Tag Archive for: covid

A Virus Changed Us—T.K. Thorne

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Covid-19 changed us.

 Our grandchildren, or those who were very young during it, might forget all about it by the time they are grown, as most of my generation has little knowledge of the 1918 flu pandemic and the fact that President Woodrow Wilson tried to suppress news of that devastating because he thought it might lower moral during war time (WWI). Spain, being neutral in the war, reported their cases, hence, the pandemic was misleadingly dubbed the “Spanish” flu.

We, who lived (and are living) through Covid, have memories of the terrible stress of those early months—watching freezer trucks lined up in NYC to hold bodies, disinfecting our groceries, not being able to see or touch a newborn grandchild or elderly loved ones, and dealing with the seclusion of our home santuaries/prisons. Grocery stores had a strict limit on how many people could be in the store at a time. We tried to stay six feet away from other humans. Those who worked from home had to learn new technology and simultaneously deal with children who would normally be at day care or in school. People were dying by the thousands; jobs and housing were often hanging by a thread. It felt like the end of the world.

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I dealt with the stress by learning to swing a mattock (a pick/hoe combo tool) and attacking the wisteria invasion in my back yard, then pulling tiny plants from the moss along my brick walkway, rescuing two horses, and creating a small pond in my yard. I learned Tai Chi from Internet videos, started watercolor painting, and growing vegetables with my flowers. Fortunately, I was working on a non-fiction writing project (Behind the Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham’s Civil Rights Days) and had a lot of research and editing to do—because my creative writing muse was on ice.

During the hay days of Covid, people relished the opportunity to get outside, to breath the healing air exhaled by forest or gardens. Passing someone on a path or sidewalk (even at a distance), we felt an instant connection, happy to see a person of any sort, perhaps the same way those who lived in isolated villages throughout the world have always eagerly welcomed visitors.

Friends who live on their boat in the Caribbean during non-hurricane months told us that during Covid, they were “stuck” near a small island with five other boaters with whom they developed close relationships. The island was closed, but the owner of a small restaurant on land snuck them groceries and took in laundry.

My cousins in the suburbs north of Atlanta began gathering weekly in someone’s yard with their neighbors for a drink and conversation, a ritual they continue.

Today, tending my garden (and two fish—meet “Blue” and “Golda Meir”) and horses, practicing martial arts, and painting give me joy and peace. I look at the land around us with a different eye, thinking about whether and how we could supplement our food if needed. My writing Muse woke up after throwing water in her face and shaking her, and I finished a new novel.

 

The changes are internal and external. The downtown of our nearest major city has transmuted. More people live there; less people work there. Working from home has left commercial buildings across the country empty but given millions of people options about where they live and how they work. We are still adjusting. I hope we are also remembering.

  • Remembering that people are precious, regardless of their politics.
  • Remembering that nature is precious and powerful.
  • Remembering that we can adjust; we can change; we can meet challenges.

Today, despite all the scary stuff going on, I have more faith that people will adjust. What a strange gift from a pandemic. If you think about it, nature regularly reminds us what we are capable of.

“Dear Autumn . . .

[you are] a Master of self-preservation.

Entering this world to teach us

not to fear change.

It is necessary.

Inevitable.

Trust

That growth will follow. . . .”

—Amanda Davis

I write about what moves me, following a flight path of curiosity, reflection, and imagination.
Check out my (fiction and nonfiction) books at TKThorne.com

The Path to Sanity—T.K. Thorne

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Writer, humanist,
          dog-mom, horse servant and cat-slave,
       Lover of solitude
          and the company of good friends,
        New places, new ideas
           and old wisdom.

 

The world fell apart in March 2020. I was at a writers
conference in California on the opposite side of the country from home (Alabama). One day
after the start of the conference, I flew home. Two people in the airport wore
masks. The rest of us tried to follow the advice “don’t touch your face.”  My nose has never itched so much.

Over the year, my grandson was born  . . . without me. Another daughter had to
spend months in the hospital with her dying father . . . without me. Many
people suffered much worse. So far, I have not lost any family. Actually, I’m am
very close to the oldest in what’s left of my family. In the past year, I have
been inside exactly one public place. How bizarre.

My mind has done some kind of trick where I can now see the
death numbers posted on the side of the T.V. without feeling like I can’t
breathe. That’s a good thing, right?  Maybe
not. I try to not to watch the tributes to individuals because then I can’t
breathe again.

Where lay the path of sanity?  It was a windy one. The muse deserted
me.  I could not put pen to paper except
to edit and to write this blog. Fortunately, I had a lot of material to edit,
but the more days that have turned into weeks and month, the drier the well of
creativity seemed. I had finished my police-witch trilogy (book two, House
of Stone) and the eight-year nonfiction project (Behindthe Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham’sCivil Rights Days. I finished a rewrite of an old manuscript
and had no idea where to go next. I felt aimless, adrift.  Everything had a surreal quality.

The first thing I did that gave me a little peace was plucking
debris and tiny plants from the green moss on the brick walk from the driveway
to the front door.  It took hours; its
only purpose was to create a little temporary beauty, but doing it calmed
something inside me.

Then I took up the WW, the war on wisteria, a vine that had
eaten half my back yard and uprooted several trees. This took months of back-breaking
work.  Wisteria sends vines out
underground that pop up yards away, making nodes along the way that each grow
deep roots straight down. You can pull up one section, but any piece that
survives can and will repopulate. I learned to know and love a tool called a mattock. Some days I could only do a tiny amount. But the harder I worked and the more exhausted I was, the better I slept and
breathed. But I don’t recommend this as a therapy. Never plant wisteria, at
least not the Chinese or Japanese variety.

The Wisteria War lasted through the summer and into fall. I
decided to let the back yard become a wildflower garden (except for wisteria)
and planted some old seeds that had been sitting out in my garage.  We’ll see if they germinate.

One thing I really missed was my twice-weekly martial arts
class. Sometime in November, I decided to learn tai chi, which is practiced
solo. You have probably seen old people doing it in a park. I learned it from Youtube
videos, and whenever I felt trapped or anxious, I went through the movements.
I did it three or four times a day, and it focused me on the present.

Over the winter, I lost my mind and adopted two rescue
horses off the track, a Thoroughbred and a Standardbred—Foxy and Nickie Jones. I
bought Foxy sight unseen from a Facebook picture at a “kill pen” in Louisiana.
Her next step would have been dog food (in Mexico). She is a beautiful bay,
although we’ve been working on a skin infection that even affected an eyelid. It’s
all getting better. Nickie Jones was an older lady who traveled with her but
when she arrived in Alabama, her purchaser backed off because she was injured
and malnourished. So, we took her too. Preparation for their arrival took weeks
of cleaning out the old barn and working on the overgrown arena and round
pen.  Focusing on preparing for them and
taking care of them has occupied me and my husband for several weeks now. But I
am smitten!

Then a good friend introduced me to a form of art called Zentangle. It is done on little 3×3 inch pieces of stock paper—tiny art. I
played with it and decided to add colors. Because it is so small, it is not
intimidating like a big canvas would be. I’ve never done any “art thing” beyond doodling, but I’ve always wanted
to.  They may not be great masterpieces, but the world fades away when I am working on one.

 

But still fresh words eluded me. No stories pushing to be born.

Then a friend I never met at that writer’s conference in California (we
were supposed to be on a Law Enforcement panel together) emailed me and asked
if I were interested in submitting a short story to an editor in Australia who
is putting together a crime anthology featuring law enforcement authors and wanted
some submissions from women. I am both of those things—an author and a cop, a retired
one anyway, a short, gray-haired old lady. I agreed to submit a story.
The catch is I had to write it. I had
to create it. I told myself—this is like the tiny art. It’s a short story, not a novel. Even so, I was
totally blank. But I promised, so I had to do it. One word at a time.

I was delighted and surprised that the words came. It’s about a short,
gray-haired old lady who is an ex-cop, a martial artist, and a horse woman who
witnesses a murder. I’ve sent it off. Maybe I’ll do another short story or maybe I have found a character who could support something longer?  

I hope this helps you find your way through.

 

T.K. is a retired police captain who writes books, which, like this blog, go wherever her interest and imagination take her.  More at TKThorne.com

 

 

Wisteria Wars and Creativity in the Time of Covid—by T.K. Thorne

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     Writer, humanist,
          dog-mom, horse servant and cat-slave,
       Lover of solitude
          and the company of good friends,
        New places, new ideas
           and old wisdom.

Most people assume, as a writer, that I’m eating up the hours a little virus has bequeathed to us by WRITING. They would be wrong. Yes, I am working on a novel, but it’s in the editing stage. That means I’m calling on some craft skills, but mostly just plain old boring, repetitive checking for errors.
This piece is the first thing I’ve actually tried to pull from the creativity well, and I have no idea where it will go. But that is okay. I give myself permission to ramble and see if anything worthwhile will arise. (I encourage you to do the same.)  So here we go.

I’m fortunate to live on several acres of property surrounded by beautiful woods. Our nearest neighbors are cows. For the ten years before we moved here, I lived in the city, and tried to grow on a tiny patch of land what I felt was the most gorgeous of plants—a wisteria vine. For whatever reason, the one I planted with hopes of it gracefully climbing the crosshatch wood panel on the side of my front porch and spilling grape-like clusters of blossoms—never bloomed. When we moved, I dug up a piece of the root and planted it in my front yard, determined to keep trying. The ground was so hard, I ended up cutting off most of the taproot and throwing a small piece of it into the woods on the side of my house.

Thirty years later, that little piece of discarded taproot has been . . . successful.  That is like saying a virus replicates. It did bloom, draping glorious purple curtains from the trees.

At first I told it, “Okay, as long as you stay on that side of the path.” It didn’t. Then, I rationalized, as long as it stayed behind the fence in the backyard. (I didn’t actually go in my backyard very much, being busy with life stuff.)  But I looked one day after covid-19 hit, and it had eaten over half of the back yard.  I couldn’t even walk to the fence line. Two huge trees went down, strangled, and too close to the house.

It was time for war.

This engagement, like those in the Middle East, will never end. Wisteria sends out shoots underground and periodically forms nodes that may change the direction or shoot out its own horizontal and/or vertical roots, so each section can survive independently and pop up anywhere.  Of course, I have the most pernicious variety, the Chinese kind that takes over the world (challenging even kudzu, which fortunately, hasn’t found my house yet.)

My first priority was to save the trees near the house. The vines were so thick at the base, no clippers would suffice. I girded myself with a baby chainsaw and determination. It hurt to cut into those old, twisty vines, to destroy something so beautiful, but the trees were more important. I imagined that with each cut, the tree could feel the release from the vine’s embrace, the reprieve.  I was taking life, but I was giving it too.

I sprayed the growth in the yard and pulled up (some of) the root systems.  If you want a mindless, exhausting, frustrating, impossible task—pull up established wisteria roots. It will take your mind off anything, even a pandemic.

One side benefit of the fallen trees was that a little more light found its way into the yard, and I decided to try growing vegetables. Another feature of my backyard is an old fashion clothesline with rusty steel posts. Periodically over the past decades, I’ve thought we should take them down as they are eyesores, but another part of me (the part that worried what young girls with flat stomachs would do during the famine) worried that we would have a pandemic one day or some kind of disaster that would require actually hanging clothes out to dry, so I left them, as well as the abandoned rabbit hutch in the far corner.  We would be ready, if not attractively landscaped.  And worse case scenario, maybe the hutch, in a pinch, would hold chickens.

I thought my creative well was dry, but looking at those old steel posts, the pile of wisteria roots, the vines I had pulled up and cut down, and a package of bean seeds that has been sitting in a drawer for a few years, something started stirring. Beans need something to climb.  One of the fallen trees had taken out actual wire lines of the clothesline, but the poles were set in cement. They will be there when I am dust. The pole surface might be too slick for a bean to be able to curl up, but maybe—
And so, as a product of WWI (Wisteria Wars Episode I) and covid-19, I found that the outlet for creativity isn’t always words on a page. If my beans grow, they will be beautiful and feed me, and if they don’t, I will at least have a couple of funky art pieces in the backyard.

Foreground: Metal pole with wisteria roots and vines. Background logs
from tree felled by wisteria, the carcass of another felled tree, and
old rabbit hutch.

T.K. is a retired police captain who writes books, which, like this blog, roam wherever her interest and imagination take her.  Want a heads up on news about her writing and adventures (and receive two free short stories)? Click on image below.  Thanks for stopping by!

https://tkthorne.com/signup/

Techno Tics

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by Bethany Maines
As we, or at least some of us, continue to stay home in
attempt to not spread disease several things have become apparent.  First and foremost, lighting matters.  I mean, I always knew that fluorescent lights
sucked, but nothing makes the members of a Zoom meeting ask Dear God, when did Miss Havisham get here?
like bad lighting.  Also, painting walls
has become of huge concern to me.  We’re
having so meetings in the homes of others and all I can think is… Color.  It’s called color.  The world is full of it.  Why is NONE of it on your walls?  And no off-white doesn’t count.  Off only counts as a thing when it’s next to
Broadway. 
Next up: aging and technology.  No one expects Nana to be up on Tik Tok, but
in recent times it has quickly become apparent who has been keeping up, at even
a minor level, on technology.  This has
reconfirmed my resolve to learn at least some basics in a technology even if I
don’t “like” it.  At some point I will be
older than the dirt on which I’m standing and I don’t want some young
whippersnapper having to explain to me that emails don’t live on my
computer.  Or whatever the future version
of that is.
To help me in that goal, and just as though I had spare time
coming out my ears, I signed up for a course on Amazon ads. The first week has
been a fascinating delve into testing ads and ad copy and basically to do all
those things that I generally avoid because I don’t “like” it. So, goal…
accomplished.
I hope all of you are keeping well and if you’re being
forced to do something you don’t like, I hope that it will at least benefit you
and yours in the future.
Here is a sampling of my new ad copy:

 

Shark’s Instinct
Shark’s InstinctGet the money. Get the girl. Get out. But with traitors and a brewing gang war on his heels, will Shark’s instincts keep him alive or get him dead?

BUY NOW: https://amzn.to/3aUhDuA


The Second Shot
A Romantic Suspense with feminist flair, The Second Shot delivers a one-two punch of passion and action that will keep you turning pages.

BUY NOW: https://amzn.to/2xBLyt7

Bethany
Maines is the award-winning author
of the Carrie Mae Mysteries, San Juan Islands Mysteries, Shark Santoyo Crime Series, and numerous short stories. When she’s not traveling to exotic lands, or kicking some serious butt with her black belt in karate, she can be found chasing her daughter or glued to the computer working on her next novel. You can also catch up with her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and BookBub.