COVID 19 and Me
Sorry for the long time between posts.
You would think that quarantine would be a perfect situation for writing: lots of time on my hands, lots of staying in one place, fewer distractions, plus some rather dire possibilities that I can't do anything about, so my best course of action should be to distract myself.
Well, it didn't work like that. I managed a few Instagram posts, mainly because they required few words, and a political opinion or two on Tumblr, but mostly I consumed, bouncing around between social media, news feeds, and a handful of bloggers I follow, obsessed with the ongoing crisis. I pretty much quit exercising, even though I was in Louisiana, a place I had chosen specifically for its nice weather that would allow me to get outside and move around. In contrast to last year's Puerto Rico trip, on which I lost about five pounds, this year I gained weight. Don't know how much because I haven't weighed myself in all this time, but my clothes are fitting tighter than they used to. A few occasional health problems I've had for years, that usually resolve by themselves in a few hours or days, have become more than occasional. Unless I maintain perfect posture, head all the way up and shoulders all the way down, my jowls and my second chin join up with each other to completely obscure about three quarters of my jawline. I look like my grandmother. It's funny. All these years I've been hearing the old saying about how we turn into our parents or other elders and I though it just meant behavioral things, repeating what we learned from them without being conscious of it. I never expected to put my hair up, look in the mirror, and see an ancestor who died in 1986.
But the biggest disturbance has been the loss of my absolute confidence that, as long as I refrained from doing stupid things like eating junk food, I could expect to live as long as she did, or longer. Death in one's eighties or nineties is pretty common in my family, but this is a new disease. It completely reshuffles the deck. I have occasionally commented in political discussions that any or all four of the leading figures in the presidential race (Biden, Sanders, Trump and Pence) could be dead by Election Day, so there's no point in making predictions. The fact that I also fall into that demographic has taken a little longer to sink in.
So I'm sure you'll understand why I've been doing more than my usual amount of Health Agonizing. That's part of why I decided to leave Louisiana. Now, I like Louisiana. I like the weather and the culture, the cheap plentiful fresh seafood and the fact that even humble little roadside diners generally know what vegetables are. But it's still Trump Country. Reopen is in full swing and anti-maskers are plentiful. I also miss my healthy food making gear, my fermenting tubes and so on. So I spend most of July driving north. I figured I'd get a temporary rental somewhere in the northern half of central Massachusetts, as I have before, until I found someplace where I could establish myself.
That didn't happen. I don't know whether rents remain high because greater Boston is still the Last Hiring Economy, like it was in the Crash of 2008, or because a lot of people have decided that they want to be within driving distance of the famous medical centers, but I did not have much luck finding anything in my price range. It didn't help that the housing section of Worcester Craigslist, which I depend on for this sort of thing, has been heavily spammed by rent-to-own operations to the point where it's hard to find anything else. (I've also been warned that a lot of these are scams advertising houses and apartments that the advertisers don't actually own or have any rights to. They try to get you to send them money "to hold it off the market" before you've seen it and then you never get to see it because as soon as they've got the money, they vanish.)
Then I did some thinking. When I decided to come back, I was hoping to be able to eat healthier. But I certainly didn't eat healthier in Puerto Rico. I felt better there because, for most of the time I was there, I didn't have a car, so I was forced to walk. So, while I do want a place where I have access to a kitchen, I also need a location that will at least encourage me to walk. Ideally to a farmer's market, because it's that time of year. At the same time, I wanted to avoid living in a really urban sort of area, because of the air pollution, which is not just a matter of traffic. Old New England cities often have some dirty-burning old furnaces that would not be allowed today but have been grandfathered in.
As it happens, I found what appears to be just the thing in, of all places, Bridgeport, Connecticut. It's an old city but it's small, a little under 150k people, and the downtown is compact. From the building where my rental is (a single-family house with a yard, on a side street) to the farmer's market (which happens twice a week!) is about a mile and a half. To the post office, about the same. I'm moving there tomorrow.