Introduction

Since our co-written piece was published in Understorey Magazine last fall, we have continued to email and chat online and with each other via video technology, which freezes constantly, to keep expanding our project “Field Notes: Desire Paths, Women, Land and Body.” With the incredible world-shifts due to the novel coronavirus COVID-19, our conversations have also shifted. In these excerpted emails, we discuss where we were a mere eight months ago–Assisi, Italy–and where we are now. We edit a new piece, so comments go back and forth in relation to it. We marvel at how life in a pandemic is very much all Field Notes, desires, and desire paths held while we keep ourselves and each other safe, and worry about friends and family nesting all over the world, or out fighting for others’ safety and health.

Continue Reading Email: Covid-19

Evenings of board games and laughter, intellectual discussions over dinner, days of drifting from reading to knitting to cooking elaborate meals and baking beautiful bread. Walks in the woods with my dog, the odd bike ride with my husband. Gardening in the sun. I had unrealistic expectations, perhaps, but this is what I dared imagine life in self-isolation might be, the four of us all together for the first time in years.

There have been elaborate meals—nettle risotto, roast leg of lamb, slow-roasted vegetables, homemade pasta. The bread has indeed been beautiful, thanks to the plethora of no-knead recipes out there now, and I’ve also made hot cross buns and nut loaves and cookies and yogurt. But discussions over dinner have often disintegrated into nit-picking and arguments, conflict over the Netflix account, and whose turn it is to walk the dog. Ah, the children are both home. Except they are no longer children.

I get it, life changed practically overnight for them, but also for us. The global pandemic caused us all to come to a pause and rethink our future in two-week blocks at a time.
Continue Reading Loss and Love in the Time of Covid

We hear of the death of a man.
By key stroke. Counting
Another number. This could be you.
This could be me.

We hide the death of a child.
Deep in the womb. Living
Uneasy. Murdering easy.
Handful of shining clink.

We bear the death of a land.
In black smoke. Coughing. Uprooting
Breath. Limbs limp with fever.
Closed in prayer.

We fear the death of the Word.
By the book/podium/screen. Excising
Tongues. Tearing hearts.
Taped shut.

We hold the death of our God.
Deep in our hearts. Dying.
All that remains. Charred wood.
Grey ash.

—April 17, 2020

Recently, a memory of you, asleep
beside me in the wide bed

in Haileybury, your black
hair fanned out on the pillow

like a split seed.
Do you remember

that house? Where we found
the trunk in the attic, full of fancy

Continue Reading For My Sister in Her P.P.E.

Life as a university student is an absolute, never sleeping, always studying, where is my caffeine, level of chaos. As a first-year university student, adjusting to this lifestyle was much more difficult than I had first thought. My first semester came with the thrills of new freedom and an expanding perspective of life and all it had to offer. With these highs came the lows, where tears accompanied thoughts of giving up in the face of midterms, labs, and the never-ending stream of assignments and studying. First semester finally ended, and I had learned so much about myself as a person and as a learner. I had gone through the ringer and came out with better studying habits and was fully prepared to conquer second semester head on.

Continue Reading I Took It All for Granted