Coronavirus Days--Week 25

I've been trying to get in as much hammock time as possible lately, even when the temperatures soar high like they've done the past few days in Denver, because I know that these days are limited. It's supposed to snow and get cold here in less than 48 hours. It's September and come mid-November, the days will grow dark and feel too cold for me to linger in a hammock in the yard. I keep count, much like I've done with these weekly chronicles.

Fires still burn somewhere miles away yet that smoke wafts this way, dropped ashes in Denver from the Cameron Peak Fire. Sirens still pulse more frequently in the city, perhaps pandemic related, perhaps my ears are just more attuned to everything around me. I continue to notice changes. 

Just like most weeks, I need a change, lately weekly. It's not just creating something new in the kitchen, such as this Jewish New Yorker's first memorable salsa, all but an onion sourced from our garden and a friend's. Or drinking a new craft brew at a neighborhood brewery with one of my closest friends, masked, safely distanced at a picnic table. This week, Nan and I adventured again in Denver, but this time following dreams.

A local poet, Mathias Svalina, the dream delivery guy and poet extraordinaire, delivered up his dreams via his exhibit Dreaming Denver. On Saturday, we set out to explore four of the stops in areas south and west of Denver. Besides listening to the dreams and then finding inspiration and jotting story ideas down in a journal, we also had many moments of I had no idea that was here. The unknown. The discovery. Sometimes, it's a cool bike sculpture on a building in a neighborhood called Westwood, a neighborhood that has some restaurants that are on our list to check out. 

Other times it's a mountain bike park in a place where I went (and how I wish this was go) to concerts, somewhere less than ten minutes from our house. We sat and watched young boys roll up and down the hills, men in their twenties and thirties practicing their mountain biking techniques. We gazed into something we don't normally see. There is a quiet type of rest in those moments that are unfamiliar. A respite in days when the number of US cases has long passed 6 million, a figure so far removed from the 520 cases that marked my count at the beginning of March.