Around ten a.m. Monday morning near the self checkout at Home Depot, I was face to face, breaths intermingling, with an unprovoked woman no taller than four foot ten inches tall shouting that she was “going to beat [my] fucking ass if [she] see[s] me again,” as no less than thirty customers and employees looked on.
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Impressionist Townscape: Downtown Fairfield Connecticut
Fairfield Impressionist Painting: Enjoy the Beach

My latest painting, Enjoy the Beach, continues with the thread of illuminated everyday sights in Southport and Fairfield, Connecticut.
Continue readingImpressionist Landscapes in Fairfield, CT: Snowman at Sasco Beach

I’m excited to share with you my latest painting! Over the weekend, we had a quick sneak peek of spring: two sunny, 50°-60°F days! They were gorgeous and I tried to milk every minute outside I could, but I headed to the gym today with an outside temp of 17°F. So I’ll be painting winter scenes like this one for a while longer.
Continue readingImpressionist Landscapes in Fairfield County, Connecticut: “While the Kids are at School”

My latest painting is an impressionist landscape of a road nearby my home in Southport, Connecticut. I went looking for inspiration a few days after a snowstorm and saw these two women walking and chatting as they walked along the road next to the elementary school.
Continue readingIs it time to disappear for a while?
In August, I resurrected this old blog with intentions of getting back in the groove of frequent posting. It struck me that my youngest would soon be in a threes program at a local preschool for three and a half hours, three days a week. I could now expect to have ten and a half uninterrupted hours a week to position myself toward some long-term goals and create new habits that weren’t accessible with a lack of childcare.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy to add more to my plate. There’s a lot of hoops to get through to maximize time when you’re time-blind and enterprising. I did some research into planners for folks with ADHD minds and found a planner that I thought would suit me best. I got geared up and started working with it right before my oldest son’s first week of school.
Despite this, things didn’t go as planned.
Our Family Feature
Pandemic Progress: Day 121
It’s been seventeen weeks since our town first shut down, and eleven since my last post about what the experience looks like for me and my family.
A Bad State of Affairs
To be honest, things got pretty dark for a while there. Continue reading
COVID-19 Quarantine, Day 36: Signs of Spring and Messages of Hope
There’s a lot of imagery that defines this strange, restless, panicked time. Major monuments, tourist destinations and airports without crowds. People queuing outside with gloved hands on their shopping carts, face masks covering their nose and mouth, waiting their turn to shop in Trader Joe’s. Masks on face after face. That look of fear as someone is walking on the same side of the road in the opposite direction as another and they don’t know how they’ll keep six feet as they near.

Local boutique in Fairfield with mannequin modeling a paper face mask
Those are the images of social distancing. I realize that the imagery is far more grim in the hospitals, but those experiences are not mine to share.
As I near the end of week five of social distancing, I have more hope than I did throughout the first month, like when I posted on day 10, day 14, and day 25.
It’s not because things are looking better. Our corrupt federal government is awarding 80% of coronavirus stimulus money to millionaires, rather than struggling Americans. The Trump administration is handing out $55 million allocated for PPE to a bankrupt business with no employees or equipment to make such items. Trump is taking advantage of this time to share more intimate conversations with Putin. He’s discouraging democracy by spreading mistruth about voting by mail and taking a page out of a dictator handbook while forgetting about the American Constitution while claiming to have ‘total authority.’
The home front has its challenges as well. We’ve been baking bread and eating non-perishables for weeks as we make our groceries stretch as far as they can. With this stretching, though, last week we found ourselves stressing. My husband and I were bickering about what our tween was eating almost every day. Catching him sneaking snacks became a really big deal. We were forgetting that being extra safe was a choice, not a sentence.
On top of that, a tween doing what a tween does: complain. A toddler doing what toddlers do: tantrum.
If you’re thinking, ‘where’s the hope in that?!’ I get it. I think it’s primarily that we’re settling into routine, and that we had a lot of sunshine this past week. It’s a few hours my husband’s blocked off from meetings during my toddler’s nap time so I’ve gotten alone time walking around my town–time to BREATHE that I hadn’t had quite enough of before. It’s back to being a collaborative couple, looking for ways to take care of one another. More time playing catch & frisbee outside, more hands in the dirt gardening, more sword fights with sticks against the little guy. It’s getting a brand new book in the mail after suffering through a couple of low-quality thrifted ones I never got around to reading before (I see now why). Those little moments I decided I would seek out in my last post about the quarantine.
Sometimes those little moments of light are ignited by messages of hope I’ve seen on my walks, or people have shared on our county’s rainbow hunt Facebook page. Little reminders of the beauty after the storm. Sometimes it’s seeing a fully bloomed tree, a splash of color that reminds me that nothing lasts forever.
These are the images I want to focus on. Individual people and families taking time out to uplift a stranger in a time of crisis and despair. A reminder that even if our government is failing us, the American people are still good hearted and deserving. That we’re surrounded by heroes, big, small, willing and many who didn’t sign up for this, but are fighting anyway.
Times are hard, but the best I can do right now is to share a bit of the beauty, gratitude and kindness that I’ve come across during these times.
Social Distancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Day 14
It’s day fourteen now. Two weeks in. Friends and family that live back in Texas are just starting their social distancing journey; Houston’s stay at home order started at midnight Tuesday. Homeschooling began Monday for them. On social media, they’ve started talking about how much they love being at home, how they were made for this.
I remember day one.
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