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I remember being puzzled by those two terms as a child. Travel sickness made more sense to me: you felt ill BECAUSE of the travel and the motion of the particular vehicle you happened to be in. But homesickness meant you were sick of NOT being home! And it wasn't really a sickness at all, but more of a longing or a sadness. Now, though? I think the one big thing that just might reverse the way we parse those two terms is the Covid-19 pandemic!

Many of us are now thoroughly sick of NOT being able to travel. We're itching to escape the confines of our house or studio apartment or room in a retirement residence and get out to see the world!

As for homesickness? Yep, most of us are pretty sick of staying home all the time. Or maybe we're home BECAUSE we're sick, either with Covid-19 or something else. Kids who used to eagerly look forward to getting out of school for the summer are now hoping to be allowed back there in September.

Summer is a time for "beach reads" and many people of my generation had a few Enid Blyton books in their piles of light summer reading. Noddy books for younger kids and Famous Five or Secret Seven for the slightly older ones. Now, for the parent and grandparent set, there's a line of "Enid Blyton for Grown-ups". Written by Bruno Vincent, they are decidedly tongue-in-cheek takes on the Famous Five as they deal with 21st century problems like social media, Brexit and now, Covid-19.

I certainly haven't read all of them but I did buy the latest one, Five Go Absolutely Nowhere. From the blurb on the back cover:

Join George, Dick, Anne, Julian and Timmy the Dog as they go into lockdown on Kirren Island. But can they get their laptops to work and forage enough to survive? And who's hijacked Dorset's entire supply of lavatory paper?

Best of all, these books incorporate some of the illustrations from the original Famous Five books, but with different captions. One of my favourites reads "We're stuck playing charades, Julian, because you got us kicked off all those pub quizzes on Zoom!"

Hmmm... sounds like they're homesick in both senses of the word!

How much "real reality" has there been in your world since mid-March? And of what there has been, how much of it has been the drudge-work type and how much has been the fun stuff?

Your answer will depend on your living situation, employment status and the way you normally spent your time when the restrictions of the past few months were not in place. It will also depend on your personality and probably a bunch of other factors I haven't yet considered.

Perhaps I need a different term for it. Offline reality? Concrete reality? Sensual reality? Tactile reality?I'm at a bit of a loss here. Are there other human languages that might have a better word or phrase to describe what I'm trying to convey?

People and cats and chickens are real reality. Bagpipers in parks and live music in general are real reality. So is art and drama if you're seeing it first-hand. Or public lectures or poetry readings. Hiking trails and birdwatching and star-gazing. Bike rides and live scenery of any kind. Good food and drink.

Lots of interesting and exciting possibilities. The outdoor possibilities are expanding a bit with the nicer weather, but our horizons are still more limited than they were. It's sobering to think that though summer's here, fall and winter are not that far behind. Pandemic Thanksgiving and Halloween and Christmas? They're looking like distinct possibilities now.

I guess for now, we have to make hay while the sun shines.

Over the past few days, more new openings have been announced. Beaches. Art galleries. Restaurant patios. Drive-in and drive-on movie venues. Pandemic-style day camps. It's a start. But at what point do the health benefits of a bolder approach outweigh the risks of a second wave or a setback to progress already made? Are we perhaps already at or past that point?

Now that school is out - the class-zoom as well as the class-room - kids and families are going to want to take full advantage of our all-too-short summer. Summer camp is mostly not an option. Ditto for a lot of family vacations, certainly the ones that involve flying to far-flung destinations. Families will be stay-cationing in limited-sized, distanced or masked droves. Even if they stay in their own neighbourhoods, playgrounds and play structures remain off limits. A couple of months is a long time in the life of a child, particularly one who has already been cooped up at home for four months, due to circumstances beyond her control and in some cases beyond her level of understanding too!

It does seem to me that we could open a few more things. What about the Agricultural Museum, for example? A lot of that is outdoors or semi-outdoors. Maybe selected library branches (for browsing, I mean), at least the children's sections? Family-friendly restaurants usually have easily-cleaned surfaces too - couldn't their eat-in sections be re-opened soon, even if some tables had to be closed off to ensure reasonable distancing?

Politicians and large organizations are pretty eager to tout our progress when it suits them - for example, when they're ending the pandemic pay for front-line grocery workers or limiting pay raises for nurses - yet far less inclined to help those who could benefit the most.

Children, after all, do not vote. But their parents do. And so will they, in a few more years!

It feels every bit as fierce outside today as was predicted. As we went out to collect our mail, we were hit by a wall of heat and humidity. But we aired out the house last night, closed the windows when we got up and headed out first thing this morning to pick up prescriptions and some grocery items at Food Basics. And so far, we haven't even felt the need to turn on the air conditioner - the fan in the living room is keeping us comfortable for now.

I've been to Food Basics before (although not since pandemic measures were put in place) but I'm not yet completely familiar with the store layout. The aisles are narrower than the ones at our regular grocery store but luckily it was not crowded. The shelves were reasonably well stocked too, although they don't carry as wide a variety of different products. I managed to snag a couple of tins of pineapple chunks, some frozen wild blueberries, Asian crunch salad kits and some wonderfully fresh looking lettuce and tomatoes - though I'm still looking forward to seeing what our own garden yields!

While we were gone, our lawns got mowed too. This afternoon there's a pile of mail to look through - bills but also my Good Times magazine with some puzzles in it. Tonight I get to watch the conclusion of my Agatha Christie mystery, although I have to say that as far as I'm concerned, John Malkovich doesn't make as convincing a Poirot as David Suchet.

So I'm ready to cocoon now for a couple of days.

Since the lockdown began, I've been reading, posting daily on here, and... well, not much else, really. I was amused by "shelf obsession", an arrangement of book titles by printmaker Phil Shaw, described here:

https://www.rebeccahossack.com/artists/72-phil-shaw/overview/

After a friend asked if I was tempted to arrange books on our shelves here to tell my own story, it gave me pause. I may yet try it. But here's a title that come fall of 2020, will probably describe what we're now on the threshold of:

https://inspectorbanks.com/books/the-summer-that-never-was/

Usually I look forward to summer. Outdoor barbecues and picnics at Vincent Massey Park. Music and Beyond. Chamberfest. Folkfest or Cityfolk. Shakespeare plays performed in our local parks. Odyssey Theatre at Strathcona Park. Blockbuster art exhibits at the National Gallery and the Ottawa Art Gallery. The big book sale put on by the Friends of the Experimental Farm. The Victorian Tea. Usually a couple of trips a week to wander through Parkdale Market and stop at the Shouldice stand to pick up locally grown strawberries. Spur-of-the-moment trips to Purple Cow on Colonnade Road to get ice cream cones. Tasting interesting new beers at Beyond the Pale.

Ant then there's travel. This weekend was supposed to be Ad Astra weekend in Toronto. I hadn't registered to go, but I had all kinds of projects I wanted to accomplish while I had the house to myself. Usually my partner attends BSDCan in June, which again I look forward to in terms of please-myself me time. I myself was planning to go to Toronto later this month for the Bony Blithe crime fiction mini-con. And in August, I had planned a trip to Dublin for the annual conference of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), held each year in a different city.

None of the above will be happening this year.

Strangely enough, as the weather starts to get nice like it is today, I seem to feel MORE dispirited, not less. It's that feeling that by the time we're released from confinement, the weather will be getting cold again, with freezing rain and drizzle and eventually snow... all the things that tend to hamper easy mobility.

So what I'm expecting over the next few weeks and months is maybe lazy, maybe hazy, and certainly stir-crazy days of summer. I guess the best I could hope for would be The Summer of My Amazing Luck.

Maybe I'll reflect some more on a suitable way to arrange my books. "Of Human Bondage" springs to mind right about now...

... but it was a beautiful, fall-like day for the Dyke March last Saturday. I found it a congenial gathering, just the right size (unlike the Pride March, which seems larger, more commercial - though I guess in some ways it's a GOOD thing that it's become so mainstream during my lifetime!) Anyway, I liked the friendliness, the intergenerational aspect, the consensual and refreshingly egoless style of the Dyke March. In flavour, it was very reminiscent of the consciousness-raising group I used to go to at the Ottawa Women's Centre during the mid-1970s. The fact that my daughter was performing afterwards in Minto Park and that both grandchildren were along for the ride didn't hurt either!

Fall itself has a rather different rhythm to it for me these days. Back when I was in elementary school, of course, it meant new clothes, new school supplies, a new teacher and group of classmates and often a new school too - although we lived in the same house throughout my school career, they were forever changing school boundaries as one or another school became severely overcrowded and new schools were built. And let me tell you, "overcrowding" had a very different meaning in my young day! I just have to laugh when parents these days complain that their kids' school is overcrowded because their kid is in a class with 25 or 30 other kids - when I was little, that would have been a SMALL class! My kindergarten class had over sixty kids in it (though mind you, there were two teachers). In subsequent grades, classes of 40 to 45 (with only one teacher) were the norm, and a teacher counted herself lucky if she had under 35 kids in her class - even if it was one of those now-dreaded split grades.

When I headed off to university in 1971, university classes didn't get underway until somewhere in mid-September (usually between the 15th and 20th of the month as I recall) and for many students, that meant an extra couple of weeks that they could work and earn money for the next year's tuition - though even allowing for inflation, postsecondary education was not nearly as expensive nor as ubiquitous as it is today. Nowadays, college and university students generally head off to classes no later than the day after Labour Day - which must make life extremely hectic for families who have children (including adult children) at various educational levels!

Once I had completed university, the rhythm of the seasons changed for me again, although there was still that feeling of autumnal renewal during my working life,
even pre-children, as folks came back from holidays and new projects and activities began.

Now that I'm retired, I'm almost finding summers to be busier than the fall, what with all the festivals going on in town - Music & Beyond, Chamberfest and next week, the Folk Festival (which used to be held in August).

Plus ca change...