Social media posts this year seemed to report many of us being in a funk, bogged down by a sense of general malaise, and I have to confess that I have found myself more “doless” (to use my mother's wonderful Appalachian term) than usual. Whether this is pandemic hangover, trying to reenter a world in which figuring out what is “normal” or safe is tiring, political exhaustion, or something else is difficult for me to say. Certainly, I have not been writing much this year.
Like most years, 2022 has been a mix, and as seems inevitable, there have been losses: early in the year, a dear former student and a colleague died unexpectedly, one of heart failure and one of Covid. In the spring, a friend lost her husband and her mother within a month. Later in the year, three church friends died, one hit by a car crossing the highway one Saturday evening. A dear friend on the next block went into an emotional collapse when the dog she knows will be her last died, and our two eldest felines have begun what are likely their final declines. All the aforementioned non-humans were or are elderly, but there is something especially poignant about watching the slow fade of an animal whose adolescence one remembers.
My gardening groove never quite returned after the trauma of the gas line replacement and the loss of a foot of topsoil. Some of the poor plants dug up in the rescue attempt were being put back in the ground in late November, and a few unfortunates are still in pots and may or may not survive the winter. The gardener's lack of enthusiasm was compounded by an incorrect move while loading a large shrub and the discovery of previously undiagnosed spinal problems, fortunately nothing particularly serious but definitely annoying and limiting. Aren't we supposed to be able to keep Doing the Things as long as we want?
Looking at 2022 as a whole, though, many good things happened. During the Yucatan winter (which I will miss this year due to the failing felines), more Ohio friends got to experience that much-loved place.
One configuration of “us” rescued a puppy before it could become crocodile food,
Another week, a group of Wild Women celebrated a friend's 80th birthday with a trip to Rio Lagartos. On our boat trip to various parts of that bioreserve, our nature guide's friend did a live broadcast for his radio show. Back in Ohio, a Minnesota friend visited during the May warbler migration, so of course a visit to Magee Marsh was required.
The rest of the year, which featured no getaways of more than two nights, brought get-togethers with extended family and short explorations of eastern Ohio treasures like Cuyahoga Valley National Park, no slouch in the natural beauty department.
Even closer to home, 2022 was a good year for Marietta projects. Through the work of our city administration and engaged (not to say stubborn) citizens, there has been progress toward improved pedestrian safety and increased public transportation. Our water and wastewater treatment systems will be getting much-needed overhaul. The pollinator habitat has expanded, its projects attracting a variety of volunteers (not to mention pollinators). It is likely that there will be accessibility improvements in the fairly near future. The Harmar Bridge butterfly garden is doing well in its first year, and the small butterfly garden in a tiny downtown park had a very good year.
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A landscape steward who recently moved back to our area in retirement has organized crews to remove invasive plants and collect, sort, and plant native seeds in nearby protected wild areas. Good things are in the offing.
And from any sort of historical perspective, most of us alive in the US today are living easier and longer lives than most of our homo sapiens ancestors. Some details mixed with personal reflection:
Yes, Covid has caused a recent drop in average life expectancy, but most of us will live into our seventies or beyond, not the 47.3-year average at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1900, of 100,000 children born, 2000 would die before their fifth birthday. Today, that number is fewer than 25.
2022 was the year that found me older than my first husband lived to be (which a friend had warned me is a rather unsettling milepost) and, when I stopped to think about it, older than most of the writers I taught in my career. Leaving out the whole crew of those who died unarguably young (Marlowe, Shelley, Keats, at least two of the Brontës), writers often did not survive to what we think of as old age: Chaucer died at sixty, Shakespeare in his fifties, all the lady lyricists who were the favorite poets of my adolescent years by their mid-fifties, Thoreau at forty-four, and Austen at forty-one. They got a lot done in not a lot of time, but I suspect most would have welcomed more time
99.5% of us have indoor plumbing. As a child born in rural Scioto County, Ohio, in the 1950s, I was in the third grade before we lived in a home with a flush toilet. (And I do NOT miss the good old days of outhouses.)
My family got our first telephone in 1966. It was a party line. When I was in college in the Seventies, the dorm had one phone for the 24 girls on our floor. Being in constant contact with anyone was impossible, and video chat was something out of science fiction. When someone moved away, staying in touch took real effort. Today, we can talk to anyone, nearly anywhere, pretty much whenever we want.
Most of the world was rightly horrified by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the likely war crimes that have been committed. For most of the last five thousand or so years, war and invasion were more common than not. There was a reason for all those European castles, and it wasn't to serve as backdrop for Disney films.
So my resolution for 2023 is to work on my sense of perspective. If these are not the best of times, they are probably also not the worst.
