Signs of Spring, a Week of Illness – Covid or Flu?, Hummingbirds, Hawks, and Deer, and the NEA application

Early pink rhododendron bloom

Signs of Spring and a Week of Illness

This week has been rough. I’m sure like many of you, I came down with something (fever, stuffy head, cough, sore throat, headache) after a dental visit last week, and that meant: doctors telling me I probably had covid and giving me really depressing info about the lack of covid treatments available, then an instant covid test, and then more covid tests (the PCR test was really hard to find – I couldn’t get it until six days after I started feeling sick, and I had to drive 45 minutes each way, walk in the cold mud and rain to construction area tent, so that was fun).

The good news is the tests were negative – the bad news is I’m still pretty sick, which now my doctors have decided is probably flu. Anyway, I’ve been lying low, not a lot of mental energy, but managed to get a few shots on sunny days to show you spring may actually be happening, eventually, despite our cold, gray, relentlessly depressing January weather.

Red-Tailed Hawk looks directly at camera

Hummingbirds, Hawks, and Deer

The good news is, though it’s easy to forget, I actually live in a beautiful place – it’s just when it gets cold and wet or icy outside, I’m not able to get out enough to appreciate it. This red-tailed hawk was sitting low to the ground, and happened to look right at me as I took this shot, and we happened to have a clear blue sky that afternoon. Hawks showing white feathers are supposed to be a good omen, but a hawk low to the ground looking you in the eye is supposedly a portent of death. So, I hope it’s the first, not the second.

We also saw our first deer of the year, nibbling on our pink camellias – which like the rhody, look like they are very close to blooming, even though it’s only January. The hummingbirds are here all year, so we just have to keep up a feeder and a bird fountain. These are shots of the same male Anna’s hummingbird. He was showing off his crazy feathers.

My pink camellia this morning – looking like almost-spring!

Reading Report – All Sort-of Plague-Related – and NEA Application – Done!

The one good thing about being sick all week is I caught up on my reading! Pale Horse, Pale Rider is Katherine Anne Porter’s semi-autobiographical account of living through the 1918 flu as a single journalist in Denver, when the hospitals were overcrowded and they couldn’t just order an ambulance as they were too busy. Her vivid hallucinations while sick for a month with the flu are unforgettable (she sees the nurse’s hands as ‘white tarantulas’), as is the ending. I also read Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Garden Party,” about an upper-class family organizing a party as their poorer neighbor falls down dead in front of their house. Again, feels so relevant.

To add to the cheer, I’m also reading Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human with my little brother, and though it is bleak – written in 1948’s Japan, about an individual who suffers multiple childhood sex abuse traumas,  grows up to be a cartoonist, tries to commit suicide, is put in an insane asylum – my brother made the astute observation that it shares a lot with Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It’s been read historically as thinly-veiled autobiography, but I’d argue it’s more ambitious than that – it’s Dazai’s attempt to embody the suffering, corruption and dehumanization of Japan during the WW II years.  It’s the second-best selling book in Japan of all time, and you can see why – despite the bleak subject matter, Dazai’s writing is stunningly beautiful, even in translation (he writes with a different pronoun that the Japanese “Watashi” for “I,” except in the prologue and epilogue, but that can’t really be translated into English, which is a shame). If you want to discover Dazai but want something a little more upbeat, read his warm and funny collection of modernized fairy tales in Blue Bamboo. I’ve been teaching myself Japanese for almost a year now, and I’m sad that I’m still not fluent, but I am starting to pick up a little more on the slight variations of words – pronouns, seasons, puns. Some part of me wish I’d picked something easier, like Italian, but Japanese literature is kind of an obsession of mine, and I’d love to read these books in the original, eventually. Or at least be able to have a really simple conversation in Japanese.

The other accomplishment I’m proud of is that my NEA application is in and done. I mean, I did it with a fever and on a lot of cold medicine, so it may not be the best application I’ve ever done, but it is finished! I was in isolation while waiting for my PCR test (two of my doctors told me that I for sure had covid, based on my symptoms, so better safe than sorry) and the only thing that is good for is reading and getting grant applications done. Wishing you health and safety this week, but if you do get sick – either this nasty flu or covid – I hope you have a good window view, a stack of books, and someone to bring you unending soup and hot tea.

Oh, and on top of reading an account of inadequate medical care during the 1918 flu, you can read this account of a New York Times writer trying to get the Pfizer pill for her 73-year-old mother – it is harrowing to realize how hard it is to get adequate medical care for covid right now, the same as Katherine Anne Porter’s experiences in 1918 in a lot of key ways: When my mom got COVID, I went searching for Pfizer’s pills | The Seattle Times.