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Island Commons Marty’s Memories – From A Coc on By Marty Trower

Memories are easily any time before now. Now being the strange, elastic, uncertain time of the pandemic. It’s here, skirting around us, lurking, but impacting every one of us in many ways. Most of us, whether consciously or not have built our own invisible but strongly felt cocoon. I sit, and I also roam within my cocoon. I talk on the phone and I have even FaceTimed. I walk with friends, fast and apart, and now, masked. The dog speeds up and pulls, trying to take it all in while she can. She inhales the thrilling outside world through her nose, whether in the air or in the ground. That’s her world and it lives within my cocoon. Spring doesn’t know what we hear on the radio and television and on the internet. It is just carrying on as we watch it happen as if in slow motion. I am interacting with my living space and hours of the day in ways I never have before. With patience, and introspection. I am still sorting through mounds of old

photographs, bumping into people and places once so significant that I want to unravel the intervening years. I find artwork, letters started, creative problem- solving projects still in pieces, all abandoned but all still breathing life. Often, I think I want to stay in my cocoon into the forever that it will take to resolve all that I have started in my life. I wonder if other people are experiencing similar issues. I wonder if we will look and act differently when we emerge from our cocoons. I hear of many positive things that have come about or at least been noticed and appreciated during this time. I have never grown seeds inside before yet here they are, little spindles of green bursting up through the damp earth in cardboard egg cartons. Will they really turn into cucumbers and arugula? Maybe all of this was just a particularly bleak mud season.

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MAY 2020 CHEBEAGUE ISLAND COUNCIL CALENDAR