Day 14: offering gifts, making do

Great video session with Bella this morning, exploring pigment and diagrams of the rods and cones in our eyes that allow us to perceive color. “Seriously?” she tilted her head down dubiously. “Rods and cones? In our EYES?” She showed me some of her Flamenco moves and confessed, “I practice so much sometimes my parents say I’m driving them crazy and I have to stop.”

Video chat with Margie, who took me by way of her phone camera on a stroll through her windowsill garden, where no less than five different orchids are blooming. When a hummingbird arrived at the feeder outside her eleventh-floor window, her phone stopped moving. “Nature,” she whispered, so she wouldn’t scare the tiny bird. “It’s here with us all the time. Look at those iridescent feathers.”

Blipfoto continues to be a rich source of pleasure. I love seeing where you all go on your walks, those who can go walking. A comment by Arachne is resonant: “There's a kind of massive 'mid-life crisis' going on around us as people of all ages reassess their place in their own life and in the world, and that adds to how unsettling all this is.” Unsettling, I would say, in a good way: shaking us up, waking us to the possibility that we can do life differently, and we always could have.   

The big event of the day was leaving one of my N95 masks (left over from the forest fires last summer) on the curb for a young woman who works in a grocery store (she waved excitedly at me as she picked it up) and toward the end of the day, a journalist called to ask if I had another I could spare. She’ll come pick it up tomorrow. I offered them to my physician, but she said if the box has been opened, they can't accept them.

The blip: I had an enticing exchange of comments with DoingOK on the subject of banana cream pie. I didn’t have a piecrust or a filling, but I did have a banana and some whipped cream in spray can, so I served it to myself on Bella’s favorite unicorn plate.