Mary Novaria

 Hi, friends. I hope you'll enjoy and share this essay published earlier this week at Feminine Collective.   Be well, Mary Photo: ©Julie Anderson, excerpted from Jackson Pollock’s painting  “Slice” Unless we are divinely called to monastic life, most of us don’t thrive in isolation. Even we introverts have our limits. Besides, it’s one thing to  choose  seclusion and determine for ourselves when we want to hole up alone and for how long. It’s quite another to have confinement thrust upon us and to have it go on… and on… and on… It was a Saturday in March when my husband and I sat in a local brew pub and vaguely wondered if it was safe to dine inside. We’d just hiked a trail where the scent of hand sanitizer was palpable. The next day, Colorado’s Governor decreed that anyone who’d recently been in Summit County should quarantine at home for two weeks. A few days before, we’d been to Breckenridge with family visitors. Two weeks? No problem. It’ll be like a ca...

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Published 6/1/2020 Working puzzles used to be something reserved for family beach vacations. On multigenerational trips to South Carolina or Oregon, there has always been a table in a corner with a puzzle in progress. Like two of my sisters in law, I can barely tear myself away while others, like my husband, can’t be bothered.  I’m on my third quarantine picture puzzle, which should be a cinch since it’s only 500 pieces. The nostalgia of a vacation pastime has given way to a daily obsession with both the jigsaw and word variety during coronavirus quarantine. The popular Wordscapes has joined the Scrabble app and Words with Friends on my iPhone, and I also work a daily crossword puzzle. Continue reading here.

I love to see my friends’ dog posts and pictures on Facebook and Instagram, especially now because the pups are so glad to have their people home all the time. I crack up at memes of happy dogs and pissed off cats, and I’m tickled when pets walk through the frame during Zoom interviews on the news. I commented to a friend the other day how blessed she is to have her two beautiful retrievers during this season of staying at home and how it sucks to be dogless. “Write about it?” she suggested, because she is wise and knows that writing is healing. Anne Lamott once said that when we are sick, the dogs are the nurses. She also wrote, “Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.” I could never say it any better than that, and my words could never do my girl justice, but here is my story. I miss our Bella, a spunky, yellow lab mix who was game for anything as long as she was with us. No matter how many pets you ...