April is moving rapidly toward its’ conclusion and May is peeking through the door. Over dinner with friends, the other night one asked MJ and me what we had been up to. As I reflected on what will soon be a third of 2022…I was amazed that our year was getting away from us so quickly. It seems that it was still the first days of January and we were enjoying the Ocean at Miramar Beach, Florida with Ira Kaye and Ron. When we returned home it was the contracting of Covid by Jonathon and MJ and me and the subsequent weird feeling of undergoing a short quarantine and wondering what the supposedly milder version hath wrought for the long term? And along came Mylo and he is growing like a weed…as my mother was accustomed to saying regarding my becoming taller. Then significant house cleaning by Judge Services and holidays and birthdays and 10 thousand steps per day and…it is almost May.

We live through the little things on our way to the big things….and suddenly it dawns on us that the little things were the big things. I am working on my 12th year of retirement and it seems like yesterday that I left my career. Until 2018 we traveled around the world and then discovered that there was peace and contentment and beauty and satisfaction in our own backyard. We still travel and indeed we have another Maine Holiday planned…but traveling is not the nirvana that many seek. Our Pandemic placed a large Black Hole in the middle of our lives. In fact, we are experiencing lost time. Life and its’ rhythms changed for us…and for many of us irreparably. When a friend or colleague asks us what we have been up to since the beginning of this decade…there is lost time and a big question mark as we attempt to fit the puzzle pieces together of our time in an alternate universe where we were afraid to encounter another human for the fear that we might die…

Art is life. Without literature and painting and music and theatre…we have no effective voice to communicate…’What we have been up to.’