Dressing Up

 

Here they came. In van and pickup, in Benz and BMW, peopling our streets and stores and cafes with strangers. Interesting strangers, though, despite the costumes.

Yes, costumes. Have you noticed? Apparently, toward the end of 2022, we have a need for costume when we travel certain places, even without a specific party to attend.

I was in Santa Fe last month, where the urge to dress up like someone you’re not became a national fashion in the Eighties. Santa Fe Style still rules, when you visit there.

We’ve got a Style of our own, though, don’t we? Call it Junk Gypsy? That’s certainly a part of it.

I watch the young women strolling along the road or street in cut off denim and cowboy boots, draped in various trailing decorations—feathers, scarves, necklaces, artistically torn shirts—topped by western hats, often black, even when it’s hot. They look pretty great, if not particularly comfortable.

Old(er) women wear long(er) pants. Long(er) skirts, blending into the Santa Fe look.

It reminds me of the Urban Cowboy fad in the 1980’s. When I met my husband, his entire wardrobe consisted of a denim jacket and blue jeans and a checked shirt. Ranch clothes for a man who actually builds fence, although he didn’t. His reason for the garb was a difficult divorce, nearing conclusion in its second year.  

But because of Urban Cowboy fashion at the time, he looked very cool to me. Happy coincidence.

Our Round Top Style today, if you’ll let me call it that, is more ornate. You find it on display often in PaperCity, and at the events held so often during Antiques Showtime. You can see how everyone enjoys wearing the (sort of) Western Look.

It has its own capacity for leveling social differences. In fact, all that matters is one’s ability to select and accessorize.

What got me thinking about this was a tall man at Farm and Ranch this morning, a stranger, who carried a sack of birdseed to the car for me. He had style in the way he volunteered. He did it just right.

In the fifteen or twenty seconds it took, I noticed a well-used western hat, muddy boots, round glasses—tortoise shell with a glint of gold at the bridge—and a white mustache. He looked real, not in costume at all, but also not a local person, quite. A local person most likely would have worn a cap. And different glasses.

How quickly we send our messages, now.

I wonder how many of us spend time thinking about it.

In the nearly twenty months I’ve been alone, I think about about it frequently. I still wear a mask pretty often, so I don’t have my smile to convey myself to those I meet. Also, I wear glasses, and big sunglasses. With that mask I might as well be Iron Man, for all the nuance conveyed.

How do I communicate, other than with muffled speech?

Clothing is an obvious answer. But which comes first? The clothing or the message? That Round Top Style I refer to above has a consistency that hides personality. It focuses attention on the jewelry, the workmanship of boots, the art of assembly in how it all fits together.

Who’s underneath?

Who are you, really?

That fellow who helped me stood out, first, for an authenticity—dried dirt on boots—and then became defined by those spectacles. I’m guessing he’s a city person who has a place around here. I did call back to find out his name. It was Tom.

Thank you, Tom.

Handling Tourists

 

I’m sitting here on the side of a mountain in Santa Fe, NM. It’s another perfectly gorgeous morning. Deep blue sky. And the sloping fall light that always seems three times brighter here. I’ve been in this little house all month, fleeing the heat and finishing my memoir manuscript about Leon Hale and me.

The deadline has caught me thinking about timelessness and place. About tourists.

In Fayette County we’re learning the effects of popularity. Round Top bulges with it, changing our daily landscape and our traffic patterns. There’s been a influx of developer activity—growing over the past ten years or so, and recently accelerating.

I always think Santa Fe is a good example of a place that understands tourism. That takes it in and uses it, revels in it to some degree, but allows none of it to affect its core, source of its blood and spirit.

I hadn’t been here for a protracted visit for more than fifteen years. When I came for a week last year, visiting my longtime friend Donna Norquist and her husband, I stayed downtown in the old La Fonda Hotel. Tourist Central, that is. And I found the city much changed.

Coming back this year, I don’t notice those changes as much.

I’m staying where Hale and I had a place, in an old development up the hill from the city center. The condos are like little adobe houses, and they’re arranged around a wicked 9-hole golf course. Great dog walking, and I’ve done a lot of that. Rosie loves it.

Staying in this familiar place activated all the familiar pathways we trod twenty years ago. Routes we took through the city to accomplish errands and have fun. Our dry cleaner is still there, so is the neighborhood grocery store. All the landmarks—museums, cathedral, Plaza, Canyon Road—are in place and only a small area near the railyard has been altered significantly.

Mainly, of course, the mountains haven’t moved. And although the sweeping basin to the south is dotted with more houses, the basin is there, the mountains encircling it still shimmer in ever-shifting blues and lavenders.

One reason for Santa Fe’s endurance in the face of truly daunting numbers of tourists and new residents (a California influx of tsunami-like proportions) is that they have strong land-use restrictions.

Letting themselves Houstonize fifty years ago—tear down whatever, build whatever, wherever—would have destroyed this place.

It’s a lesson for us.

Round Top, LaGrange, Fayetteville and the surrounding communities appeal to tourists by being different from daily life in the city. We all know that. But creeping urbanization threatens our future.

Creeping developments, on properties that are subdivided into lots that are too small, too numerous. They increase the load on well water, without any return possible. They add to traffic.

Junky construction on the outskirts of our towns duplicates the origin of urban blight.

These creeping negatives partake of the human drive to turn every resource into money, especially land in a pretty place. This drive is part of our culture and our human race. It seems as strong as the highly restricted drive to procreate.

Santa Fe surely loves money. And money loves Santa Fe. Big money. But the city’s underlying strength of spirit continues to prevail.

Intelligent developers understand that the character of the place whose appeal attracts them must be maintained, and enhanced if possible. To some degree they restrict themselves from taking the short-term approach to maximum gain.

Some days I see examples of this in our county and I feel myself exhaling in relief and gratitude.

But then, on other days, I wonder.

Loving Men

 

Are men, really, “a lot of trouble?”

A friend recently quoted a woman he knows as saying that. She was trying to explain why an eligible older fellow might have difficulty finding an interested new female partner.

When I began to check it out, I discovered that a surprising number of unattached women have quit on men. They like the freedom of living alone. Housekeeping for one.

Men, they say, require “double the work.”

One woman said men turn into “old geezers” the day after they get married. “They expect women to work hard at staying attractive, but they don’t bother about themselves.”

A friend in real life (IRL) pointed out, “All the older ones want is a ‘nurse with a purse.’” And she made a face.

This is a very sad state of affairs.

But I think it may say more about their experience in marriage than it does about men.

We Boomers were set afloat in our youth on waters roiled by change.

Women rose up, stepped away from their mothers’ Miltowns and afternoon gin, and began to surf the power that resides in assertion. We crested successive waves of it, each one larger and larger until the curl came to tower above our heads.

Has it crashed, yet?

Today, a man begins comfortably to impart his knowledge about something to his lady and he’s shocked to be accused of “mansplaining.”

He didn’t ask if she needed an explanation before launching into one.

He didn’t notice launch pad cues—the expression in her eyes and her body language as he began to talk.

I’m not sure men are particularly alert to cues. Most of them haven’t been raised that way.

Is it fair to nurture anger and disappointment against a whole group of people because of something that was missing from their childhood? Something they can’t help.

Can they help it?

I love men. I also like them. I think a man often possesses a carefully buffered, tender heart and that women are much tougher, emotionally.

At the core of every man lives the little boy he was.

Many of the negatives the women express are trappings that our culture has draped across the men. Trappings and traps.

Left out are two of the best things men do, and like to do. That is, help and protect.

Think of daily life. Think of the chores a husband or partner usually performs around the house. Think of the security the presence of a good man conveys to the deepest part of a woman’s being.

These things matter. And they promote happiness if the man understands the perils of making assumptions.

Here’s where things get complicated.

If a man assumes a woman needs help with something and steps in—and she doesn’t want that help—many times she’ll respond with sharp words.

Ouch. He steps back, stung. He has absorbed a lesson, probably the wrong one. Because, afterwards, he waits to be asked.

And she begins to marinate a resentment to the effect that he “never helps.”

What if the transaction goes smoothly and he performs all the duties they’ve agreed on? Still, the woman can become irritated because she is left with the minutiae of domestic planning—children’s scheduling, and so on. She works, too, doesn’t she?

A man might find all this rather confusing.

I had a very happy marriage, it’s true. Neither of us wanted to make the other person uncomfortable. Where we diverged, we compromised. And many times I didn’t realize a compromise had been made.

I have only lately realized that’s because he was the one who made it.

Escape Hatch

 

Texans often travel to escape summer’s heat, heading for the Gulf Coast, the Hill Country or the mountains.

A few travel to Europe, where they’re finding a “heat wave” that’s even more punitive than ours.

But at some point, you have to come back. Walk into the oven everyone else has been roasting in while you were gone.

That makes it seem even hotter.

I was only gone two weeks, but, driving in from Houston, I thought the land looked emptier, bleached. A cornfield that was ripening when I left on July 6, is now straw-dry, brittle, stunned.

The grass on my own small sloping field is shrinking, drawing in on itself.

A few neighboring pastures are going gray, like they did in the terrible drouth of a few years ago. (I like the way that old spelling makes you feel the dry in your mouth.)

Don’t you sense protest from the living vegetation around you? From the trees, grass, flowers—and absent vegetables. And how about  those poor cows huddled in patchy shade while the grass loses moisture with each minute that passes.

We keep trying to power through. By our capacity to do so we measure our character.

Is it enough?

Scientists study the factors contributing to world weather conditions. They think they understand why Europe is having a “worst heat ever” period—a matter of divided jet streams and varying ocean temperatues interconnecting in complex ways that affect rain and the movement of weather systems.

Our situation is related. And here, we have the addition of Saharan Dust flowing in—quite visible when you’re descending in an airplane from 36,000 feet.

Saharan Dust is reputed to diminish the likelihood of hurricanes. No one likes a hurricane, but right now we’d really like a gentle tropical storm to wet us down.

Are we hapless victims of Nature’s whims? I don’t have the technology or the knowledge to give an answer, but I do know what I think.

And I think we’ve got a population problem that we have no way to solve. Population that requires destroying forests for farming. To feed and clothe the people. Forests that that exhale oxygen and contribute to the cycle of moisture that makes life, at all, possible.

Cow people know how much land it takes to graze a herd of a particular size. You and I have seen what happens when a field is overgrazed.

How much land does it take to feed a human population of eight billion people, growing hourly?

Until recently, the problems of insufficient food and water have seemed confined to the so-called Third World. The worst abuses of unbridled development, too, seem centered, now, in that part of the Globe.

But we are not insulated from the consequences, anymore. We created the technology and the philosophy that propels development, and now we are enjoying some of the less comfortable, even threatening, side effects.

One of them involves your well and mine. Water to live by, in other words, right here at home. I know the water my new pump draws on has diminished. How about yours?

Point is, we are not going to be able to open a hatch in the floor and drop into safety while the winds of anguish howl above. And we also aren’t going to populate a Space Ark in time to help our children or grandchildren.

All we’ve got is here. And now.

Maybe we’ll start paying attention to the balances we can correct if we get miserable enough, and if we don’t forget the misery with the first good rain.

Blame it on the Tomato

 

Dear Boss,

Please let me explain why I don’t have a column today although I have struggled mightily to produce one.

I blame it on the tomato. Yes, one tomato, and it had a blister on it bigger than a half dollar. (Remember those?)

This was no ordinary tomato, either, but an heirloom variety given to me by a friend when it was just a sproutling. Anticipating its yield had my mouth watering for months. Pretty much the only thing that did water around here, in fact.

Because the blister drew my attention to the plant’s foliage, turning brown and yellow before my eyes. And that led me—you know how these things go—to examine the irrigation.

Aha.

Irrigation Man arrived and gave the bad news. The problem was our well. Apparently, irrigation needs constant water pressure and our well couldn’t provide it.

There are technical words to describe the problem, but I only know four: call the Well Man.

He came, with his big truck and his machinery and he pulled our well.

Nervous hours followed. This well had been going strong in 1985 when we arrived. Had it outlived its time? But no, it was the pump, the Well Man said, and he replaced it.

That evening, with the temp on the porch at ninety-two, Rosie began acting strange. She resisted her usual plunge out the door into the yard and, instead, tiptoed to the steps and sniffed, watchfully. I followed with a flashlight. “It’s okay,” I said, sweeping the yard with the beam. But it wasn’t. She had smelled the copperhead before I saw it.

Next day on the way back from visiting a friend in Sugar Land, the low tire light came on. We were somewhere out on the prairie along 529. Next morning that tire was rim flat. The Toyota dealer took care of it in only two and a half hours.

On Monday, an agent accepted the book manuscript I’ve been working on for just over a year. That’s the one about Leon Hale and me—half fiction, half memoir.

She liked it. And to help her sell it to publishers, she asked me to create a table of contents describing what happens in each chapter.

There are forty-six chapters in this book, Boss, each one crammed with feelings. A daunting task.

So you see how it is, Boss, and I didn’t even mention the $5.10 gas or the Toyota dealer’s empty lot and showroom. Or the fire ants in my cupboard and kitchen sink.

Or the constant heat all month, until last night’s rain.

But the rain may be the biggest reason of all why I haven’t written a column this time.

It reminded me of Leon Hale’s Madame Z, the Brazos Bottom fortune teller. How, when the summer temp started to climb, Madame would pack up and head north.

I’m about to do the same.

I haven’t made up my mind yet for sure, but I’m leaning toward a trip by car to Connecticut, where my grandchildren live. A slow trip, watching how everything changes, gradually, in a rhythm and with a speed that feels human size.

An old dog and driver (me) looking at the reality of America today.

It will take an extra twelve days, if all goes well, but I’m hoping to learn something useful, something important on the way—other than the high price of gasoline everywhere. Maybe I’ll see what we Americans share in a good way, because I know it still exists.

I’m sure to be able to write a column about that, Boss.

Shrug is an Action Verb

What we do is shrug. Honestly now, isn't that true? All we've been through here in the past two years, with each news broadcast bringing the pain of hundreds, thousands, millions right into our homes. We begin to develop an emotional callus, a protection against feeling all that misery.

So, a guy with a gun kills nineteen children in an elementary school. How horrible! Deeply, truly, irrevocably horrible. Where did it happen? Oh, in Texas. That’s when the out-of-state reader or viewer starts to shrug. Of course, such a shooting is terrible, but I and those I love are far away. Safe. And then they move on.

We move on.

Shrugging has become our national answer to disaster. Shrugging followed by prayers.

Is it working?

We Americans, we Texans, pride ourselves on finding practical solutions for big problems. If ever we needed a practical solution for a problem, this is it.

The problem is complex, and our culture has difficulty dealing with complexity.

Faced with complexity, we gravitate toward any argument promising a simple answer. Gun control looks like one, at first. We grab hold of that and hunker down.

We’ve got to do something different, people. What that will be, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer.

But I do think I understand some contributing factors.

It’s all about those calluses.

Visualized violence permeates our culture. Moving images of violent acts are on the television, computer, smart phone, accessible to anyone, anytime. Increasingly realistic video games place our children and young people—whose brains are still developing—at the killing console, vaporizing “enemies.”

Frequency of exposure can develop those calluses. And it’s the calluses that allow us to view torn limbs, squirting blood, explosions, etc., without a scarring revulsion.

Just like frequent exposure to mass shootings can cause us to shrug.

The recent catalogue of threats—terrorism, violent storms, pandemic, mass shootings—has left us feeling so vulnerable. Of course, people who feel vulnerable grab for armor, and arms.

And broadcast media—TV and radio—just wallows in it, escalating whatever fear there is to escalate.

Our fear prevents us from thinking. In fact, it’s caused us to stop believing that we can think these difficulties through and arrive at a plan.

We face problems of a planetary dimension—climate devastation, pandemics—and our brains cannot handle that. There are interrelated, complex systems at work that it takes computer modeling even to begin to understand.

Our fear in the face of all these stresses is logical and rational. But it’s preyed on by people whose motive is only to gain power and wealth in the short terms of their own puny lives. They rely on us to be afraid.

Maybe, for now, simple solutions are the best we can do. Here are a few:

Stop watching TV news; stop trolling the internet to fuel your anger and feel righteous; stop thinking that those who look different are out to harm you.

Look to your home and your children. Where are your guns—are they locked up—can your children find the key? (Most of the time, they can.)

Stop looking for dystopian drama, for end-of-the-world cheap thrills. Boycott the stuff. Read a newspaper, instead.

Get to know your neighbors. Stop feeling that you, in your small wisdom, are smarter and better than anyone else. You are not. Neither am I.

We are a vulnerable species, like every other. But, like every other, we occupy a specific place at a specific time. Know that place, know it in detail. It is everything. 

Leave the “vesper flights” that arc above the Earth’s clouds and confusions to swifts and angels.

Online Dating

This third version of me has to step out a bit.

In my 13^th month alone, now, I have noticed how much I miss talking. With a man. Well, I did notice it sooner. It has taken this long for me to accept it.

There is peace, of course, in silence.

In the songs of birds, insects, the distant rumble of tractors. Peace there, as well.

To a point.

But not a word of conversation.

So where do we find it with a man, outside of hardware stores when buying a new garden hoe?

Newsflash: Fayette County does not seem to bulge with single men over seventy.

In a grief group I had met a solid and successful local citizen who told me he’d joined Match.com. He had lost his wife and was suffering, it seemed to me, much as I was suffering.

If people like this fellow join Match, I thought, it might be worth a shot. I’d been sharing feelings with wonderful women friends who walk ahead of me this labyrinth of widowhood. Maybe, now, I could connect, also, with a male mind over the destabilizing loss of a spouse.

So I joined it, along with a few other sites intended specifically for older people.

I had thought there would be few men of the right age participating on such sites. Apparently, however, a substantial number joined during the pandemic, when normal social life became restricted.

And so did a legion of scammers. We’ve all heard the stories. More about that another day, I think.

Overall, it’s a learning experience. People are classified on these sites according to categories into which the real person disappears. Very few men take the opportunity offered to post a description that might reveal personality.

And, curiously, a number of men don’t even post a photograph. I skip them. A face can tell you much about a person.

I discovered quickly that I have lots of choice if I’m interested in a man who never attended college or stopped after two years; is a born-again Christian; very conservative; likes to travel by RV, hunt and fish.

Go for it, girl!

Choices diminish if you are private about your religious beliefs and attempting to match an educational level of college and above.

In that category, I find mostly engineers, a few retired professors, a retired doctor or two, but zero journalists or writers.  

The pictures are fun. Men on boats, men holding big fish, or standing with a gun and dog beside a fallen deer. Men hugging pretty daughters or granddaughters. Men standing beside prosperous fireplaces, or at the top of a mountain, against a panorama of foreign valleys and towns.

Strangely, many of the men without props are scowling for some reason. Many others display excellent teeth. But no cheekbones. Cheekbones are out. These fellows have upholstery (as do I, in fact). Or the kind of beard that hides expression.

And then there’s me. The immutable fact of myself. I decided on complete honesty in my profiles. Age honest, photo honest, career honest. And I have to report that I have not discovered a groundswell of interest in the land of silver singles for seventy-seven year old female writers.

That should not be surprising.

But after so many years of marriage to a man who never criticized, who treated me as though I were still the “beautiful girl” he had fallen in love with, I had been carrying around an image of my virtues that had become tangible to me. I saw it daily in his eyes.

Welcome to the real world, honey.

The Moon is a Balloon

 Driving through Round Top around nine-thirty the other evening, I was struck by the sense of relaxed holiday ease. It was the first Saturday of the Antique Show and town was crowded. Yes, the weather that day had been fabulous. After all, it doesn’t take an Antiques extravaganza to bring people to our area on a beautiful day.

As night fell, many cars lined the streets. But the cars were still and quiet. Only a few couples strolled around, murmuring. I could hear light cocktail laughter from the tent outside Prost.

I recognized the feeling it evoked. We’ve all felt it—the peaceful pleasure of day’s end following hours of happy activity. I could feel it from inside my car as I paused at a stop sign. Been a long time since I felt that ease, that peace.

Did I mention the moon?

It was the night of the giant orange moon, slowly rising over Henkel Square. Such a moon exalts us. We can’t help it. The golden light sheds grace upon us. Maybe that accounts for the relaxed good nature of this particular evening.

I had attended the PaperCity kickoff party earlier with a friend. I think we were the only ones not wearing Santa Fe Style, or fancy western garb. My tunic had, in fact, been bought in Santa Fe, but there weren’t boots on my feet to proclaim it.

A genial kind of hype prevailed, with many photos taken and jovial conversation among local luminaries enjoying the perfect air and sloping late afternoon sun. Everyone seemed relaxed in the knowledge that they were in costume, and wasn’t it fun to be mingling and laughing in person, again?

Well, it was. Friends, music, food—out of doors so lingering fears of virus transmission could be allowed to drift away. No wonder everyone was in such a good mood.

This night also struck a kind of balance. We all know the virtues of Antiques Showtime. The health of the area’s economy depends on tourism.

City folk have populated the rolling countryside around us for almost seventy years. We know what they’re looking for. Escape. Peace. Charm.

Lately, though, developers from other cities are in hot pursuit. They have plans for us. Condos in pastures, tourist accommodations in a density never before seen around here. Tourists in cars that will spill out onto Highway 237, a road that, with caravans of heavy equipment hurtling past every day, scarcely needs more such spillage.

It’s not why the rest of us live here, is it? More traffic? More junked up roadways? And a Christmas Market to deliver the chaos of the Antique Shows year-round? Why doesn’t someone suggest a Buc-ees on the Square?

That just doesn’t fit, does it?

Round Top is molting, as it has done for decades. Slips out of the skin it has outgrown, tries out the new one, slips out of it after a few years, and so on. A continual, gradual process in which the nature of the place has, somewhat miraculously, retained its fundamental self—appealing, charming. Beloved.

Round Top has always known its brand and how to stop short of ruining things.

Do the powers that operate out of LaGrange understand that?

The hype that has attracted California developers and boosted local real estate prices is founded on aspects of our community that will be damaged, perhaps fatally, by the advent of developments such as the one suggested for 237 and W. Fuchs Rd.

If nothing else bothers you, think of the wells in the area that sucked sand during the last drought.

The Third Self

 

Before you meet your person, the one who will stick, you are someone—a person all your own. Or a collection of characteristics you think of as a person. You have an identity. We all picture ourselves in a particular way, affected by whatever has been going on in our lives.

I remember the person I was when I met him. She was a worried thirty-seven-year-old divorced mother with one son. She wrote articles for regional publications and worked on fiction that went nowhere.

Then she met him, and after some back-and-forthing, they stuck, and she became his partner and his wife.

We were lucky enough to be a couple for nearly forty years.

During those years my identity evolved into something more symbiotic. It became entwined with the person and identity of my husband. I didn’t realize the extent of the interweaving until he died.

The absence created by his death left me in the condition of a hill-side house after a mudslide removes half the ground supporting it.

The house may have been a home before the slide. A safe place for a family. A place in which to raise children and where a couple might grow old together.

After the mudslide, you walk across its floors at considerable peril. What has that house become? It is certainly no longer what it was.

In the same way, after the loss of the beloved, who am I? Who have I become?

I don’t have an answer. Most people in that situation don’t have one, either.

I know I can’t remain defined by the subtraction, although it’s tempting. Settle in to being “the widow of.” I might almost get used to the words. I might let myself think that’s really all I am, that person—neatly contained within what remains of his much loved identity.

Whatever I do, I can’t return to being the woman I was when I met my husband. I’m forty years older. All the defining responsibilities back then have changed. My son is grown, has his own family, his own children.

My grandchildren.

If they lived nearby, which they do not, the demands of the present would pull me forward into the future, however murky it may seem.

But I have also changed in a deeper way. Life with Leon Hale expanded me. He was open, curious, embracing whatever might lie ahead. Interested in all that went on around him.

With him, I learned to think optimistically, to resist the appeal of a downward spiral when things seem momentarily dark. I’ve been grieving his loss, yes, for eleven months. A tremendously painful experience, and one unlike any I had imagined. But during this whole period of grieving, I haven’t been depressed.

Grief is different from depression, I think. It has been for me. Although there are moments when I feel like I’m falling off the edge of that teetering house, they remain, usually, just moments. Sure, the temporary pain that comes with them can be stunning, but I don’t think it’s as dangerous as depression.

And I am told that the worst moments will hurt a little less and come less often as time passes. I will have more energy with which to engage the future. The unknown future, yes, but furnished with many beloved artifacts of the coupled life that ended with his death. Familiar ones: Friends, family, our dog, the table where I work, the work itself. Many more.

And from these, and memory, and my continuing love for the absent spouse, I will cobble this, the third configuration of my Self.

Whoever she will be.

Hermithood, 2022

 

I’m back in isolation, historically a comfort to spinster ladies and ancient crones. Literature is full of them. I need mention only Emily Dickinson, whose isolation was not quite as solitary as mine.

Men who choose it are often called hermits. We laugh at them in cartoons, hermits in ragged furs, sometimes sitting cross-legged like a guru at the top of a mountain. In front of a cave. Hermithood, to me, implies caves, dank smells, penury, intentional or otherwise.

Solitude has a more satisfying ring, being voluntary and longed for, at least some of the time.

Isolation may look voluntary, but it is compelled. And therein lies the snake in the grass. How can something be compelled when nobody is forcing you to do it?

Or maybe somebody is.

Recent figures in Fayette County show a rise in the number of Covid cases. I know of three or four people who’ve had it, and they were vaccinated, if not quite boosted. And yet the data themselves are unclear. No one counts results from home tests, for instance.

And which masks are effective? Almost nobody wears one, or correctly, if required.

I go into the PO and the person on duty wears hers around her neck. I go into an optician’s office where the fellow who’s coughing into his mask leaves his nose uncovered. Oh, he has allergies, says another employee. Did he test? Without testing, how can he know if it’s allergy or Covid?  

At the grocery store, customers are good about spacing out in lines, but they don’t wear masks. They’re not worried. When one man coughs into the air between us, I jump like I’ve just been stung. Not a voluntary response, I promise.

Hey, you’ll say, but she’s out and about. That’s scarcely Hermithood.

True enough. I venture into stores, double masked, looking like a fool, and I scurry out, Hobbit-like, as quickly as I can. I go on windy picnics with a friend; or sit outside at a restaurant on a mild day.

But I don’t go into crowded indoor venues where everyone is acting as if we have returned to our age of innocence, 2019 and before.

Do we, any of us, truly retain that innocence?

We may want to think normality awaits, shimmering ahead of us like a highway mirage. But isn’t it really an historical artifact, a place to visit, like Washington-on-the-Brazos or Winedale?

What is truly going on?

Sound bites float through the ether and stick like bits of pollen. Resignation copulates with optimism. Real information takes work to locate, read and believe. Real information like vaccination provides quicker protection for self and others. And quicker matters because it minimizes future mutations.

But we’re all so tired of worrying.

I should feel somewhat safe. I’ve been vaccinated and boosted—but the variant is more contagious by far than any of the familiar wintry banes that, for me, travel straight into bronchitis. And each year, the severity of the bronchitis gets worse. I am not alone in this.

For people like me, Covid—however “mild” the variant—would be a disaster.

As a result, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as wobbly, stepping forward into a new year, onto ground ahead that does not look solid, with a view that is anything but clear.

So, at a time when, as a new widow I feel most need of being close to friends and family, I am compelled in the opposite direction, toward isolation. I have to protect myself, even if it makes me look silly or cowardly.

It’s a Texas thing, I guess, to put oneself first.

 

Galveston in December

Everywhere we look, this season, we encounter scenes of a traditional family holiday. A Hallmark card holiday.

All those attempts to sell you things by tugging on heartstrings tuned to a memory, or a dream—I wonder how much of the distress some experience at this time of year could be erased if we could avoid those reminders. (No doubt we have enough personal reminders, anyway.)

Christmas in our house has been a shrinking festival for some years. This may be a hazard of time’s passage when the grandchildren are far away. It is also a hazard of families fragmented by divorce, no matter how long ago that may have occurred. Of families that may blend on paper, but don’t gel.

Over the past thirty or so years, LH and I faced down this emotional barrage by fleeing. We didn’t go far—just to Galveston Island, out on the west end.

Most years the weather there was chilly, with few people enjoying it. Our visit, with its elements of escape, became part of our holiday tradition, a necessary part.

This year I have come alone, except for Rosie, my dog. I don’t really feel so alone, however, because the Gulf is still here, rolling waves toward me. The beach is still here. It’s not deserted this year, but sparsely populated by people and dogs. The weather is warm, lovely, so far. Asks for a light sweater in the morning. It will become colder, soon.

The peace that comes from proximity to large bodies of salt water has not changed.

Hale isn’t here in a form I can see and touch, but he is here, nonetheless. While I type, he is sitting just out of sight on the deck watching a convocation of seagulls at water’s edge with his binoculars. It’s funny, how clearly I feel his presence.

Before sunrise this morning, Rosie and I walked along the sand waiting for the sun to emerge from behind dawn’s cloud bank. And I brought with me Hale’s words about Galveston sunrises, how special they are. I did see one or two with him, but I was usually still asleep while he waited for the happening in the company of our current Labrador.

Because of Rosie, today I was wide awake, toasting this morning’s performance with a cup of coffee while she kept close watch on two Great Pyrenees a hundred yards away. They were stately, controlled, no doubt a great disappointment to her, the perennially hopeful pup.

Being alone in a much loved place when the spouse is no longer alive brings an elasticity to time.

I, suspended in the present moment, can see him walking along the sand sometime in the 1990’s, looking for the intact sand dollar he never found. His binoculars are swinging from one hand.

I can see him, younger still, teaching my son to fly a kite on the constant Gulf breeze.

Walking on the damp sand, I feel his hand in mine, always, across the decades, as our stride falls into synchrony. Such synchrony.

I recently came across a section of his food memoir, Supper Time, that recounted our improbable courtship. He told it, also, in his recently published retirement journal--two tellings of the event.

And it is a gift for me, now, to read these stories, written years apart, where sequence and chronology vary, but the inner truth glows and burns, unaffected. This is one of the lessons a writer learns from reading, from experience, and Hale knew it down to the bone. There is truth, and it lies next to the heart. Everything else is ribbons and shiny paper. 

Published December 31, 2021 in the Fayette County Record