Citizens Of Somewhere

Yesterday when I went to the supermarket, I saw three shops have re-opened, which were not open last week . One sells cosmetics and other beauty and health products (not medicines), one sells cakes and pastries, and one sells takeaway drinks. Oh, and the hotdog place is open again! The non-essentials are returning. I did not buy a lipstick to celebrate, but ... after three months with only the supermarket open, it's really nice to know that I could . There are more people in the streets. The weather is improving. The air is pretty good. We have been in lockdown since January and it is beginning to feel like, inside China's boarders, things are opening up a little. It is still impossible for friends and colleagues from school to return from overseas; as China begins to contain the rates of infection inside the country, it rages in other lands. I am afraid for my friends, I am worried for my family; especially the infirm and immuno-compromised very close to my heart, but things

 Decameron Day 3: Tell a story about someone who worked hard to get something they wanted or find something they lost. To Be Completed...

Write about people who suffer through misfortunes and arrive at a happy ending.  One day you will again dance in a crowd of people, sweaty and laughing and feeling the surge up from the balls of your feet as the beat swings down and you fling back your head, whooping and lifting your arms and One day you will again lean forward in a crowded restaurant to smell the food you ordered, trying to hear words that are being muffled by a group beside you, who are laughing drunkenly and too loudly, as yellow light spills onto the street outside and One day you will again rise from kneeling, shoulder to shoulder with strangers on the ancient flagstones, and turn to them hand out, with shy sincerity, feeling it as you say peace be with you .. and also with you, and One day you will again lean against a kitchen countertop, giddy and smiling, and sip wine as someone opens another bottle and a houseparty converges and moves around you, and watch the others, and think fondly of when

Tell a story that pleases you. It doesn't matter what it's about. It can be fictional or true. The goal: to entertain us all and distract us from our various stresses.  I have been quarantined with my children since January 15th. It is March 15th. There are 7 rooms in our apartment. Here is something I've been thinking. I have two sons, one dark and one fair. It sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, doesn't it? It is. The dark one has his dad's dark brown hair and my skimmed-milk skin, semi-opaque with a fine celtic tendency to burn, freckle over the nose, and the ability to go ghost-white in winter (or after 6 weeks of quarantine, in fact). He looked so like me as a baby that people would laugh at it. Now they say he's the image of his father, and it's true. The fair one had bright butter-yellow hair for the first 3 years of his life, and it has been going darker ever since. It's what the Americans call 'dirty blond' now, and will soon

My immediate reaction to the bombshell exploding, was to cope, cope, cope.  "Right, we're not going to have a place to live or jobs, let me research and plan where we might live and what jobs we might have..." It's how I attempt to protect myself against the horrible feeling of grief; the anger, the despair, and the sadness. It doesn't make it go away, it just makes it happen in more manageable bites. Because after my coping and planning, when I do turn the corner in the spiral staircase I am climbing OUT of this misery, when I return back to the place of such pain, I am at least another flight up, a little further away from the original site of the blast.  In this way, when I have a period of sitting with my grief, when I feel it lying heavily on me as I wake up in the morning - at least I have a plan, at least I'm not falling without a net. That said, it's still hard. I woke early this morning and couldn't get back to sleep again, I dozed and trie

This has been the coldest, wettest American May I can remember; but this is a nice sunny Sunday and I'm tying this on my phone, on a park bench. I just spoke to another mother who got her green card 6 years ago, and was horrified about my story. Every now and then I wonder if I should be fighting harder, calling more lawyers, something like that.  But the fact is, just because no one can believed this is happening to us, doesn't mean that it's not legal.