in the abandoned lot in New York, and the suns inside: to me, all of the could-have-been lives are inside that rose. “It was a moment of passage,” Roland tells Jake. “A time such as must be at the Tower itself, when things come together and hold and make power in time.” Those moments of power in time are the choices we make, and we don’t always get to see clearly how they bind us.

Here’s another example. Remember, I was a wild, angry, rebellious teenager when I read these books. I was in a dark, dark place. Whenever I wanted, I could’ve jumped right in to doing whatever heavy drugs I could get my hands on. But I never did. I wonder about that a lot—in that rose full of the possible lives of Amy, there have got to be several addict versions of myself. And when I got to the chapters about Eddie when he was in his junkie days, it hit me. It was as if the person I had been reading that book—this exact copy of this book, the one I held in my 15-year-old hands—left an annotation. I clearly remembered feeling what I felt as that version of myself: a deep aversion to becoming like Eddie, to having a monkey, to being taken to awful places and terrifying experiences and the thread of jail because of drugs.

It might be too much to claim, but reading it I felt it anyway: Partly I’m not a drug addict because of Eddie Dean.

(Or, to be more specific: because I decided to read the book that had Eddie Dean in it. If I didn’t chose to read it, Eddie Dean never existed for me. It is the choice that matters the most.)

And o how I wish my dad was here so we could talk that idea out. He would understand.

So, today: I finished The Wastelands. I can’t believe how long I have left Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Oy riding on Blaine, starting their riddle competition. I still have mixed feelings. I still feel like I am reading something that is not quite my style, even if the metaphysical, layers-of-time concepts resonate. When I’ve mentioned my rereading to other people online, some have warned me that I will be disappointed by the ending, and some have promised me I will love the rest of the books. So I am expecting nothing, just picking up what I left off more than twenty years ago. These books—as with many others that have changed me in some way—are much like the doors that appear over and over within their pages. There was a drawing of myself, between one world and another, when I started the story so long ago. Maybe the rest of it will only be a story, just a thing I read during a quarantine. Maybe a new, altered version of myself will be drawn along the way, into some subtly-altered life I didn’t know I could find a door to.  Either is fine with me, because I swear: there’s a little bit of my dad, peering over my shoulder, reading along with me.

There are other worlds than these.

Two truths I have learned about medical issues over the past twenty years:

1. What happens to one person in a family happens to every person in a family.
2. Doctors, hospital, medical procedures: these things fix you. They repair you. But “fixed” doesn’t mean “the same.” Afterwards, you will always be repaired. There will always be a scar; there are always repercussions.

As we’ve reached this phase of the corona virus pandemic—the phase where people start to say things like “see, it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be” and “the number of deaths didn’t justify the shutdown” and even “it was a hoax designed to strip us of our liberties”—I keep thinking of these two truths I have learned.

Until you have experienced severe health issues within your own family, you cannot understand the full impact of the issues, how they pervade almost every aspect of your life, how the fear, once ignited, is sometimes less noticeable but never stops burning.

Once you fully understand the frailty of the human body, once you witness it with your own eyes, you can never stop knowing it.

So when I read things like “people are overreacting” or “this isn’t as bad as the media is portraying it” or even (especially!) “we should all just get the virus and move on with our lives because then we’d all be immune” I almost can’t breathe in the face of such unknowing ignorance.

It’s a luxury, really. A privilege to be in the group of people who don’t understand those two truths. I almost envy that person I used to be, who didn’t know these things.

(I say “almost” because I will never not value the pieces of knowledge I have gained in my life, even if it hurt to learn. Especially if it hurt to learn.)

But I’ve learned them, and the other truth is that these are painful pieces of knowledge to acquire. Part of the staying-home, part of the mask-wearing, part of the everything-is-closed: all of those efforts will help some of you never belong to this group. I think of the people I love who nevertheless do not belong in this group, and I want to spare them this inclusion. (Even though I know life can bring it to anyone at any time.)

When you mock or doubt the quarantine procedures you are illustrating you don’t know these truths, and I hope you never have to learn them with your own body and psyche. So here: I will expound.

1. What happens to one person in a family happens to every person in a family.

I don’t only mean that if one person in your family catches develops COVID-19 you’re likely to all get it (even though that’s true). Let’s say, just for the sake of illustration, that only one person in your family develops COVID-19. Let’s say it’s your 17-year-old daughter. She is the one who will suffer physically, with the fever and the body aches and the inflammation and all of the other symptoms. Maybe it gets so bad she has to be put on a ventilator. All of these things she experiences within her own body. It happens to her.

But it will also happen to you, too. If you are her parent you will anguish over not being able to heal her. If you get to be in the hospital with her, you will anguish for days by her unresponsive body, watching machines move her lungs, while you wonder in terror what the outcome will be. You might be faced with impossible decisions to be made in behalf of this person you love but can no longer communicate with.

You, yourself, will forever be changed. It will scar you emotionally forever. And it doesn’t matter if you are the parent of this sick person, or the sibling. The sick person experiences the sickness but the whole family suffers alongside of her. Her brother watches their father weep and is changed. A husband cannot console his wife; a preschooler doesn’t receive the emotional help he needs because everyone is consumed with fear and worry.

And it’s not just the days of sitting by her bedside. Your relationships with your other children will be affected, as will your marriage. You will see your parents in a different light. Sometimes you will look at your friends or your extended family members who didn’t have that experience with bitterness. How blithely they go about their lives, making decisions without ever having had to stare right at death.

“Let’s all just get it and move on” is not a solution. It is a hypothetical concept that is only appealing if you do not know completely how medical challenges change everything.

Your family will never be the same.

2. “Healed” doesn’t mean “restored.”

Let’s go back to that teenage girl hooked to a ventilator. Let’s say you don’t have to make the choice; let’s say she starts to improve. She comes off the vent, she breathes on her own, the medications work their way out of her body and she wakes up.

Let’s grant her no mental deficiencies from being on a ventilator.

She will still never be the same. On the vent, her body has broken down some. Her muscles have deteriorated. Her body has changed. From now on, on the other side of COVID-19, she is different. We don’t know all the ways, exactly, she will have changed, because this is a novel virus. Novel here doesn’t mean fiction. It means new. It means we don’t know the story of how it will continue to affect the body.

We don’t know exactly how, but it will.

Once your body has experienced such devastation, you are always, from now until your death, fixed. You are always repaired.

Because our bodies can’t be restored. They can’t be remade to their former non-fixed, non-repaired condition.

That’s not how bodies work, and this is true for any medical condition.

You can have cancer and be healed, but your body is changed.

You can have a heart attack and survive; they can fix your heart with surgery but you will always have a repaired heart.

Even ortho surgeries: they can replace your knee or your hip, possibly your ankle if you are truly unfortunate, and the surgery will (probably) fix the pain. But the replaced joint will never be the original joint.

Are you doomed to a life of horrible weakness because you’ve had a medical crisis? Of course not. There is life and happiness and everything else on the other side of it. Once you heal.

But you have to learn your new limitations. You will eventually realize you are not the same, and you will grieve for what you lost.

And this grief and those changes will also affect your family.

❦❦❦

These two truths rotate around each other endlessly. You will all move on, your family and your repaired daughter.

But none of you will ever be the same.

I share this knowledge not because I am a doomsayer or full of fear or overreacting, but because of the empirical data my life has brought to me.

Some things you can’t avoid. Cancer, congenital heart defects, diabetes, lupus. Arthritis in your hip or knee or back. Alzheimer’s. Life just happens.

But a virus? With a virus, you can make choices that at least will make smaller the possibility of you having to experience it.

You can protest.

You can reject social distancing.

You can seek out sources that dispute scientific facts.

You can refuse to wear a mask.

You can refuse the eventual vaccine.

But none of your refusals will change those truths: everyone you love is affected and no one is ever the same.

This is bitter knowledge. This is a group no one wants to belong to.

But I am saddened in knowing how many will soon be joining me within it, especially knowing they didn’t have to.

Choose wisely, my friends.

I have finally started making masks! I don’t know why I didn’t start making them sooner; it’s not as if I don’t have fabric for it! I even prewashed and dried fabric that I thought would make appealing masks. And then Colorado, where Haley lives, started requiring people to wear masks outside so then it was a necessity! It still took a few days to get started because A—I was sick for a few days and B—I was kind of intimidated. In quilting, it is sometimes easier to hide mistakes than it is with clothing and while yes…I’ve sewn dozens of quilts and more than a few pair of pajamas, I wasn't sure my quilting skills would be enough to make a little piece of clothing.

Please: Allow me to caption this photo. This is not me making a goofy face. This is me PANICKING. Same thing happens when I put on a snorkeling mask. Low-key panic because I can't get enough air. Happy to make the masks. A little bit freaked out if I actually have to wear one.

But today I decided: enough. I’ll just try one and see what happens. What’s the worst thing that could happen? I mess up and make something unwearable out of a piece of fabric?

That is acceptable risk!

There is no 1/4 inch elastic to be found anywhere near me, so I went with this pattern:

A.B. Mask for a Nurse by a Nurse

It is designed to be worn either just on your face or over an N/95 mask. It uses ties instead of elastic and two layers of quilting cotton. It seems intimidating because there are a lot of steps and it looks complicated…but really the steps are well-written and make sense if you follow them carefully.

And it was really pretty fun to make!

I know there are a million mask tutorials floating around right now and I’m definitely not the person to write another one (remember: my clothes-sewing skills are pretty unremarkable).

But I do have some notes I thought I would share. These are just notes I made as I went through the steps, and maybe they will be helpful for someone else who is also making the same pattern.

So here are my notes on each step. You can also download a PDF of the notes at the bottom of this post. And if you are thinking about sewing masks, my biggest advice is this: just do it. If they aren’t perfect, who cares? Have fun. Use bright fabrics or fun fabrics or whatever you think fits someone’s personality. If you don't have big enough pieces of fabric, use a different color for the ties. Mostly, don’t get too worried about your mistakes. Perfection isn’t the point, right? It’s protecting and caring for each other!

First things first: before you start making masks, you should preshrink your fabric. Wash it in the hottest water your washing machine has and rinse twice. Wash light fabrics separate from darks. Use a color catcher because that hot water will stream out a bunch of dye. Dry on hot, too. Trim the strings and then iron. In theory the masks should be washed once a day so you want to get the shrinking done first.

Also, if you have a fabric marking pen or pencil, find it. It'll come in handy!

Notes correlate with each step of the original pattern and are named the same thing as the patterned named them, for clarity.

1. Print the pattern. I had no problem with this, except I should’ve printed on cardstock instead of printer paper, just for durability.
2. Fold fabric. Quilting cotton stretches more on the width side (selvedge to selvedge) than it does on the length size (cut edge to cut edge), so if you are using odd sizes of fabric, see which side stretches the most, and fold so the stretch goes across the width of the mask, rather than the height.
3. Cut binding and ties. I cut my binding strips 1.75 inches instead of 1.5. I know…a quarter inch doesn’t seem like that much but for me it made it much easier to make the ties. Also, if you can use larger yardage so you can cut width of fabric strips, it does make it easier!
4. Refold and cut mask face. I folded my fabric twice so I could cut four pieces at once. You can use scissors or a quilting ruler and a rotary cutter, up to you. I skipped the step of cutting out the notches. I marked it with a marking pen instead.
   Also, I have no idea what the difference is between a “taco” style fold and a “burrito” style fold…tortilla shells are all round.
5. Stack and sew. I have a hard time knowing exactly where to turn at the points, so I just marked a line 1/2 inch from the edge.
6. Iron in pleats. I have no idea if I’m doing this step right. I THINK the fold should go up, toward the top point, but if you look at the picture of the folded pattern, it seems like they
   point down. I’ve made it both ways…I continue to think the fold goes up. But I am happy to be corrected if I’m wrong. UPDATE!!! I found an updated version of the tutorial that states
   "Pleats should be facing downward when looking at outside fabric of mask face." OK, got it wrong! Luckily I've only made a few so far. Maybe no one will notice? The updated version also includes instructions for a pocket for a wire. I haven't tried it so I can't speak to that part of the process, but HERE is the updated version.
7. Sew pleats in place. Careful not to hit the pins with your sewing machine needle. Just saying.
8. Mark and sew darts. When you sew the darts in, use the denim stitch on your machine. This is the stitch that does three stitches close together; on Bernina machines it is stitch #6.
9. Trim excess. The tutorial photo shows these cuts being made with pinking shears. If you don’t have those, regular scissors are just fine! (I might really now want to buy a nice heavy pair of pinking shears. My mom used to have a pair that fascinated me when I was a kid. Wonder what happened to them.)
10. Prepare the binding. If you cut width-of-fabric strips in step three, you don’t have to sew seams! Also, the smaller pieces (the one you cut in half) don’t need to be 10 inches, only about 4 inches long.
11. Attach side binding. Sew toward the folds of the pleats to avoid sewing them down the wrong way.
12. Finish side binding. When you sew it down to the front, again sew toward the pleats; that way your presser foot doesn’t get caught in the folds. Try to make sure the fabric edge covers the stitching lines you already stitched (also, if it doesn’t, don’t sweat it).
13. Attach top/bottom binding. Fold the binding strip in half (end to end) and iron the fold. Then, line up that fold with the dart from step 8. This way your ties will be even.
    

    I had to piece these binding strips together out of scraps because I calculated wrong. This is how I know it is faster to cut them from the width of the fabric!
14. Finish top/bottom binding and ties. If you folded in half on step 13, you can skip trimming the ties to make them even, as they already will be. However, I trimmed the corners off the edges of the ties because it makes sewing the ends easier.
    

    Fwew. This close up makes me realize I am about ready for a new cutting mat...This is the last birthday gift my mom gave me, though, so I just keep using it even though it's bumpy...
    
    When you sew the binding strips on, make sure to back sew once over the dart spot, just for added strength. Take this step slow at first, because it’s kind of tricky to get such a small strip in the right spot. Double check that you didn’t miss sewing both edges once you’re done; if you did, just sew it again.

Alternate version of the clipped ends, this time folded:

The first mask I sewed took me almost 45 minutes from start to finish. By the third I was down to 30 minutes!

Download Notes on corona masks.

Let me know if you are sewing masks, have questions about sewing masks, or are also, like me, utterly panicked at the thought of wearing masks...

Happy sewing, friends!

“Spring is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.” ~Barbara Kingsolver​

It’s been since late October that I put my garden tools away. Rosebushes pruned, dead annuals piled up in the green waste bin, the very last of the weeds pulled. A few new bulbs planted.

But now it is spring. Now it is time to go back outside and greet my garden.

When I stepped out onto my grass yesterday morning, my bucket in my gloved hands, I had to pause for a moment. Under my maple tree—the tree we planted when Haley was one week old—the daffodils are blooming, mixed with three shades of pink hyacinths. Already the crocus are passed and gone, the Grecian windflowers almost over, but the rosebush is spreading out its red leaves and the poppy is a tidy green mound.

I set my bucket down next to the rosebush that in another month will bloom its pale magenta blossoms, the first thing I planted in my flower beds, and just walked around my front yard. My front yard. More hyacinths, more daffodils, the grass so green now, and one orange tulip. I sat on the steps of my front porch, and before I got to work I just took it in. Just savored it. Just felt it all once again, my little-girl self who loved flowers more than almost anything, who sometimes lay in the dirt under a cornstalk just to see if she could watch the purple morning glories open. The barely-an-adult person who planted that first rosebush. My faint but true memory of my grandpa Fuzz kneeling next to me so he could answer right in my ear that the delightful flower I had just found in his garden was called a bleeding heart. Watching my dad plant the maple tree in our front yard, witnessing its yearly growth from my bedroom window and then, years later, watching my kids climb it. Planting my first spring bulbs in the autumn before Haley was born, planting hostas one spring day with Jake when he was three. Nathan crawling towards bright orange daylilies on a hot day in August, Kaleb lining up and making patterns with the garden tools. All the days of my children’s childhoods when they would play outside with friends and I would watch them while I gardened, and every so often they’d stop by to help. The way it felt, the spring after Dad died, to see the tulips, daffodils, and grape hyacinths he’d planted bloom even though he was gone—like a greeting, like a reminder that he loved us still.

I sat there on my porch, where I have sat some minutes or hours during the days of the past 26 years. This place I have owned and cared for. This garden I have cared for, and which cares for me. I know—maybe that sounds silly. How do flowers do anything but bloom? But they do care for me. They lift my spirits. There is a restorative power in their presence. They are like friends, returning each year. My trees are confidants and sometimes I just stand next to them, touching their bark and feeling their deep connection to the earth and thus finding my own place upon it. They are each a symbol, of a sort, of memory and of who I have loved and been loved by and of hope.

“To plant a garden,” Aubrey Hepburn said, “is to believe in tomorrow.” When that orange tulip first bloomed—only a few weeks before Haley was born—it was already a connection to the past autumn day when I planted it. But it was also a connection to Saturday, when I sat with it at my feet, when I leaned in close to examine its dusty stamens, when I texted that same daughter.

A garden is hope for the future, but it is also connection to the past. It is nurturing and being nurtured.

I know not everyone has this blessing. I know not everyone needs or even wants it.

But I am still as grateful today as I was that day, when I was 22 and learned how to plant roses, to have my place, to have my garden, to love my flowers and hug my trees and walk barefooted through my green, soft grass.

Keeping up with my goal to COMMIT this year, here’s an accounting of my March progress and a list of my April goals.

MARCH GOALS:

1. My EXERCISE goals were to run 50 miles and to go to 10 ballet barre classes.
   COVID-19 put an end to the ballet barre classes, but I did get in three before the craziness escalated. As the month progressed, Kendell wanted to walk with me, so I walked a lot. More than I ran. I am feeling like getting outside and moving is more important than ever right now, and it matters more that I do it and less HOW. My mileage this month:

6 runs, 23.55 miles
6 walks, 24.55 miles
2 hikes (Dry Creek and Grove Creek), 10.28 miles
58.38 total miles

2. My WRITING goals were to blog two times a week, work on four poems, and finish an essay. Almost total fail. I did blog 8 times, but I worked on zero poems or essays. The enforced togetherness of the quarantine is not fantastic for my writing goals.
3. My QUILTING goals were to finish the octagon flower blocks, bind Jake’s quilt, and figure out the process for Kaleb’s quilt. I finished a hot pad I made with some scraps from my Crazy Paving quilt (it is named "purple chakra")
   and the octagon flowers and I bound Jake’s quilt, but he hasn’t used it yet because I haven’t dared to take it to the laundromat. I did not figure out the process for Kaleb’s quilt but I did print out the pattern so that is a start! My other goal was to NOT quilt as much, and I did accomplish that; I made one little mug rug and I shopped for fabrics for another table runner, but that was all.
4. My SCRAPBOOKING goal was to make some layouts, and I did that! I organized and executed my Christmas in March week (which is extending into April!) and I made 10 layouts.
5. My READING goal was to finish the two books I hadn’t and to start The Dark Tower series. Reading has taken the second-biggest hit during the quarantine for me (writing is first), but I did accomplish these goals. But I haven’t read much at all.

APRIL GOALS:

1. EXERCISE: Eight runs (two a week) and as many walks as Kendell or anyone else wants to go on. Three hikes. Pick up strength training again by logging in to my Beach Body account and/or Peleton app. Also, MOVE MORE while I’m working at home. On Wednesday I took several 5-minute breaks where I did a little bit of exercise—jumping jacks, planks, burpees, each one followed by some gentle cobra poses—and my back felt 100% better at the end of the day.
2. WRITING: Blog twice a week. A couple of days ago, I got sucked into a YouTube add for a Master Class by Joyce Carol Oates. Three things she said I want to remember: “The most destructive thing to our creativity is constant interruption.” “If you feel like you are a writer, you probably are…Take that instinct and turn it into a craft.” “What we all need is the psychological uplift of finishing something.” I was listening to this at the same time I saw that meme about how if you don’t finally do the thing you’ve been putting off doing during the quarantine, you obviously didn’t NOT do it because you didn’t have the time, but lacked motivation. If I don’t finally settle down and write something, anything, during the quarantine, will I ever? Well…who knows? What I want to do is to look at it like a challenge. I WILL be interrupted. I love my people and I love that we are together, but just their presence in the house makes me feel less able to write. (Does blogging count as writing? Yes…but also, sort of no, because it is easier. It doesn’t have the challenge of being chosen by an editor in order to be seen, and so in that sense it is more of a writing exercise.) So, I am making my goal smaller and more specific: I am going to finish an essay I started a while ago and submit it to the Ploughshares emerging writer contest.
3. QUILTING: Actually make the table runner. Start on Kaleb’s quilt.
4. SCRAPBOOKING: Finish the Christmas layouts I had planned and make three layouts for my family stories album.
5. READING: Commit to reading for 30 minutes a day. I have the time. I’m going to try to not let myself feel guilty about this.
6. BONUS GOAL: Right now, it feels like packages are life. I keep placing online orders for stuff I don’t need. So, I’m setting the goal of MAILING more than I order. I’m going to make and send two cards a week.

Of course...with all that is going on, maybe the best goal is just to survive! How did your March goals go? 

Last year, Kendell and I did 50 hikes together. I didn’t blog about them much because in my head I have the spark of a book idea that is growing out of those hikes, the changes they inspired, and the reasons behind them. So I have notes in my hiking notebook and scattered throughout my journal but nothing in a central place.

In December, I had the idea that it would be great to put together a photo album with pictures from our hikes, to give Kendell for Christmas. (I would have to add the last hike after Christmas, because we took it on December 30.) I wanted this to be a simple album, mostly just photos and journaling with a few embellishments. I ordered a 6x8 photo album and some two-up photo holders (so two 4x6 photos per side). I started going through photos on my phone and, wow. I was swiftly overwhelmed. Of course I can’t print every photo I took from 50 hikes (at least, not if I wanted to fit them all in to one album), so I tried to narrow it down to 2-3 per hike.

I'm using this Simple Stories black leather album and their Snap photo pages. Mostly 4x6 but some 6x8 photos too.

And then I bumped into the problem of photo orientation. Right now I am just using my cell phone for photos when I hike (I really want to change that and find a good small camera, as I’m getting more and more frustrated by the cell phone limitations, no matter how much they’ve improved), and think about it: how do you usually hold your cell phone when you take a pic? Vertically. But how are most pocket pages oriented? Horizontally. I know it shouldn’t matter and I can put a vertical in one pocket and a horizontal in the next one and it’s not a huge deal, the photos are still visible.

It still bugs me.

One vertical photo, one horizontal. This makes me crazy.

And then I started trying to figure out how to include some journaling. This varied widely depending on the hike. Some hikes were epic, like the 14 miler we did when we ran out of water at the half-way mark, got stung by yellow jackets, stumbled upon a big, angry rattlesnake, and got lost when we took a wrong turn. Some hikes were just…lovely rambles, but no big stories. In my head, I pictured small journaling blocks that I would stick on top of one of the photos from each hike, with the name of the trail, the distance and vert, and a few details. But as the “few details” are so different for each hike, some of the small journaling blocks are not really very small.
And then I also got hung up on how to orientate the journaling. If I had, say, four vertical photos for a hike, all together in the sheet protectors like this:

This is the album lying open on my desk, with four vertical 4x6 photos. You have to turn the album one quarter turn to see the pictures properly. Which way would you put the journaling?

then should I put the journaling so you could read it when you flipped the album to look at the photos? Or so you could read it as you just turned the pages, even though it would run the opposite way of the photos?

Eventually, I got all the photos printed. I printed some as 6x8 and more as 4x6. I tried to find as many horizontal photos as I could. I gathered all the story details.

See....these are the journaling boxes. No consistency to the size because the stories are all different lengths. I will put a stamped image in the empty space under the hike details.

Did I finish it and give it to Kendell for Christmas?

No.

Did I finish it and give it to him for our anniversary in February.

No.

I’m just frustrated by the whole thing. I wanted it to be simple but it’s gotten more and more complicated and I have a TON of photos (250+ so I have options to choose from) and all the sheet protectors but I don’t know how to proceed.

Actually, here’s what I want to have happen. I would like some scrapbooking company to make an 8x8 album that has two types of pocket protectors for the photos. One that holds two vertical 4x6 (which would be 8x6, yes, which is entirely different than 6x8) photos and one that holds two horizontal 4x6 photos. The holes on the protectors would line up so they all fit nicely into the album. Yes, the pages themselves would be a different size, but you could just flip the pages without having to turn the album to see the photos correctly.

One day I will put on my big girl pants and put the album together…but I already know I won’t love it.

At any rate, that is a very long introduction for what I really wanted to write about today (which I will blog about tomorrow), and that is that I have set myself a new goal. This year, who knows how many hikes we will take. We’ve had a slow start because of muddy trails and so only did one hike in each January and February and two in March. I don’t know if we’ll make it to 50 again. But I DO know I want to document it in an easier and less frustrating way. For one, I am paying attention now and trying to take horizontal photos on EVERY hike. I am researching a new, small camera I can take hiking with us. And I’m going to blog about every hike we take. These blog posts will include photos, and then I will just save them so I can print them at the end of the year, but I won’t have to spend 57 bajillion hours processing them all at once. The stories will all be in one place (in my 2020 hikes category). And maybe by then my dream album will have been invented and produced. Or maybe I'll figure out some different approach, I don't know. I'm open to suggestions!

Tomorrow I will start posting about our first hikes of 2020.