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Yesterday's sunrise, caught by Jen on her morning ramble

The Stay-at-Home orders, RILLY now, could be a whole lot worse. I live with Jen, Oni and Ten – I’m not alone. I’ve got plenty of books, painting’s going well again (finally!) and, I may’ve mentioned this once or two trillion times, we live in beautiful Valhalla.

Yeah, I miss hitting the gym, the library and Nantasket for dawn walkies. Sure, it blows bantha wang, now that we’re all wearing masks, to be unable to lipread the pharmacy clerk. Plus, I gotta chill out my fear of strangers. NOT every single passerby in the grocery or on the Nut Isle path is a death-bringing virus carrier/spreader. Eye contact and a wave isn’t gonna leave me open to the Trump Plague.

Jen and I have instituted a new house custom – as long as this quarantine lasts, Wednesday night’s are now all about dinner and TV together. Ya know, like our weekend high teas but with pizza, Thai or Chinese takeout.
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This morning, I woke from a dream about The Amazing Bob. For some unillustrated reason we were separating. I couldn’t come up with any reason for this inane shit to go down. It made NO bloody sense at all, so I asked him, “can we get back together.” With that gorgeous smile of his, he said yes and we lived happily ever after.

Despite having the most wonderful (fer reals, mes amis!) Ten in my life, I still miss TAB and grieve his absence. I’m not wallowing (HONEST!) – just allowing myself to recognize and accept what I’m feeling…I guess.

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.
~ Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“It doesn’t get better,” I said. “The pain. The wounds scab over and you don’t always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you’ll never be the same.”
~ Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.
~ John Green