Machado, Roses, Back Pain, and Covid

Another Machado poem, "Tal vez la mano, en sueños…":

in dreams maybe the hand 

of the sower of stars 

sounds the forgotten music 

a note on an immense lyre 

and that humble wave comes to our lips 

in a few truthful words

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The climbing yellow roses make their serpentine, parasitic way through the laurel, and dangle from the eaves. They're not really roses and the laurel is not really a laurel, I'm told; they both have odd polysyllabic names in clumsily grafted classical tongues. But I'll call them roses and laurel. It's my damn hedge. The roses are gorgeous this year: apparently this ominously dry April suited them.

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The back? It's no longer giving me pain, if I'm careful. I don't want to be careful, is the thing. And I most particularly want to do what my back least wants me to do: go for long walks. So I'm perpetually peeved.

Nevertheless, my energy returns, and that's welcome. Continual pain, even if it's low-level, easily managed pain, does weird, unwelcome things to my spirit. It shrinks suspiciously from contact: it contracts, and wrinkles. I become a self-absorbed teenager again. Bad enough the first time, when it was age-appropriate. I weigh how much of investment I want to make in learning do-it-yourself physical therapy. My faith in American-trained physical therapists is low enough that I don't even want to bother trying to get insurance to pay for a few random sessions with some random PT. Better to spend that energy actually learning and experimenting.

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I have a conviction, based on basically nothing, that this week will mark the peak of the second Covid wave in Oregon, and that we really have blundered our way past the halfway mark. The lack of discipline and public spirit so far does not make me optimistic about how we'll fare if a really bad virus comes our way. We are rich children who expect our parents to buy our way out of any trouble we get into. It's not always going to happen that way.

Meanwhile, I personally, continue to bear a charméd life. And this May is quiet, cool, and sweet, whatever the summer will bring.

Lots of love, dear friends.