I've been watching a variety of movies with an apocalyptic theme. I've also been doing a lot of thinking about apocalypse in general, and about the early months of 2020, when an apocalypse was bearing down on us and very few of us realized it.
As an NPR news junkie, I heard about the new respiratory disease in China early on, but it took me awhile to realize how bad it would be. I'd been expecting some sort of flu since the early part of the century when the new bird flu swept across Asia. But even those expectations and all my reading about earlier plagues and pandemics didn't really prepare me.
The first time I wrote in this blog about the new virus that would be named COVID-19 was a post on January 30: "On the way back home, I heard news reports of the new corona virus that's burning its way through China; we now have more people infected with this new virus than those infected with SARS during the 2002-2003 outbreak. The World Health Organization will meet today. If we were characters in a movie, ominous music would be playing."
But even earlier, I think I had a glimmer. Here's a bit from my January 4, 2020 post: "There are many events I should write about, perhaps, events with real weight (pun intended). I'm hesitant to write about the split/schism that seems unavoidable for our Methodist friends since I'm not a Methodist. There's the assassination in Iran that seems to be a portent of a ratcheting up of hostilities, a horse or a rider or some other symbol of apocalypse. I suspect there will be many more opportunities to talk about heavier topics in the days to come."
On Friday night, I scrolled through my old blog posts from the first half of 2020, and I'm struck by how I remained calm as I figured out how grim the situation was, as I figured out how to make a way forward, as I went to work, even as much of the rest of the world went into lock-down. I tend to think that I haven't suffered the losses that so many others suffered, but of course, we've all suffered in ways that we'll be sorting out for decades to come. And the suffering isn't finished yet.
I remember returning home from vacation in early 2020. I had bought a jar of yeast, which I added to the two jars in my refrigerator. In early December and on vacation, I had had a vision of lots of bread baking, but I hadn't really done it. I wondered how I would ever use up all that yeast. Little did I know how yeast would soon vanish off the shelves, and I'd be grateful that I had several jars stashed in my fridge.
Last night as I watched World War Z, I thought about how quickly the zombies overtake the world, literally within a day or two. I would have found the movie much more scary with the slow build of the disease, the way Contagion does. In some ways, World War Z is more of a horror movie than the kind of apocalypse I like. But it was compelling enough to have on while I stitched small scraps into larger squares.
This semester break, I am doing more sewing than any other kind of activity, and I am loving it. I know that I won't always be able to do this kind of sewing. Because I'm the only one here, I have fabric draped over almost every surface. I have turned my living room into a kind of studio.
Because I don't have an iron, and because I hate to iron, if I have a very wrinkled piece of fabric, I run it under water and stretch it out on the stainless steel countertop. I love being surrounded by my fabric this way, but it wouldn't be possible if I was living with someone else, because this kind of chaos wouldn't be fair to anyone who would have to share my living space with me.
I know that it's good to make progress on quilting projects while I'm on fire to do it. I don't always have this kind of enthusiasm for this kind of sewing (or this kind of time or space).
It's also soothing, as I process what we've been through both as a society and as individuals: the pandemic, the various political events, the reshaping of our societies as more people move to online work and education and more people leave various professions and housing markets rise (and collapse?).
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