Featured Refresh
Text & Image
How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
I have maintained a heavy zoom contact load in the past week. The connections include several groups that have extended far back in time, pre-covid. I have not bern travelling with my husband anywhere - except one libg day trip to select burial plots in Massachusetts. We love the two plots we selected - and will both be cremated. The lagoon we overlook is near the entrance of the Jewish memorial park and nearby many of my husband's relatives are buried - including his only sibling, a younger sister who died in an accident ehen she was only twenty-one. Back at home, our “Departures” magazine arrived so I decided to create a dream world. Each photograph is from just one magazine: Petra in Jirdan, a Greek island sanctuary, ice bergs in the Antarctic, doorway in the midwest, a throne/ladder art piece, window to nowhere, row biat, tea service, wooden row boat - yearning woman in billowing outfit that is sunlit from a ling side window and the act of collaging brought peace. I shared my collage with zoom folks and members if Write Out during the national write out day, i read a poem on zoom that I wrote - first of my poems read aloud on zoom! I ince Jane Goidhall ifcshe cared to read a piem about her husband in a book she had written. She was lecturing locally and my artwork was on the walls as she read her poem. It was a touching poem as she described how her imagination helps her cope. She looked up after completing the last line and smiled, “No one has ever asked me to read my poem aloud before.” I smiled back in her direction and felt a connection - one that informed me that now in this pandemic, in this tome of great losses of friends who recently died, I would find comfort by sharing my words and showing my collage - so here it is for you to see. My friend who died last March showed a collage in last winter’s art exhibition I curated. I decided to try a collage myself. No civid touches my images, the collage is a safe place where I may travel to anytime!
October 23, 2020
Text & Image
How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
Coming home from errands around town yesterday (hardware store, grocery) : I say to myself "We are never going to get this pandemic under control because of ignorance or malice. We are a failed state--with repercussions of that failure killing us." Scenes: at the hardware store --an obviously ill sales clerk--underweight perhaps from chronic malnutrition, feverish, coughing, mask failing off his nose gives me directions to aisle 10. He is probably part-time (to save store from sick leave), making a low wage, and at work because he cant afford not to be. A friend refers to "Plantation America." I think of Dickens, Bleak House, death of Jo, the lowly crossing sweeper, by smallpox that also infects his "betters". Then there are always one or two enraged customers barreling into the store mask-less, daring anyone to cross them, and the sales clerks making too little money to enforce store policy or state ruling. So I head home, masked, slathered in hand sanitizer and wonder will I now end up intubated in 14 days because I needed a carton of milk and a bag of potting soil?
January 1, 2021