What does your day look like during -- what exactly are we calling this? The springtime of eternal snow days?

I wake up in the morning and try to remember what I was dreaming. But before I can grab a mental screenshot of what will surely help explain me to me, reality steps in.

Oh. This.

I grab my phone and scroll through email. Devotions from Luther Seminary sent shortly after midnight. Junk. Charity appeals. Headlines from the Washington Post -- should I read them?

No.

Another day stretches before me of trying to do meaningful things in a vacuum, without brushing past other humans at less than six feet of separation, avoiding something, scrubbing away something -- a virus -- that I can't even see.

I don't know where it is, I don't know where it is not. I don't know if I'll have symptoms. I don't know if I'll get sick.

My brain is not wired for this. Nor has it evolved over the last six or seven weeks to meet this challenge more effectively. It will take effort to stay in balance again today.

Sunshine helps, and warm socks, and days when you go barefoot in your shoes and remember that summer will come soon. Masked strangers who nod as they walk past my fence with their dogs. A sister who brings chocolate cake and stands at the gate to talk. These things are real, if altered by isolation.

Screens on the other hand -- it takes effort and imagination to see real people and personalities inside the Zoom boxes online on a screen. We have all flattened out over the weeks of isolation. The lags and bumps in wifi are spontaneous, but we are not.

My living room has little piles in each of the places I sit. The book pile, the cookbook pile, the wooly yarn pile rich in blues and greens, browns and golds, the abandoned project pile. It's the way I lived in graduate school, with papers due at the end of the semester: the theatre history text on the floor, with 19th century plays and notes; the script for playwriting in the typewriter on the desk; the seminar project strewn across the bed. It would all be cleaned up, the room restored to order, when finished.

What does your day look like? This post was started yesterday, abandoned because it seemed to be going nowhere, with no appropriate tone or take. The day went downhill from there, and then climbed back up. Today, on a brighter, sunnier morning, my fingers and brain are itching to cast-on caps and shawls,

and words are flowing with less disappointment into my notebook and onto my screen.

I begin again.