Siri in Isolation

I am standing by the kitchen counter, preparing to whisk yogurt into mayonnaise. It is December 24, and I am prepping the Christmas meal. The dogs are playing, snarling and leaping, too close to where I stand awkwardly balanced and fearful of hurting my healing kneecap. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a fight with bared fangs breaks out, serious enough for me to scream and hurl what I have in my hands to break it up. Unfortunately, it is the full yogurt bottle, which I have just opened, and there’s a breathless moment when the dogs and I stare at the splattered yogurt, some of which has landed in their dark fur. My scream has summoned helpers to the kitchen, who shoo the dogs out and mop up the pools of yogurt, while I sit down and shakily drink a glass of water. After my fall a month and a half ago, I still feel vulnerable and easily startled, but mainly the pandemic isolation has left me, and probably everybody else, with a brittle surface of composure, which it takes very little to break....

The full moons come and go, sunny, hot days follow others bleak with rain, and occasionally nature gifts us breath-taking sunsets.     Outside our house a full crew of workers has broken one lane of the street to put down giant sewer pipes which will serve Rocinha up the hill. We hear their voices and the machinery, and over many weeks the commotion has traveled from the front of the house, accompanied by the whistles and the shouts from those directing the single file traffic, to around the corner and up along the long sidewall of the garden, with the noise growing less strident. We have to imagine most of this, because we can only see the undisturbed other side of the street from our second- floor windows. Sometimes several men let out alarmed shouts, “oh-oh-oh-OH!” and we fear a truck lost its brakes, a digging machine tipped over, or a heavy section of pipe fell from great height, but then they stop yelling, and we hear nothing more.   Inside our walls, life continues...

  Oswaldo’s work as a logician and philosopher has taken us to many interesting places, Athens, Paris, Bucharest, Sevilla, to mention a few, but the most interesting and splendid trip was to Turkey in 2008, where we spent a week in Istanbul, while Oswaldo and Keith Lehrer, another philosopher from the University of Arizona, gave several lectures. We then traveled around the country, ending up in the magnificent landscape of Cappadocia, visiting the famous cave dwellings there. I wrote about our trip here:  http://www.siriinturkey.blogspot.com/   At home the other day, I happened to look up to discover a couple of wasps busy building a papery nest of open cells, teetering on the edge of a lamp on our veranda. It didn’t seem like a very desirable location for a dwelling, swaying at the end of the wire of a small clay pendant next to a bright LED lamp, but the builders seemed unperturbed by my presence and very focused on their work. Truth to say, I was not surprised. Throug...

“MOM! You have to look down!”    It’s 2008 in Washington D.C. and my son is exasperated. I have just fallen forward like a plank, walking though the crowds at Obama’s first inauguration. It is not the first time I have tumbled and won’t be the last; nonetheless I pick myself up, unharmed, perhaps relaxed by the happy exhilaration surrounding me.   In the scalding heat of Athens in August 2013 I am not so lucky. I am walking cautiously on the big marble flagstones, when, distracted by a man passing me at speed, I whip my head around -  and step into a hole, crashing to the ground. I will learn that I have broken my fibula, which means 6 weeks without putting my foot on the ground. It is the first day of our vacation there. I will spend the remainder in a wheelchair pushed by my husband, seeing Athens, Crete and Santorini from a different and unexpected perspective.   A week ago, 8 months into our self-isolation quarantine, I catch my foot on the doggie gate ...

The other day my friend and I were on our weekly walk in the botanical garden, at 8.30 am enjoying the deserted space and the enthusiastic bird song. Several toucans were screeching above us, way too high to spot their bright yellow chests and black beaks. Mid-walk we passed in front of the playground area, until recently cordoned off by yellow and black tape. The tape had gone. In its place a brand-new set of rules posted on a placard indicated the playground had re-opened. To our surprise, a pretty café had opened as well.  We used to stop at the previous one, which had closed at the end of the year, for an expresso and a shared bottle of water, and to chat with the resident cat, Penelope. Now we stood there transfixed, not sure what to do. We desired the coffee and the return to our routine, but at that moment, taken by surprise, the process was too overwhelming.  Would the cups be sanitized? How would we pay? Would it be safe to share a bottle of water? Everything fel...

Facebook memories has been nudging me these days, sending photos from a 2014 trip to Paris, where Oswaldo and I spent 3 delightful weeks housed in the  Maison Suger,  a research institution located    in the heart of the Latin quarter. Oswaldo would lecture during the day, while I was free to walk around and drink in the city. Each day new FB generated photos bring up memories from those weeks, here walking in le Jardim de Luxembourg  when my wonderful niece Christine flew in from Copenhagen to join me for a long weekend, and we walked and walked until we couldn’t take another step – and then walked some more. At the time she had undergone fighter pilot training and was in top physical condition, entertaining me with stories about being air-dropped alone into a Canadian forest for survival training and other jaw-dropping experiences, as we strode along. We discovered that we both enjoyed watching art as much as staring at pastries or shopping for shoes together....

There was the time we were chatting in the kitchen with Helinho, who’s been working at our house for more than thirty years. He turned to leave and then said, “Uiii!” stopping in his tracks. Holding Zaffy back we inched forward to see what had startled him and saw a rather long boa constrictor stretched across our outside area, quite beautiful with clear markings down her ( jiboía  in Portuguese is feminine) back and measuring perhaps a meter and a half. What to do? In the course of our forty years in this house we’ve never seen a snake and so we called the fire brigade. Eventually two firemen appeared with a long grappling stick and a large container. The poor snake hissed loudly when she was finally caught - it had taken a couple of tries - and then they eased her into the container and assured us she’d be set free in the rain forest.   The firemen were back several months later when a porcupine with long yellow-tipped quills made his way down to the service area and took re...

It started out like any other pandemic day. I woke up before 6am, went downstairs, whistled for Zaffy, filled her and Loki’s bowls and prepared a breakfast tray us, which I took upstairs to share with Oswaldo while we read the latest bad news, both from Brazil and from the US. Zaffy flopped down under the moving fan and went to sleep. Downstairs, an hour or so later, Victor too woke up and started his day, going outside to meditate on his patio, hanging upside down with feet locked on his Teeter inversion table. By then both Zaffy and Loki were exploring near him, and Victor, who normally keeps his eyes closed during this routine, opened them to discover Loki in front of him shifting a smooth oval rock around in his mouth. Shackled and unable to intervene Victor watched in horror as Loki stretched his throat and simply swallowed the rock. The 2 ½ month old baby German Shepherd, who’d just reached 12 kilos, had ingested a 2 by 3 cm rock. I had put on my gym clothes and was tying on my s...

I looked in the mirror this morning and considered the state of my hair. Newly cut in mid- March, just beneath my ears, it now hits against my shoulders and falls in front my eyes. Today I brushed it all back in a tight ponytail, the first time I’ve been able to do so. In truth, not a flattering look, but a relief. Oswaldo’s hair has gotten longer and wilder – on a zoom call our lawyer said he looked like a poet - and he too is hoping for a ponytail soon.   Unlike our hair, Loki, the German Shepherd puppy, is growing daily, if not hourly, in front of our eyes. He weighed just over 8 kilos when he arrived 2 weeks ago, and now he’s at 11 kilos and some. His little body has lengthened and lifted up on sturdy legs with those big paws. It is almost impossible to lift him – he slithers in your arms until you manage to secure him in a firm grip, hand under his rump. After a shaky first week with eating issues after deworming he now wolfs down his kibble with relish and then asks for more....

It was the end of August, when we were more than five months into our self-isolation, that we decided another dog would be a perfect new addition to our house, for a realistic look forward had made us realize we would probably continue like this well past Christmas.   “We’ll forget about the pandemic,” we said to each other. “A puppy will cheer everyone up and keep us busy.” Although we considered adopting, we were reluctant to risk additional stress by acquiring a grown rescue dog – we had tried it before, and it had not worked out - so we decided to get a baby dog, a two-months-old male German Shepherd puppy from a kennel in the mountains. Brought to our house he turned out to be an adorable velvet-black soft-furred bundle with innocent dark eyes and very sharp little teeth. Victor named him “Loki,” in Norse mythology the brother of Thor, thus honoring the memory of our beloved Malinois, who died exactly four years ago. We all fell for Loki, except for Zaffy who looked like she’d...

Some months ago, my friend, Hanne, who lives in Covid-safe Denmark, suggested that I watch the progress of a nest of ospreys,  https://stream.webstream.dk/naturstyrelsen/ , high in Gripskov, a forest north of Copenhagen. Cameras and microphones had been installed so that viewers all over the world could follow the birds as they fixed the nest, laid 3 eggs, took turns sitting on them, until 2 chicks emerged. One egg didn’t make it. We watched the chicks scream for food, the parents swooping in with dangling bits in their beaks to be shared, and then suddenly the chicks were big, stomping around the ample nest, tearing at the live food brought by the parents and testing their considerable wings. All this accompanied by the sounds of the wind in the trees, the bird screams, and the hoot of a distant train - a peaceful scene that made your face relax. View from Oswaldo's study Meanwhile, in Gávea, we were oblivious to a similar event beginning to unfold. Hummingbirds are known to be te...

I’ve slept badly these last weeks. Anxious dreams and negative thoughts have haunted my nights. A lot of staring into the dark and thinking, “Oh no. Why did I do/say that?”  Rain on Dentista beach There’s a reason for this unsettled state: we have owned a beach house and a boat for the last 22 years. For various reasons we had put them on the market for 4-5 years without any success, and then suddenly, in the course of one weekend, we had a firm buyer for the boat and 3 offers on the house. When you’ve been the sole owner for all those years you have no knowledge of the ins and outs of property sales and, as a result, the ensuing days have been stressful, filled with insecurity and demands for a surprising amount of documentation. Add to this our Covid isolation and there’s a hot mix of worry right there.       Last week Oswaldo and I spent two days there alone – our first real outing from our home since mid-March – separating and packing what we would remove from th...

I write a lot about noticing. It’s an enjoyable exercise which lets me write about what’s happening in my small world without having to delve too deep into an inside which at the moment seems, well, numb.  There are signs. As I write this, I’m chewing ferociously on sugar-free Mentos tablets, lumps of which I chuck into the wastepaper basket when the flavor has died and then refresh (just spat one out and started another). I like to crunch the outside crust before delving into the chewier inside, and I am convinced the sharp burst of mint in my mouth helps me focus and write, or indeed do anything that requires concentration. Answer correspondence? pop a Mentos. Filing documents? Mentos again, and so on - I go through an embarrassing amount of these addictive icy-blue pieces of gum. Oddly, I do not require Mentos in the kitchen where my creativity as yet has not flagged, but there I can  beliscar,  as they say cutely here – the word also means to pinch a cheek or a bottom...

A brisk march around my house takes 40 seconds. My usual aim is for 40 minutes of uninterrupted walking, equal to 60 turns. Preferable to walking around the pool, which takes 20 seconds, and, in turn, would require 120 laps. Victor chooses this latter option, plugged into his Audible App, listening to the latest of 70 books consumed during the pandemic; he walks late, after work, in the gathering dark, oblivious to his surroundings, only kicking the occasional ball to Zaffy.  Being a morning person I prefer an early walk and choose to go around the house due to the variation of landscape – there’s the narrow path along the side of the house, lined with a bed of smooth round stones, where I once found a small frog sitting stock-still, waiting for me to pass. Then I emerge into the front garden, covered in flagstones and with an abundance of bromeliads along the wall to the street. Right now, the orchids tied to the palm trees there are in bloom and display several clusters of delica...