JULY 2, 2020

Dear Larry -

There’s only one room now, and this is it.

It’s a 1979 One of a Kind design, by which I mean there are no other takers.

No, none of these design ideas have made their way into magazines or Pinterest.

It’s an upside down pirate ship, really - a Redwood floored asymmetrical hexagon, cantilevered atop two cabin bedrooms and accessible only via a steep wooden staircase, each riser at a unique slippy hand-cut angle.

We spent about ten years moving every office supply possible into a single shared robot desk - every sharpie, every post-it, every notebook, every cord, all the glasses, every marker, every pen. Adjustable & shared: the platonic Bay Area ideal. Which of course became the stupidest design possible when it came time to lock the door and stay inside on our laptops forever.

The pirate ship has no traditional windows. Just two balconies with sliding doors that open to ocean breezes.

One is wide enough to permit a grill and a minicouch that faces the sunset; the other is our 320 day a year dining room/garden.

There are two enormous curved windows, and time fluffs by. Foggy with tea before noon, breezy palm trees later. 2020 was the year we finally broke down and bought an actual TV - my first! I had been rebelling.

Everywhere are projects, piled up supplies and in-progress experiment. The kitchen counter now houses a 7 gallon pot of herbs overdue for a trim, a watermelon for the fourth of july, chile peppers destined for grinding into spice rubs, onions that ought to have been pickling already and everywhere the boxes and crates. California has mostly banned the use of reusable bags, these fickle hippies, so everywhere I go, I accrue more rectangles.

We gave up and just installed the drums on the loft that exists, atop a storage closet, that everyone hopes is a bathroom (but really really isn’t).

There is one one room now and this isn’t a bad one, but we’re now starting MONTH FIVE/SHIT SIX and anything I might write to you next comes from the very very specific place where we sit and/or do dishes.

Time flows: I fill the pantry, I remember making the pickles, I dutifully freeze and dehydrate and shop, all bundled up, for the essentials that the CSA can’t deliver.

But the time doesn’t have a place to go, not here in this room.

It’s Friday, or July and it’s never Thursday but there are days in which Chris is downstairs typing and I am upstairs typing but either way neither of us can remember what was for lunch three days ago and no one has ideas for dinner.

I’m writing a cookbook, slowly, of everything I cared enough to cook during quarantine. I figure it will take me two years, and I’m thinking now that we’ll be locked up and away from the virus for maybe two years.

Two years feels better when you’re talking about investments and returns, so i invest: growing my peppers for spices from seed, tending my herbs, and putting some time into some local economic data that I think I’ll be thankful to have in the future. Yes that was a very old sentence.

Mostly I’m ok with the time pudding. The sense of standing up while falling down, simultaneously doing the only three things you could do in the house anyways, always dishes, and trying out your back in your assortment of chairs. There’s a cardigan to change into when it gets colder, and a Hawaiian shirt for when it’s warm, and have I mentioned we’ve been inside now for four months?

It was better, in March, when the tech corporate lockdown began. The streets were empty, and the conscientious queued politely along these goofy exactly-6-feet-apart tape lines, as if we could fold ourselves into the width of the tape. Take up less air.

But I realize now that the beach is where the beleaguered come to breathe. And they come from everywhere.

No masks for the runners, the joggers, the family with the rented bicycles and their aerosolized laughter. The red cups are back at the vacation rentals, cars parked three deep along the cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway.

And who can blame them, really? There’s only so much air.