I bought another house. I am too emersed in life to want to write about it much. In my kids, my job, warily letting a man near me while holding him at bay also, life upon life upon life. The surgery worked. But I am worse for wear, heavy still in my mind especially from the months of being pinned down. So I do what I always do when desperate and I need to stand back up - I go balls out at Doing.

But it feels different. It feels like a hat trick that I know I can't keep pulling forever. It makes me quiet. As if to ration my remaining energy more carefully.

The house is an investment. I won't live there. But. She will more than live there. Glow. She will grow up there.

I look down. I always looked down when I was small like her, watching my legs move to hold me up and move me around. I was in love with my own short sturdy brown legs, some of my earliest wordless memories. I stand in the empty house, mine for an hour, I look down at the stained red scratched bald old floor and notice the inlay underneath the years of crud and gobbed on red semi translucent whatever was fashionable in circa 1940. I text the convict ripped neck tattoo floor guy. Remember me? Seconds later: Yes, I do. Good. Because I might just go down that block, buying her neighbors, who would be my sons now that The Girl is settled. Well, my son, living near my daughter, and my youngest - a They, a multifarious blessing.

The virus spreads and everyone braces themselves. Shaken. It feels as if the world just caught what I've been feeling for God knows how long now. A year? Since 2014? Welcome to the party of battening down hatches. I have a year's worth of toilet paper and bear mace, for whatever that's worth. You probably have hand sanitizer. It isn't worth much. Like most things you believed in, once upon a time

public health faculty helped me test it