Patricia Harrelson

After the Women’s March to Sacramento, I was elated. The cloud of despair had lifted and stayed gone as I clicked “Like” on Facebook posts picturing my friends and family at Marches all over the country. On Sunday morning, I met my writing buddy at Schnoogs, a popular local coffee shop, where talk of the March peppered the air. We ran into friends who had also marched and some customers said they’d watched coverage on TV and thanked us for our participation.

However, as my date with my friend came to a close, I could feel the hint of a virus closing in on me, so when I got to my car, I sent text messages canceling my plans for the rest of the day and went home to sit quietly in my chair reading and sipping a cold preventative hot beverage made from garlic, ginger, honey, and lemon juice. Ironically, the book I was finishing was called “Today Will be Different,” a quirky novel by Maria Semple, that closed with the narrator considering how to live with her husband who’d adopted a radically new approach to life that she couldn’t fathom.

From there, I proceeded to four hours spent in cyberspace, reading email, following links to articles like this one in which George Lakoff explains how the Democrats helped elect Trump. Friends were still posting on Facebook and Instagram about their March experiences, but now another kind of post was showing up—one from friends who had felt excluded and/or resentful of the March. There were also posts from Trump supporters who were insisting that we needed to give Trump a chance. And one chilling post that cited attacks on Barron Trump. Oh dear, I thought “NO!”—a ten-year-old child is off limits. I commented on a few of the posts and found myself immersed in revealing and sometimes uncomfortable conversations with people who saw things quite differently than me. I’m happy to say the threads remained civil, and I actually learned something.

Still, I was overloaded. I felt like I needed to find ways to engage more fruitfully in conversations with the opposition and I was swimming in suggestions about what to do to maintain the momentum following the March. I was starting to feel afraid. I went to bed as a bracing winter storm hit the region. I was sick, my cats were agitated, wind and rain were lashing the house, and I was alone, thinking that it was up to me to solve problems for which I couldn’t see solutions.

A couple hours after I got up in the morning, the storm broke, and a neighbor and I trekked cross country to check out the flow of Bear Creek and the height of the New Melones Reservoir. My lungs welcomed the fresh air as much as my spirit. My neighbor and I made a date for late afternoon to write postcards to our elected officials about our legislative priorities. When I got home, I checked Facebook and read a post from a wise teacher I had met in graduate school. He admitted he felt “pulled out too far” and would be retreating for a while.

Yep, that described my feeling pretty well—pulled out too far. I decided to retreat too, but first I would blog about my March experience and write my postcards. We made postcards by cutting up greeting cards with beautiful or provocative images. Choosing the right image for each official felt almost as important as clarifying my priorities and shaping them into something that would fit on the cards. It was a feel-good exercise.

So now excuse me, please. I’m heading for a media fast to regroup and find my center again. See you in a while . . .