Small Kindnesses

A happy update: Mz called by noon feeling much better after a night's sleep. Plus a couple friends had surprised her with a birthday cake. Such kindnesses mean more than ever now.

She biked over, and we spent the entire afternoon talking from opposite sides of the sunny front yard. I made her a butter and peanut-butter sandwich, and I gave her a roll of toilet paper (made of bamboo--bink had seen it at a corner store near her house a couple weeks ago and had bought a four-pack for me)--a birthday present perfect for the zeitgeist, eh? 

Lots of people came walking past, and almost everyone said hello. 
I met three neighbors for the first time. One is a midwife, and she said delivering babies is so weird now. ("Weird" gets my vote for Word of the Season). Usually, she said, "we could almost go barefoot"––now, the birth attendants suit up in mask, gloves, gown, hair nets... 

Funny old time to get born, or to die, just like a normal person.
Life goes on.
It was a happy afternoon.

Then HouseMate and I had our second weekly Happy Hour on FaceTime with bink & Maura.  
Not so happy: Maura is sick. Just a cold? (Inshallah!)
Some kind of normal flu? Or, . . . The Thing? 
Too soon to say. She's staying in bed, resting and drinking tea, and bink is tending to her but wisely keeping separate.

Everyone, please stop frightening me, please. 
No, not really! It's okay--I want to hear how you are, even if it's frightening. It helps to share this.

Yeah, kindnesses mean more than ever, and unkindnesses too.
Someone who quite often cancels on me at the last minute (though several times I've told them that's hurtful) canceled on me the other day. Though they'd invited themselves over to sit across the street and chat, at the last minute they were "too busy."

Too busy? In a pandemic when there's nothing to do, by legal order?
I had to laugh.
But I don't think I'll be forgetting it.

This is the time to tend to kindness.