It’s been a quiet week. Both of us suffered for a while from tree pollen allergies. We’re both also suffering from anxiety.  I miss most seeing women friends.  All the technology available to use does not make up for human contact and seeing and talking in the same place, face to face.

However, it’s a time of rare beauty on our land.  From the top of the hill where our house is dug in down to the road, we have several hundred daffodils in bloom.  We have navy hyacinths, [whenever I type that name, I think of the Minoans], intense blue scilla siberica, dark purple crocuses, lavender myrtle and blue anemones as well as some little bulbs on the way to the gazebo, carpeting the left side of the walk.  The witch hazel, in bloom since mid February, is finally fading, but the Cornelian cherry [which is actually a yellow dogwood that grows in bush form instead of tree] is huge, bushy, over towers that shed all yellow flowers I can see form my office windows, along with the Gibraltar azalea in brilliant orange that I planted in a pot last year    

We transplanted seedlings of broccoli together earlier in the week.  Then Friday we transplanted red cabbage and bok choi.  It was chillybut the sun was out.  I started zucchini this morning and sunflowers. One found pot of sunburst pattypans never germinated, but I replanted it yesterday with the hope that this time those three seeds in the round pot will come to life.

We had a Pesach seder with just the two of us.  I had already added new relevant parts to myHaggadah before we went into total isolation. We had a simple seder, just the ritual items, the Sephardic salad of hard boiled eggs, cucumbes and fennel with an olive oil lemon dressing; Woody made his matzoh ball soup that we had for two nights.  Still some soup left for a quick lunch.  I missed the friends we usually have over.  Woody did not miss the clean-up.

We cleaned up my office and put it in order – except for the page proofs of my new poetry book and the increasingly shaky pile of filing and things that have to be done, but I can’t get to them until I finish ON THE WAYOUT, TURN OFF THE LIGHT.  I hope I can finish it by Monday, but to proof the acknowledgments at the end, I need information that is only on my assistant’s MAC.  I use a PC and I don’t understand the arrangement of files on his computer, and of course he isn’t coming in. It creates a serious problem.

I gave Woody his few birthday presents on Thursday.  A couple of things I ordered for him never came, no response, no information.  Just long gone.  We had a pretty good day anyhow.  It rained hard and blew hard on his birthday.  Woody always says he doesn’t want anything, but he has been wearing one of his gifts every day since.  He keeps saying how great and comfortable it is. He very much misses the gym he went to four times a week.   He rehabilitated an old rowing machine, put it on the sunporch and has been using it starting this week. 

I am used to writing alone, so I thought social isolation would be easy for me. But I’m almost never alone now.  Woody is recording his shows from the downstairs office.  The studio is closed.  One DJ died.  Last fall, when new equipment was being installed, Woody bought his own so that he could continue broadcasting.  Now about half the DJ’s at WOMR are working from home.  Woody sometimes does two interviews a day, with politicians, nonfiction writers, activists, entertainers, etc., and also a series of interviews with DJs who are not on the air and other Outer Cape residents about how they are dealing with isolation and the virus. The virus has come to Wellfleet and several people here have it.  So, we blunder on.