Thursday, February 2, 2023 (Imbolc, Groundhog’s Day); from Jinny in San Diego, CA to Sally in Taneytown, MD
Dear Sal,
Happy Groundhog Day! The midterms have come and gone since I last wrote. My 2022 voting work in nearby Carlsbad turned out to be mostly a yawn—by election day we’d only processed a couple hundred ballots, most of them “mail-ins” being dropped off at our voting center. I think our particular voting center may have been new this cycle. Perhaps that helps explain the low participation rate. Also, I think there’s still a lingering tendency, especially in the “exurbs,” to wait until Election Day to vote, as it seems to some more civic-minded. Some people (including me) just procrastinate. Actual Election Day was busy, and complicated by weather. The heavens picked this particular day to open up, which made keeping voters and ballots dry a bit of a challenge. When I checked our rain gauge at home the following morning, it registered over an inch. I’m pretty sure there was even more than that at our Carlsbad site. Somehow we all made it through and kept the ballots, if not always the voters, dry.
Though I generally didn’t enjoy the commute to/from this year’s assigned voting center, I was able to get back and forth outside of rush hour in both directions. A couple of times, I stopped at an overlook along “the 5” (not sure why everyone in this area seems intent on putting a definite article in front of a freeway number). I got some gorgeous views of the ocean. Before we started visiting son Jason and family in California a decade or so ago, I’d made the mistaken assumption that the coastline would be flat or gently rolling—like much of the mid-Atlantic shore near where we grew up. That’s rarely the case here—most of the shoreline has cliffs of varying degrees of density and stability. Since the most prestigious housing sites have unobstructed ocean views, each successive bad storm tumbles someone’s cliffside mansion into the sea. The scenic train line between Los Angeles and San Diego also runs near the sea. Its siting is getting to be an increasing problem as the climate changes and storms and heavy surf become more frequent. Parts of the coast have been set aside as parkland, which is probably wise. Nice views, though, while they last.
Thanksgiving was a video-conferenced occasion for me this year, with participants from San Diego, Ohio, Florida, and Maryland. The largest in-person gathering was at brother Bruce and Wendy’s on Lawyers Hill. I think you would have enjoyed it. Sorry you couldn’t come. I hope whatever issues prevented you from being there—pique, illness, other responsibilities, maybe—will get resolved soon. I remember earlier celebrations when most of us lived on the East Coast when we’d all await the Lawyers Hill arrival of Aunt Sally (usually a bit late) with parts of that year’s abundance from the farm. I’ve found a 2011 video of a John Williams arrangement of the Aaron Copeland composition “The Promise of Living” that reminds me of the enduring promise of White Rose Farm. When I most miss former days “back East,” I sometimes play it. It juxtaposes images of farm fields (and farmers) from many places on our planet with a gorgeous choral rendition of this Thanksgiving anthem, with subtitles of the lyrics: “The promise of living with hope and thanksgiving is born of our loving our friends and our labor…By working together we’ll bring in the harvest, the blessings of harvest…The promise of ending is labor and sharing and loving.” (You may, with internet access, be able to pull up the video on Youtube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLM_YTnmLto&list=RDbLM_YTnmLto&start_radio=1).
The latter part of December, we traveled to a good bit of the U.S. “east of the Mississippi.” First we flew to Maryland and had a partial family confab at Lawyers Hill with Bruce and Wendy and some of the cousins. Again, you were missed. We generally avoided talking politics. Not surprisingly, whenever we strayed into the political arena, we discovered that our views and media choices were widely divergent. It was good to be together all the same.
Next we went to Connecticut for an early Christmas with Jim’s brother Paul and sister-in-law Vivian. We’d rented a large vacation home on a lake not far from their place. We arrived a day ahead of son Scott, Morgan, and Kenley, who flew in from Ohio. So far, cross my fingers, no air-flight-mediated covid for any of us. For most of the time we were in Connecticut, the lake house proved inviting and wonderfully spacious. It was just a few miles from P&V’s, so we could ferry back and forth for daytime visits and still avoid overburdening them with hosting duties at night. Kenley was generally cute for her first Christmas, outfitted in red velveteen with a big hair bow. She bonded quickly with her “Aunt Vivian.” A day or so before we left, a bad windstorm knocked out electricity to the lake house for nearly 15 hours. We were afraid we might have to impose on Paul overnight after all. Fortunately, the power came back on just before bedtime, though our final night there was on the chilly side.
Our next east-ish leg was complicated by covid—our good friend Rita, wife to equally good friend Bob, came down with the viral infection a few days before we arrived in their vicinity in Atlanta. We’d booked a hotel stay near them, so weren’t exposed at night. Rita self-isolated. We could talk to her from at a distance as she waved from her sickroom. The rest of us went on local sightseeing jaunts, but the visit was much less fun without her active participation. We heard from her later that it took several months to recover completely. Before returning to San Diego, we made additional stops to visit Jim’s cousin Bob along the south coast of Georgia, and our brother Jim V. in Jacksonville. We made it “home” still testing negative for covid, a further holiday treat.
Our news feeds the latter part of the year carried interviews and videos of serious civil unrest in parts of China. After an initial surge of infections, the Chinese government had ramped up treatment facilities and instituted draconian “zero covid” restrictions to keep infection numbers low. However, the restrictions had ravaged the economy, caused transportation disruptions, and harassed millions of residents through enforcement raids and requirements for frequent tests and isolation. Eventually folks had had enough.
As a long-distance observer, it’s hard for me to know what happened or on what timeline in China’s covid responses. My sense is that we are never likely to know exactly how the pandemic started, though all signs point to its origins somewhere in/around Wuhan, a major city and transportation hub. It also seems to me that the timing of public acknowledgment that there was indeed a pandemic was flavored partly by government paranoia, but also by the 2020 timing of Chinese New Year (Spring Festival), which occurred starting January 25. In our experiences of living in China, nobody, not even the government, can prevent Chinese workers from doing their utmost to return to their hometowns for New Year. By the time case numbers in China had started to spike, millions of people were already traveling, by bus, boat, train, or plane, making it almost impossible to stop the spread of the virus.
Because I’d had previous indirect experience of an earlier viral outbreak in China (husband Jim was in Guangxi during part of the SARS epidemic in 2003), I’m inclined to believe that Chinese authorities at first tried to hide the covid outbreak, then overreacted. At any rate, in early December, the Chinese government abruptly reversed its “zero covid” policy and eased most restrictions.
This year’s TVSD Groundhog brunch was about the same as last year’s, with a slightly larger crowd. Good food, good conversations, easy clean-up. Never likely to become a major celebration in southern California, but fun all the same.
Please take good care. Lots of virtual hugs!
Love, Jin
