Today is my first in-person studio recital since before the pandemic! I booked a pavilion at Tower Grover Park, and I am looking forward to having 22 kids and their families come and play and watch. Hopefully it goes well enough…naturally I’m a bit nervous about the details, and perhaps more so what with worrying about COVID and how it will all work out. The weather looks good: hot, but no rain. I think it’ll be a lot of fun for the students. If it goes well I will likely make this an annual event.

Life has been gradually changing to more “normal.” Last year for my birthday Louie’s mom gave a me a gift card to my choice of two restaurants, The Crossing or Acero. I didn’t want to use it for takeout, so we decided to go Friday night. (It was busy: I made the reservations over a week in advance because the weekend I first wanted was booked up). I highly recommend going to The Crossing for a special occasion dinner. The food and the service was fantastic. It was kind of odd being in a restaurant again, and just sitting and ordering food and eating and such, but it was wonderful. I’m so grateful to all the scientists who developed the COVID vaccine, and grateful to have gotten my vaccine and all of that. It was worth it for that buttery four course dinner. I had goat cheese and beet salad, tagliotelle with trumpet mushrooms, halibut, and fried strawberry pie. They also brought out a baked blue cheese spread with little toasted breads, and regular bread service which was so buttery it resembled a croissant.

Yesterday I taught and played a wedding. I don’t think I have any more weddings on the books right now, believe it or not. I don’t mind though I’m sure a few will pop up over the summer. I’ve been lucky enough to have more than enough teaching to keep me busy, and I’ve got a garden to tend to and other things to do on the weekends.

This was the peas a week ago or so. And now the lettuce on the ground is ready to harvest, in fact we ate a small salad of it yesterday, and the peas are another 6 inches taller and starting to flower.

You can see it is a constant battle in my yard against the weeds. I didn’t know we should be cutting back the raspberry bushes either (I am such a novice gardener!) so they are encroaching: after this summer we’ll prune them way back. And the grass is mostly clover and violets and they keep encroaching. We’ve had so much rain, and this picture was right after days of it, so lush and green! When I was younger I didn’t know cities were so lush and green.

I was really excited about the flowering until I realized that might mean the peas are ready while we are on vacation. We are going to Arkansas for a week right after school is done, and I’m worried we’ll miss the ideal time for peas. Oh well, it can’t be helped, I’m not changing the trip for the peas. Hopefully we won’t miss them all.

Random: awhile back my mom got a bunch of old slides put into digital forms and sorted them into albums. There was an album called “Hannah’s Childhood” and I decided to have it made into a photo book. This is a delightful collection of old photos of me and my family.

The last week of school is coming up, and I’m ready. It’s been a tough year for everybody, kids, parents, teachers, other people, and I think it’ll be a good summer. It often feels like the pandemic is over here. It’s not, but we are so fortunate in this country to have such excellent vaccines widely available! (The pandemic will be over when the performing arts have opened back up normally, and not until then.)

(I didn’t know what it meant at first to have a vaccine be 95 percent effective: at first glance it might seem that means you have a 5 percent chance of catching COVID. But that’s not what it means. Your chance of getting COVID is 95 percent lower with the vaccine, and may be as low at .04 percent chance of getting it.)

(I should probably stop with the parentheses.)

We have been having a lot of rain, though I noticed my flowers in the front of the house still looked like they needed more. Maybe they actually needed more sun, I don’t know, they got all droopy and sad looking, so I watered them and moved them to the back where there is full sun. In the front the roof might have been keeping them from getting enough water from the rain, and also from the sun.

In any case, it’s been a busy two weeks, but things are settling down. I had some extra stuff for Holy Week (as the Catholics call it), a rehearsal one evening, and then some services on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. I also got/had to attend one of my student’s senior recitals, which was wonderful, but was another thing to do. This week has been better but I was still exhausted from the previous week, so I’m really looking forward to relaxing and working around the house/garden today and tomorrow. I’ve gotten a bit obsessed with the garden. I got a few new tools, some great gloves, and all kinds of flower pots. I’ve already planted various flowers, trying to get some rhubarb going in one place for the future, and made a super crude pole area for some peas to climb up. Those I planted about a month ago and they are doing well (last I checked.) Today or tomorrow I need to do some weeding and keep working on the rest of the garden soil to get it ready for planting in early May. I also want to fill some new tiny pots I got and plant some flower seeds in them and see how that all goes.

I’ve been really excited about flowers this spring. It is likely because this spring feels so much more hopeful, what with vaccinations and perhaps returning to life, and also because I am getting older, and growing things is more appealing because time goes by faster, and also because I think I feel more settled into this house and have a better sense of ownership over it and the outside. And frankly, Louie doesn’t care if I plant things or weed, and he is happy if I make things better because he barely has the time for anything what with teaching all of his hybrid courses and working on his doctorate.

I’ve been working on some policy changes for my private studio going forward and trying to figure out what I want things to look like for the next few years, at least. It’s been fun, but it is phenomenal how much time I can spend revising a document to send to my students, and working with other stuff like that. I hope to add a few more students in the next month, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to make it all work. I also have been trying to streamline the “onboarding” process and have some ready to go materials to send people. It doesn’t really matter, because only about half of them read it anyway, and I know that I can be wordy, so another thing I’m doing with my new policy document is to make a quick “here’s the important stuff” list, followed with the real details.

I’m planning to start teaching again in person in about two weeks, and I realized I wanted another music stand. I used to give my students the music stand and not use one myself and I decided not to do that anymore, that I want a stand for my music and things. So of course I didn’t want to buy a black stand, because I am a colorful person, and it didn’t cost much more to buy a green stand! It matched my carpet more on the computer screen but I still love it. I can’t believe I’ll be having kids back in the house soon!

For anybody wondered: by then my household will be totally vaccinated, as well as quite a few of the parents of my students, as well as most of my adult students. I will ask everybody to wear masks nonetheless and we will run an air filter and have the windows open as long as possible. I will only be teaching about 1/2 of my students in person at this time, and I’ll limit each lesson to the student plus one parent or sibling in the house at once. They will be asked to have an online lesson if they have been exposed to anybody with COVID or have any potential symptoms/illness. Lastly, I will have each student wait outside if I am teaching an in-person student before their lesson so there is only one extra party in the house at any time. I think these precautions are MORE than the schools are doing yet also similar than what the schools are doing. We’ll also wash hands frequently and such, but I think if we are wearing masks it really covers most of the issues, especially with me being vaccinated.

Things I’m not doing: taking extra time between lessons. Some guidelines say to do that, but I don’t have the time. There will be many times I have online lessons in between in person lessons, but I’m not setting it up in any specific way. Everybody coming back has signed an agreement that they know COVID is contagious, that there is an inherent risk of some kind, and that they will follow all protocols and stay home if exposed or sick, and I think it’ll work out. Our vaccinated numbers here are only getting higher and higher.

I was thinking about how as a household with two adults, we can really say our household is protected against COVID after we are vaccinated, and those with kids have to wait longer. I was also thinking about the sort of fights between those with and those without kids, and how both sides always feel they are getting the brunt of the pain. As a childfree person, it is only in the past few years that people have stopped asked me when am I having kids, or why don’t I have kids, or telling me that I will understand (fill in the blank, ranging from true unconditional love to how to teach the violin properly) once I have kids. I have been insulted for not having children or told I’ll regret it, experienced overly personal questions about why I wouldn’t be having kids, and so on. At this point in my life, it doesn’t really bother me. There were times earlier in my life where I know I said similar things to people, said that not having kids was selfish, or asked overly personal questions about why people didn’t have kids, because I didn’t know any better either. We grow up surrounded by people with kids and you don’t realize there are people without kids, really, until you get older. At least I think for most people!

I think the pandemic was hard (IS hard) on everybody, and those with kids may think it is harder on them, and it may well be, but I know that the past year and months has been incredibly difficult for this household, and we are ready to be done with it. I know many have suffered more, and that many have had much more loss. I think we will have a collective grieving period, trying to recover, and I imagine it will be more difficult trying to grieve and recover from something that many never saw as a big deal, even as people died around them.

So those are my Saturday morning thoughts…mortality, grief, not having kids and disappointing my mother, and rain. The rain is lovely, and I hope it means my pea plants will grow tall.

The other day I needed to go to the DMV because I need a real ID and my license is expiring soon. Errands are tough these days, right? I gathered all my documents and more (piece of advice for the DMV, always bring 2 to 3 more documents than you think because they won’t like a few of them and then you can try again). This errand took about 45 minutes, and then I realized I had some time and could check off some more errands. I haven’t done a good errand running morning since BEFORE, because of things being closed, or too crowded, or worries about getting sick, or all of those things.  So I went to get passport photos at a place, but it wasn’t open yet (too early in the morning) and then I drove around the block and saw that I could quickly get an oil change…it was a very productive morning and the only thing I have left to do with all of that now is mail in my passport, which means I should go to the Post Office to send it priority.

It’s funny how NORMAL I felt driving around doing things. It made me feel alive and hopeful that someday soon we can truly be back to normal, where if you need something at a shop you just head out and get it, or you make a list of 3-5 errands to run in a morning and get started, without worrying, do they have proper distancing procedures, will they even be open, will millions of people already be there?

There is hope! And light at the end of the tunnel, and all of the analogies one can make.

I had been putting off some other plans as well, waiting to decide what to do for my studio’s May Recital. And then it hit me: rent a pavilion at Tower Grove Park. I thought, oh they might already all be booked, what a great place to hang out in these times. But I was able to get one for the day I wanted (hopefully a day that will work for students) and I think it’ll be really fun. We’ll do an outdoor recital, we’ll hope for good enough weather, and the students will get to have interaction with the other students. I’ll figure out the mask rules later, and whether we can do a reception, and other details, but it’s long enough away that for now I just sent out a “Save the date” and I hope that most families will feel comfortable attending. I think many of the parents will be vaccinated by then so it should be a relatively safe, and in my opinion, very “worth it” activity.

So it’s been a productive week for me, and it feels good. It might be the typical spring feeling, of the weather warming up and wanting to come out of hibernation, but it might also be the feeling of hope and feeling like yes, we are going to make it, we just have to stick it out for another month or two and then we can live our lives again.

I’ve figured out my plans for how to do this whole career thing too, to keep teaching a bunch but not take every gig. I will take some though, but just more thoughtfully. It’s tempting to want to fill every blank space on the calendar, but I’ve definitely learned that blank space is good.

There you have it. Happy Friday to you all, can you believe it is another Friday already?