I took my bicycle off the road 138 days ago. Making my cycling season 227 days long, 62% of the year.

My friends Darcie and Peter cycled to the New Years Levees, so they’ve got me beat. But at almost two thirds of the year, that’s still a pretty long season, and it’s a lot longer than the “well, for six months of the year, you can’t bicycle” reasoning that automobile enthusiasts bring out.

For the first time this year, I did some basic spring maintenance myself: MacQueen’s has a backlog of 70 bicycles to get to before they could get to mine, and I wasn’t patient enough to wait. I oiled the chain, tightened the bolts, and even trued the back wheel, with the help of a spoke-tightening tool loaned to me by my friend Cynthia.

Oliver’s bike, and my bike, are now ready for the season. We’re about to head off on our first ride.

Part of the hold that the process of dying has on us is that we shy from talking about it, sharing images of it. It remains, thus, a more powerful, frightening mystery than it need be.

Looking through Catherine’s photos this morning, I found this one, which I took with her phone on January 1, 2020, the day she moved from the emergency room of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital into the PEI Palliative Care Centre.

This is the room in which Catherine died, although in this photo she’s still very much alive. Still in thrall of morphine toxicity (which explains the position of her hands, which were weaving patterns of delirium for several days), but on her way out of it and back, for a time, to us.

The chair Oliver is sitting in was the chair I slept in for the last week of her life, moved up against her bed. It’s the chair I was sitting in at the moment she died; I was holding her hand.

The sunshine coming through the window is sunshine that arrived every afternoon, through the large windows in Catherine’s room, windows that overlooked a forest, and a bird feeder.

On the shelf behind Oliver is a photo we brought from home, a photo of the happy three of us taken when Oliver was little.

You would think that, looking at this photo three months after Catherine died, I would find it depressing, that I would wish to avert my eyes.

But it’s not. And I don’t.

This is the place we said goodbye to Catherine. Where I had my last conversations with her. Where she got to say goodbye to her nieces. And her brother and sister-in-law. And my mother. And her mother. And her son.

There is so much love in that room.

We’re holding the monthly Pen Night, for fountain pen aficionados, virtually again this month. The March meeting turned out to be a pleasant surprise, given how horrible Zoom-meetings can be, and so we’re back into Zoom again tomorrow night, Saturday, April 18, 2020, at 7:00 p.m. Atlantic.

Email me if you’d like to attend and would like the Zoom link.

My time-between-grocery-store-visits increased from 10 days (between this visit and this one) to 14 days, with a visit to Sobeys this morning.

Friday morning turned out to be a pretty good time to visit: I’ve learned that how busy the Sobeys parking lot is bears no relation to how busy the store is, so I no longer use that as a metric; instead I look for whether there’s a lineup to get in, and this morning there wasn’t.

The degree of stress that Steven commented on was very much in evidence today: we generally don’t place any demands on our fellow shoppers, and we treat it as an individual rather than a community exercise.

That’s changed now, and we need to get with the synchronized swimming; some shoppers haven’t figured this out yet, and were willfully ignoring the one-way aisle signs, engaged in extreme lollygagging, and ignoring all guidance to stay 2 m apart from everyone else. It wasn’t chaos, but it also wasn’t clockwork, and I came close, a couple of times, to pulling a “hold your horses, bucko, this is one way the other way.” But I stayed calm.

Every week I divert more of our shopping elsewhere, which is why I’ve been able to lengthen the time between the visits. I’ve been buying vegetables from Heart Beet Organics for pickup Wednesdays (and so enjoyed fresh carrots, fresh mushrooms this week), getting milk, yogurt and butter from Purity Dairy, getting a weekly delivery of meals and bread from Receiver Coffee, and, last week, I bought a side of smoked salmon from Gallants, open for takeout, so we’re good for the next couple of Saturday market simulations.

For Sunday waffles, and other baking, I’ve switched over completely from trying to keep eggs in the house to using aquafaba, a trick I learned from my vegan friends at Crafting {:} a Life last year.

It is interesting–a challenge sometimes, an opportunity other times–to be coming into my own as full-time household cook at a time when so much is changing.

On our walk to the waterfront yesterday we noticed that the parking garage at the Delta Prince Edward hotel is now protected with a semi-permanent barrier of sandbags

The hotel is closed indefinitely due the pandemic, so presumably this was installed preemptively to prevent staff from needing to be on-site in the event of heavy rain, which has been known in past to flood the basement garage.

So this is a piece of public art that testifies both to the pandemic, and also to climate change.

In our neighbourhood, the most obvious sign that we’re all locked inside our houses due the pandemic is that there haven’t been any cars parked on Prince Street for weeks.

On a typical Friday afternoon, you’d be unable to get a space at a parking meter between Richmond and Grafton unless you were prepared to circle the block a few times; I don’t think I’ve seen more than two cars parked on this stretch since mid-March.

Seeing the street empty of automobiles for so long reinforces just how much of our downtown we’ve given over to them.

My friend Cindy, in an opinion piece the the Regina Leader-Post, Organizing in hard times serves the betterment of community:

Although individualism might help us stay at home alone and learn a new hobby or practise informal learning through our computers or sewing machines, by acting together we can build something sustainable and push for actions that benefit communities and build the commons in the long run. This is our challenge and our need.

The performance of a community comes from its people and actions where the collective trumps the individual. This, fortunately, has become obvious during these difficult times. But actions that prioritize economic growth over the environment and community will only lead us back to the pandemic. It’s time for actions to emphasize public ownership, solidarity and bottom-up changes. Without this, the post-pandemic will present further social and economic divisions.

My friend Lou, on Facebook, links to Well, That Unraveled Quickly from the American Institute for Economic Research:

In the meantime, we’ve seen things we never imagined possible, namely seemingly intelligent people howling for weeks for the nationalization of industry, the socialization of production, the imprisonment in our homes, the trillions in pointless spending, the unprecedented amounts of new money created by the Fed, and the countless other awful legal precedents set. The lawsuits will continue to be litigated for a decade.

The core realization we face right now is that it is not possible to stop and start an economy; nor is it possible to distinguish between essential and nonessential. The commercial society is a web in which everyone and everything is connected with everyone and everything else.

I have a diverse group of friends.

In this brave new world we’re all jacked into Zoom (or, maybe, Jitsi) all day long. We’ve been at this for a month, and it’s remarkable how little most of us continue to pay attention to video and audio, as if living the Dick Tracy future is enough, and we don’t really need to be concerned with seeing and hearing other clearly.

Here in my office I mostly use the “Display Audio” microphone built into the front of my Apple Cinema Display. It’s always been good enough. But, I wondered, could I do better.

So I dug the old Live from the Formosa Tea House audio setup (Apex 435 microphone, Behringer 802 mixer) out of storage, bought myself a line-to-USB cable, and set everything up beside my computer to see if that would prove the audio quality.

If you listen to the same here, I think you’ll agree that it did.

I’m taking it out for a real ride in 15 minutes on my weekly conference call with my colleagues in New Hampshire.

I’m also using the opportunity to promote the brand (get your Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook by The Old Farmer’s Almanac today!):

Grief is a journey. And in parallel to that journey are the myriad practical acts of unbundling from another’s life, and of shutting down or attending to the practical tools they once used.

Figuring out what to do with Catherine’s mobile phone is this week’s task.

The phone itself, a Nokia 6.1, has a storied history: last September Catherine was rushed to hospital by ambulance, the result of dehydration and exhaustion. Here’s how I told the story of that day in the email newsletter that went out to friends and family:

I was away last week, and Catherine’s mother Marina, supported by generous friends, was here from Ontario to help out. Marina’s presence was a Godsend, and made my time away possible.

Her presence also allowed Catherine to be convinced today that it was again time to call in reinforcements, and with the help of her Palliative Home Care nurse, she was able to arrange to be admitted to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital today for rehydration and recuperation.

This all happened to coincide with the time that I was due to drive Marina over to Moncton to catch the train home, and this was how it came to pass that our house cleaner, two paramedics, a home care worker, me, and Marina were all packed into our house today.

As Marina and I were readying to depart, Catherine was on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance by the paramedics, and she neglected to notice that her cell phone was in her pocket: it fell out, crashed onto the sidewalk and, before anyone could notice, the stretcher ran over it. It did not survive.

Not a calamity, relatively speaking, but yet another thing to add to the pile.

Oliver and I did drive Marina across to the train, and we stopped at Staples in Moncton to pick up Catherine a new phone; it turned out that the Nokia 6.1, the phone that was run over by the stretcher and needed replacing, was on sale. So we simply bought a replacement, and delivered it to Catherine in hospital that night.

Catherine used this phone a lot. For Instagram. To send texts (for someone for whom reading and writing was a constant struggle, this wasn’t easy, but she plowed through). And as a phone.

Two things have prevented me from doing something with her phone over the last 90 days.

Three things, actually, if you count that it’s another act of closure.

First was her telephone number: all three of we 100 Prince Streeters ended up with telephone numbers ending in 9569. What to do with Catherine’s? Put it back into the pool for someone else? Keep it alive in case we need a third phone between the two of us? I solved, or at least delayed, this issue by downgrading the Public Mobile plan for the SIM to a basic $15/month plan. A small price to pay for renting a phone number for a while.

Second was the text messages on the phone. Despite that most of them were workaday “good morning!”, “how are you?”, “can you get eggs?” texts, or maybe especially because of that, the archivist in me didn’t want them to disappear into vapor when I repurposed the phone.

To solve this problem, I installed SMS Backup+ on the phone and configured it to backup Catherine’s text messages and call log, via IMAP, to her email account, which I’ve kept active, via IMAP.

It took all night to back the messages up–there were almost 9,000 of them–but now that’s done, when I login to Catherine’s Fastmail account I see two new folders, Call log and SMS. In the SMS folder is an archive of Catherine’s texts back to December 10, 2018:

It’s a small thing, an archive only of interest to me. And perhaps never to be consulted after today.

But it’s another small step.

The “X years ago today” feature of Google Photos almost makes entrusting care of my photos to Google worth it. Especially on days like today.