Report from the Sickroom: Good Books, Old TV

My blogging has fallen off because this week, I've gotten up from my sickbed, done a bit, gone back to my sickbed, and on some evenings, attended my seminary classes by way of Zoom.  I am feeling better, but still not back to "normal"; I haven't walked this week because I'm trying to conserve my strength.  Let me collect a few observations while I have a chance.

--I'm remembering last week at the Fletcher, NC post office, where I stood in line and heard cheeping.  Come to find out, a shipment of baby chicks had just arrived.  While I waited, the man who ordered the chicks showed up, not realizing they had arrived.  The woman behind the desk recognized him and told him.  He said, "Let me go rearrange the back of my truck.  I'll be right back."

--I love that I'm living in a place where people at the post office recognize each other and would have called, to save the chicks, if the farmer hadn't arrived.

--It's been the week of the Mountain Fair, like a state fair, but for the counties of western North Carolina.  We've been isolating, so we haven't gone.  Apparently, more people want baby chickens during Fair week, Fair week and Easter.  The man in line ahead of me said that if it's Fair week, we'll be getting more rain.  I did not say, "How can we possibly get more rain?  My trees are growing moss."

--When I went to get more COVID test kits at a less busy county library, I picked up Rebecca Makkai's latest, I Have Some Questions for You.  It was riveting.  I am always thrilled when I find a book that holds my attention the way that one did.  Hurrah!  I can still lose myself in a good book!

--Yesterday I went to the Fletcher branch to pick up Marge Piercy's Braided Lives.  They had a copy of T.C. Boyle's latest, Blue Skies, which is also compelling.  I've really enjoyed going out on the back deck and taking a reading-for-pleasure break.

--We have also been watching a lot of T.V.  I say we, but my spouse has more tolerance for hours of the same show than I do.  Yesterday, it was a Laverne and Shirley channel, free content on one of the antenna channels that airs endless content from a different age.  In season 2, Laverne has a pregnancy scare.  So that would have been in late 1976 or winter of 1977, aired at 8:30, and I would have been watching as an 11 year old.  I have no memory of that episode.  Was it pulled before it aired?  Did I just not understand what I was watching?  But I would have understood--the characters are not married and being pregnant would be a disaster.  Even in the days of easier access to abortion, I would have understood an unwanted pregnancy as a disaster.

--As I watched the shots behind the closing credits, I wondered if future generations would see the snowy scenes and yearn for them.  Or maybe they'd say, "Those were the days!  Two women could get jobs in a factory and support themselves and even have a cute little basement apartment all to themselves."