Seized by a desire to go somewhere and not at all sure it wouldn’t have been better to stay home, in late June and early July my husband and I made a road trip to Winnipeg. There were only four cases of Covid-19 in Manitoba at that time, so the locals were probably in more danger from us than we were from them. We encountered no expressed hostility to our Alberta license plates, and the weather and the visiting were great. Now Manitoba has the highest infection rate per capita in Canada, and the province is in lockdown..

At that time we did not envision the pandemic lasting into next year. Now the limitations have gone on so long that normal life seems farther and farther away. Always given to introspection, I find myself tending more and more in that direction. Like many I wonder what will survive and what should survive of the old world.

The pandemic has made me aware of how much energy I usually expend rushing to get to things—mostly social engagements—and how stressful that rushing is. I ‘ve also been wondering why as a retired person I need to rush at all. Now that I barely have anywhere to get to, I am free of the stress of hurrying; I now experience the different stress of loneliness. From August until this week, when new restrictions were put in place, I was able to enjoy the company of my three grandchildren.

While I am fortunate compared with those alone in isolation, I still long for more variety in the company I keep and more variety in the places where I keep it. And I desperately miss live music and singing in a choir. Recently I attended my first Covid-19 funeral, where there was no hand shaking, no hugging, no singing, and no sharing of food. Everyone was masked and socially distanced, and yet it was comforting just to be in a church in the presence of other people. This was the funeral of my grandchildren’s step-great-grandmother, and I waved at them from three rows of pews away.

One side effect of isolation has been than I mostly feel calmer than usual, and get through most days in pretty good cheer. However, it doesn’t take much to shift my mood downward.. A sunless sky, a strong wind, a whole day of rain, the death of someone I barely knew, attending to the political shenanigans south of the undefended border—even one of these could cancel out my good mood in current times. Two or more together can ruin my day.

My mood is now steadily elevated by the fact that Joe Biden is president elect of the US, and even more so by the election of a woman—and a woman of colour—as vice-president.

In normal times a good part of my day is given over to socializing and running errands. Now the errands are mostly only for essentials and I am socializing much less and then at a distance. In these abnormal times I have more time to read and write than usual, yet my concentration and focus are poorer than usual. Also, my eyes simply wear out before I have filled up the day. I have probably read about a hundred books since my last post, yet have found it difficult to focus my thoughts on any of them—or even to keep track of all the titles.

At least I have had sufficient focus to have published a poem called “Intelligent Orange Woman Seeks Lovely Man” in an anthology called Glow from Truth Serum Press in Australia.

Like many I am wondering how I will make it through a pandemic winter when even a mostly beautiful pandemic summer was a challenge. I have had to find other pleasures besides writing, reading and visiting during this time. Gardening was a great joy and comfort from May through October, and on October 12^th the zinnias and rose mallow I planted from seed were still going strong, although it seemed wrong for flowers to be blooming at the fifty-third parallel in mid-October. With a supposedly 600-year-old starter passed on to me by my oldest friend, I have learned to make excellent whole wheat sourdough bread. I have also been making good use of the Netflix subscription I share with my younger son.

I often feel left out when other people talk about movies and TV shows, as I rarely watch anything in normal times. In spite of my love of animals I seldom watch cute animal videos, and find watching anything else on my small laptop screen almost unbearable. To me watching is incredibly slow compared with reading, so I must work out on the elliptical trainer in front of the TV, or do some knitting or hand sewing, neither of which I excel at but both of which soothe me. Even when I have something else to occupy me physically, I often just feel irritated by watching.

Because I am a fan of both Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, I watched all six seasons of Grace and Frankie, a show I enjoyed even though it doesn’t always make good use of the talents of these two wonderful actresses. Then I watched After Life with Ricky Gervais, Broadchurch, and Unorthodox. I enjoyed these three but wanted them to be longer, and still needed something to occupy my hands or my feet and arms.

On the recommendation of a Chinese Canadian friend the same age as my older son I viewed all sixteen luxuriously long episodes of Crash Landing on You (CLOY), a romantic drama about a South Korean heiress, a savvy businesswoman in her own right, who ends up in North Korea after a paragliding accident during a terrible storm. She and the handsome captain she literally lands on, the soldier in charge of guarding the border, gradually fall in love. The picture of life in North Korea, in reality a police state, is no doubt romanticized, but as the story develops, the villagers, especially the village women and the men under the captain’s command, are humanized. There are many improbable plot twists and turns that in the context of the characters and the story make perfect sense. In episode fifteen the lovers are separated at the border. Never much given to weeping, I cried my eyes out over their separation. It was cathartic to shed copious tears–something I needed to do in these trying times, when I often feel simply numb. Here is a picture of the lovers as they are falling in love, and he is doing his best to get her back to South Korea.

When I finished this series I tried Itaewon Class, another South Korean drama, but couldn’t get into it because the only character I found appealing (the father of the main character) was killed off early on. On the recommendation of a friend my own age, who had enjoyed CLOY after I told her about it, I next turned to It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, a South Korean drama about mental illness and trauma. Much of it is set in the OK Psychiatric Hospital and there is lots of humour in addition to the serious subject matter—and a compelling love story. At the beginning, supernatural elements are strong; as the series moves along, it becomes more realistic.

What is so remarkable about these Korean dramas is that I find them totally engrossing—I can just watch with my hands in my lap. Maybe it’s the unfamiliarity of the characters and the settings. Maybe it’s the way that physical attraction is handled. The characters remain fully clothed, even when in bed. I love this chasteness, and the scenes where lovers simply gaze at each other. And I love the flashbacks even though flashbacks usually get on my nerves. In a long on-line article I can no longer track down, another addicted female viewer commented that because 70 percent of the writers of Korean dramas are women, men are often seen through a female gaze—something that doesn’t happen much in Hollywood.

With little evidence, I previously had a low opinion of South Koreans, thinking them robotic unfeeling workaholics. Korean dramas have so changed my perspective that I now hope to travel to Korea when that’s possible. I am two thirds of the way through my second viewing of Crash Landing on You, and am finding it even more engaging than the first time, such that I feel no need for knitting or sewing. This may be because of the unfamiliarity of the settings and the characters; it may be because I am just generally slowed down compared with my normal life. On second viewing, I am also struck by how little I remember of something I have already viewed once compared with a book I have read once. Many of the scenes in the show seem absolutely fresh to me.

In the midst of all this viewing I have also been frantically reading. Generally I am good at keeping track of what I read, but it feels like most of the books I have read this year are loose pages blowing around in the pandemic whirlwind. In this time of protracted isolation, which in theory should be the ideal environment for finishing projects, I am finding it more and more difficult to finish anything. This seems to be just one more way the pandemic is detracting from my quality of life. It takes a lot of energy just to get through the day.

So I will conclude this post with remarks about only four books that I will always remember.

At the end of April, I speed read my way through Anna of All theRussias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova, a 2005 biography by British poet, novelist, and memoirist Elaine Feinstein (who died last year). Both the person and the poetry came alive for me. Anna Akhmatova had a public life as tumultuous as the outward life of the great American poet Emily Dickinson was uneventful. Born in 1889 to a noble family mired in genteel poverty, a family straight out of a Chekhov play, she lived through the 1905 revolution, the Bolshevik October revolution, the civil war, the famines, the terror, World War II, the banishment or execution of many of her generation, and the incarcerations of her only child. Because she continually ran afoul of the authorities, for much of her life her poetry was not published, although millions of Soviet citizens could quote big chunks by heart. She becomes a sort of Soviet Everywoman in her poems about waiting in line for news of her son with packages she hopes will be delivered. This biography received rather tepid reviews. I think it needs a reader as immersed in Akhmatova’s time and place as I am. One of the most thrilling aspects for me was the discovery that Akhmatova was a friend and muse of Modigliani, who was in love with her (although she did not reciprocate), whom she met in Paris about 1909. Imagine the conversations they had as they talked about their personal lives and the literary and artistic happenings in Italy and Russia!

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a 2018 novel by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk chosen by one of my book clubs. On the most basic level it is a murder mystery. I read it twice because it puzzled me on first encounter. The setting is rural Poland near the Czech border, and the first person narrator is a retired civil engineer, formerly a builder of dams and bridges, now eager to know people’s exact dates and times of birth so she can cast their horoscopes. Another element of the occult or supernatural is provided by the appearances of the ghosts of her mother and grandmother in the boiler room. She keeps a sharp eye on all the comings and goings around her, ostensibly because she watches several unoccupied houses for money over the bleak winter. One of the things she observes most carefully is the abuse of animals. Indeed, the book has a great deal to say about the human relationship with non-human animals. It also has a lot to say about attitudes towards older women. Like many men approximately her age, the male authority figures she encounters see themselves as virile and in the prime of life, and women around their age or even somewhat younger as sexless crones soft in the head and certainly not worthy of positive attention. These attitudes allow the narrator to hide in plain sight, to observe things very closely and then to act on those observations.

My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by Fredrik Backman (translated from Swedish, 2015) is also about a feisty old lady, but from the point of view of her seven-year-old (almost eight) granddaughter Elsa. Right after the novel was given to me by a dear friend, who put it on top of a box of books I had lent to her at the beginning of the pandemic, my stepdaughter-in-law and I chose it for the book club of two she and I have started having by phone. Elsa is being bullied at school, her mother is expecting a baby with her new partner, and Granny is dying of cancer, yet in the end this is a feel-good book with a happy ending. In general I don’t trust feel-good books but this one works for me. Elsa and Granny are both compelling characters, there is lots of humour, and a dog plays a central role in the story. While Elsa is having a hard time, a whole community of adults is quietly looking out for her.

Clara’s War: One Girl’s Story of Survival by Clara Kramer with Stephen Glantz (2009) is the most gripping of the many Holocaust memoirs I have read. To save one Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe was an extraordinary feat, fraught with terror and immense practical difficulties. This story is based on an old woman’s memories and the diary she kept as a teenager in the cellar of a house in eastern Poland (now western Ukraine) as one of 18 Jews rescued by an ethnic German who was a drunk, an adulterer and a vociferous anti-Semite. The venture succeeded because the house had a flush toilet that made it possible to dispose of the waste of so many human beings, and because of the sheer nerve and bravado of Valentine Beck—and also because of incredible luck. As to why Beck did what he did, as far as I can tell the fundamental motive was his inability to bow to authority. The original impetus was the close friendship between Beck’s wife and one of the women in the cellar. The wife leaves for three days after she discovers the friend and Beck are having an affair, an affair that all the others in the cellar are painfully aware of, but does not betray anyone.

I first read this book around 2010 when I borrowed it from Saskatoon Public Library. In 2014 I bought my own copy at the Strand Bookstore in New York City after phoning from Edmonton and speaking to an actual human being. I have never felt so cosmopolitan as when I walked into the store to pick up my hold, which was handed to me by a young hipster in wire-framed glasses, a black T-shirt and black jeans. Recently I have read that like many other bookstores, the Strand has experienced a huge loss of business during the pandemic (and also that its employees—hipsters and others—are not well treated by the female owner). I am doing my best to keep Audreys, Edmonton’s independent bookstore in business, and have just placed my Christmas order.

I hope this pandemic will end before I do, and I will get to feel as cosmopolitan again as I did walking into the Strand. In the meantime, I have Korean dramas.