The Stolen Lake, the fourth book in the Wolves Chronicles, was a decent read, fully as compelling as the first three books in the series. The book mixes Arthurian lore with South American settings and folklore in an alternate history where the British/Romans colonized a portion of South American as they escaped the Saxon invasion in the sixth century B.C. The story itself, however, takes place in the wilds of New Cumbria and Hy Brazil during the reign of James III, King of England, as the HMS Thrush and its crew are summoned to the aid of Queen Ginevra of New Cumbria, a longtime ally of Britain.

Dido Twite is again the heroine of the story; in fact, maybe these should be called the Dido Chronicles since there’s more Dido than wolves in the stories that follow after The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Dido’s straightforward, somewhat ignorant, but always brave and practical, character shines in these books, and I think children who are trying to make sense of a mystifying grown-up world will identify with Dido. Actually, I’m still trying to make sense of the world, and I identify with Dido.

These stories involve lots of kidnapping, spying, adventure, and derring-do. I think Dido is kidnapped and held prisoner in this book no less than three, maybe four, times in the course of 291 pages. And there are many other dangers: giant birds that carry off children, fish that eat human flesh, active volcanoes, glaciers and landslides, not to mention your everyday witches, soothsayers, and cruel power-hungry courtiers and royals. It’s suspenseful and even a bit breathtaking, but I don’t think any child will be too much traumatized by the adventures of Dido Twite and company. And everything pretty much comes out all right in the end.

Joan Aiken succeeds again in writing a crazy, disbelief-suspending, fantastical tale that will take readers to a place that never was and convince them that it really, truly could have been. I’m already looking forward to the fifth book in the series, The Cuckoo Tree.

• A House for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle.
• Is This a House for Hermit Crab? by Megan McDonald, illustrated by S.D. Schindler
• Animals That Build Their Homes by Robert McClung
• Sea Creatures Do Amazing Things by Arthur Myers

Eric Carle’s A House for Hermit Crab is a perfect introduction to sea creatures, in particular to hermit crabs and their propensity to inhabit the shells of other creatures to protect themselves. In the story, Hermit Crab goes through an entire year, each month looking for a bigger and more protective shell to live in.

Hermit crabs live on the ocean floor. Their skin is hard, except for the abdomen, which is soft. To protect this ‘soft spot’ the hermit crab borrows a shell and makes this its ‘house.’ Then only its face, feet and claws stick out from the shell. That way it can see, walk and catch its food. When a hermit crab is threatened, it withdraws into its shell until the danger has passed.

A House for Hermit Crab, Introduction

The genius of this picture book, aside from the illustrations which are luminous and colorful, like the ocean itself, is that instead of reciting dry facts about the hermit crab and and other sea creatures and their habits and habitats, Carle uses a story to create what is sometimes called a “living book.” Hermit Crab is personified. He thinks and talks and engages in negotiation with the sea anemones, starfish, corals, snails, sea urchins, and lanternfish that he meets, asking them them for the use or at least partial use of their shells or for directions to a new and more commodious home when he outgrows the current one.

This story about a particular hermit crab and his travels sticks in the mind much more readily than a book would that simply stated the facts. Hermit Crab becomes a character with whom we can identify and from whom we can learn. Some see a danger in this personification of animals as we teach children to impute to non-human creatures the desires and needs and thought processes that are peculiar to humans. However, this sort of story that engages the imagination and feelings of a child is just the right way to introduce children to the world that God has given to human beings to care for and to steward. We first come to love and feel for flowers, birds, bears, even hermit crabs, and then we can later learn more about how they should be cared for and how they actually differ from humans.

Megan McDonald’s Is This a House for Hermit Crab? is a more simple book than the Eric Carle title. In McDonald’s story Hermit Crab tries out several possible homes: a rock, a rusty tin can, a piece of driftwood, a plastic pail, a fishing net. Then, danger approaches in the guise of a pricklepine fish, and Hermit Crab finds just the right home and hiding place, just in time. S.D. Schlindler’s illustrations are more muted and pastel than Carle’s, but they, too, are infused with the colors of the seashore and its creatures. McDonald’s Hermit Crab doesn’t engage in any of the human activities of thinking and communicating that Carle’s does, so her story is a good contrast and accompaniment to the story in A House for Hermit Crab and a comparison of the two stories should create questions and and answers and a sense of wonder in relation to these fantastical creatures of the sea.

The other two titles listed above are more general books that show a variety of creatures, including crabs, and tell about their habitats and ways of building and finding homes in a more general, factual way. These books and others concerning marine biology and animal homes would be good follow-up titles for a child (or an adult) whose interest in these creatures has been piqued by Carle and McDonald and their stories. Living books lead to connections which lead to more books and to films and to real life experiences and to who knows where!

One of the many books listed in my curriculum book, Picture Book Preschool, A House Is a House for Me rhymes itself through all of the houses and containers and enclosures you could imagine with a lilting meter that maintains its rhythm throughout its 48 pages. Actually, this maintenance of meter and rhyme is no small accomplishment considering the many children’s books I’ve read that start out well but fail to maintain a readable rhythm, making them difficult to read aloud to oneself or to children.

A hill is a house for an ant, an ant.
A hive is a house for a bee.
A hole is a house for a mole or a mouse
And a house is a house for me!

A web is a house for a spider.
A bird builds its nest in a tree.
There is nothing so snug as a bug in a rug
And a house is a house for me!

The poem, in its clever and inventive take on houses, is the heart of this picture book, but the illustrations by illustrator Betty Fraser add a second dimension of joy and colorful imagination to this picture book. The book could certainly spark a Five-in-a-Row type unit study on houses and homes as well as a more advanced study of animal habitats or even of boxes and house construction and the manufacture of homes and containers.

And once you get started in thinking this way,
It seems that whatever you see
Is either a house or it lives in a house,
And a house is a house for me!

A House Is a House For Me was the winner of a National Book Award in 1983 for the paperback edition of the book, and author Mary Ann Hoberman, Children’s Poet Laureate (2008-2011), has written many other well known and beloved picture books, including Seven Silly Eaters, All Kinds of Families, and Not Enough Beds for the Babies. Her 1978 book The Llama Who Had No Pajama is a collection of Ms. Hoberman’s poetry, also illustrated by Betty Fraser.

Picture Book Preschool Book of the Week: A House Is a House For Me by Mary Ann Hoberman

Picture Book Preschool is a preschool/kindergarten curriculum which consists of a list of picture books to read aloud for each week of the year and a character trait, a memory verse, and activities, all tied to the theme for the week. You can purchase an updated, downloadable version (pdf file) of Picture Book Preschool by Sherry Early at Biblioguides.

Homeschooling moms, that is. Although anyone can enjoy these lovely books, both fiction and nonfiction, I picked them out especially to encourage and enlighten homeschooling moms who might want a reading jumpstart in the summer to re-inspire them to the work and the joy of teaching and guiding young minds and hearts.

Fiction:
Quaker Summer by Lisa Samson. Heather Curridge is having what some would call a “mid-life crisis”, but she just feels as if her life is empty and at the same time, full of the wrong things. When Heather meets two elderly Quaker sisters and imbibes of their wisdom, she begins to see where she has taken a wrong turn in life and perhaps what she can do about it.

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge. Londoner Mary Lindsay inherits a house from an elderly cousin whom she met only once when Mary was just a child. Nevertheless, she feels a deep connection to the house and to her deceased cousin, and she very uncharacteristically and impulsively decides to quit her job and go live in the house in a rural village in the north of England. There Mary learns the meaning of love and sacrifice, and she begins to pass on that heritage to another generation of children. Any of Elizabeth Goudge’s novels would make good summer reading material, but this one seems especially appropriate for a long summer afternoon of slow reading. In a hammock.

A Garden to Keep by Jamie Langston Turner. Elizabeth Landis, the wife and the narrator in this book, is about fifty years old and dealing with a severe case of empty nest syndrome. Her son, Travis, has gone away to college for his freshman year, and her husband Ken is absent a lot, too, travelling for work or playing golf or just absent in spirit while bodily present. Elizabeth has a Christian conversion experience at the beginning of the book, probably the least developed and believable part of the story, and then she finds out that her new faith and her marriage are to be tested to the limit.

The Glorious Cause by Jeff Shaara. I read this “novel of the American Revolution” last year, and I must say I found it to be fascinating. Mr. Shaara’s father wrote the Pulitzer prize-winning Civil War novel, The Killer Angels, the basis for the movie Gettysburg (excellent summer reading and watching), and after father Michael Shaara’s death, Jeff Shaara continued to write novels about America’s wars, bringing the historical characters who lived through and fought those wars to brilliant life. In The Glorious Cause it is George Washington who takes center stage, as well as British General Cornwallis, American General Nathanael Greene and a host of lesser characters who nevertheless fill out the story and never become card caricatures. Books like this one are such an aid to imagining and understanding America’s history and the legacy of our heroes.

Nonfiction:
Mere Motherhood: Morning Times, Nursery Rhymes, & My Journey Towards Sanctification by Cindy Rollins. I laughed. I cried. I identified. Cindy Rollins, mother of nine homeschooled children, mostly boys, has written an honest, but also encouraging book about what it was really like to homeschool a large family in the 1980’s and 1990’s homeschooling culture. Cindy (I feel as if we’re first-name-friends although we’ve never met in person) is honest about the things she’s learned along the way, but never jaded or dismissive of her younger self or of homeschooling families who work every day, although imperfectly, to get it right and teach their children to know the Lord.

Different: The Story of an Outside-the-Box Kid and the Mom Who Loved Him by Sally and Nathan Clarkson. Nathan Clarkson started out different as a baby, not sleeping, screaming for no apparent reason, fussy, difficult. And as he grew, the differences grew, too. He was eventually diagnosed with a whole alphabet soup of differences: ADHD, OCD, ODD, plus some learning differences, personality quirks, and a strong will. Put it all together, and you’ve got an array of problems and diagnoses, but Sally Clarkson, Nathan’s mother, had to learn to appreciate the person inside Nathan, help him deal with the issues that his differences caused, and also show him that God made Nathan Clarkson for a purpose, to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, even with his many differences. Told in the alternating voices of mother and son.

The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer. One of my all-time favorite classic books about seeing your role as a homemaker in a new light.

I can start with today’s post by issuing a series of disclaimers: I am neither an expert nor a prophet. I have no special interest in mask-wearing or mask-avoidance. I am neither Republican nor Democrat, since I feel that both parties have become infected with blind partisanship and a thirst for power to the detriment of the public interest and of public service.

However, I have read and prayed and thought about this pandemic and our response to it quite a bit. I’ve been home with little else to do for a couple of months now (just like the rest of you). And I’ve come to some conclusions, which may or may not change as I receive new information.

If you are under the age of 65 (an arbitrary line, but it has to be drawn somewhere), your chances of dying of Covid-19 are small. If you are young and also healthy, your chances of dying or even getting very sick are minuscule. So, why are we, as low risk people, social distancing and wearing masks and refusing to touch one another and staying away from group situations? (I include myself because I am 62 years old, on the margins of the safer group.)

We are taking all of these precautions, precautions that are causing us to lose our jobs, our communities, and our freedoms, because we want to protect the “other half”, those who are elderly or immune-compromised or otherwise at risk for serious consequences from contracting this virus. This goal of caring for and protecting others is good. However, if we want to care for the vulnerable among us, some of us must leave our houses. Someone must grow and process the food, transport necessary goods to stores and homes, maintain the utilities and communications systems, govern the country, protect us from criminals, provide the healthcare we need, etc. All of these people and more already must leave their homes and mix with others to some extent just so that we can live and eat and enjoy some basic comforts.

So, what about the rest of us? What about those of us who are able to work from home or who are able to survive for a few months by draining our savings or by living frugally on unemployment benefits? When those enhanced unemployment benefits run out (in July) and the savings are gone, another set of people will be in need of income just to provide for their own basic necessities.

I can see no possible end to this state of coronavirus stasis other than a return to normalcy for the great majority of the population—those healthy people under a certain age who are at very low risk for dying or even becoming very ill from Covid-19. I believe we should open the restaurants and the shops and the beaches and the parks and the sports arenas and the churches now. I believe that we should suggest masks for those who want to wear them, as a possible deterrent to the spread of the virus. I believe that social distancing should be done on a limited basis, as much as is humanly possible. But basically, the healthy, younger population can go back to life as it was meant to be lived.

Then, there are the rest of us. And now I am including myself in the elderly or vulnerable population. We are responsible for our own health. Young, healthy people are not responsible for protecting me from Covid-19. If I do not want to risk getting the virus, then I am the one who will need to remain in quarantine. Our nursing homes and senior living centers will need to adopt stringent protocols to protect the elderly and the sick from the virus. Young people with health conditions that pre-dispose them to serious illness and death from the virus will need to stay home, have necessities delivered, and maintain social distance. Young, healthy people can help by delivering meals and other needed items to those who are less fortunate. and they can help by going back to work and staying away from old people and immunocompromised people. They can help by continuing to wash their hands before entering a room with an older or immunocompromised person or by wearing a mask when around vulnerable people.

Old people can help themselves by staying home.

I know there are problems with this approach to fighting and controlling the pandemic. I have young people living in my house, and if I were older or if I were dealing with an at-risk health condition, I would be concerned about their going back out into the public arena and then bringing home a viral infection that might end my life. Some younger people may have to sacrifice, not by staying home, but by leaving home and communicating with their elderly family members from a safe distance.

There are more and bigger problems with having us all shelter in place, waiting for . . . what?

And if some of us can go back to work and to school, go back to living in community, go back to life, shouldn’t we be all in favor of that?

Nightbirds is the third book in Ms. Aiken’s Wolves Chronicles series. Many readers are familiar with the first book in the series, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but not so many are aware of the eleven sequels to that well-loved story.

• The Wolves of Willoughby Chase 
• Black Hearts in Battersea  (1964)
• Nightbirds on Nantucket  (1966)
• The Stolen Lake (1981)
• Limbo Lodge (U.S. title: Dangerous Games) (1999)
• The Cuckoo Tree  (1971)
• Dido and Pa (1986)
• Is (U.S. title: Is Underground) (1992)
• Cold Shoulder Road (1995)
• Midwinter Nightingale (2003)
• The Witch of Clatteringshaws (2005)
• The Whispering Mountain (1968) a prequel to the series.

I’ve now read the first three books in the series, and I also own Dido and Pa and Is Underground. So, I’ll either look for reasonably priced copies of The Stolen Lake and Limbo Lodge and The Cuckoo Tree, or I’ll just skip over those and read the ones I have.

Anyway, back to Nightbirds on Nantucket. It takes place, not in an alternate history England, but rather on a Yankee whaling ship and on the island of Nantucket. Dido Twite is back, and in addition we have a pink whale, a frightened girl named Dutiful Penitence, and a very big gun. The Hanoverians, who want to depose King James III in favor of George of Hanover, are still the villains of the story, but they are now operating out the island of Nantucket. And only the doughty Dido can stop them.

This was a great story, just as good as the first two books in the series. Dido Twite is just as brash and fierce as ever, and the rest of the cast of characters are quite as eccentric and fantastic as Simon the Goose Boy and Miss Slighcarp in the first books.

I’ve been reading four different nonfiction books all somewhat related in terms of time period at any rate. Three of them are Messner biographies:

• Disraeli by Manuel Komroff
• The Real Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle by Mary Hoehling
• Iron Chancellor: Otto van Bismarck by Alfred Apsler

The third book is one I’ve been reading off and on since January: Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War. This last book is fascinating, but rather dense, almost 1000 pages long. This book moves past the lives of Disraeli and Bismarck all the way into the early twentieth century, but it spends a great deal of time on the events and characters of the late nineteenth century

I’ve learned a few things:

• Disraeli was an interesting man, a Jewish convert to Christianity. He faced a lot of anti-semitic prejudice, but managed to succeed in politics in spite of the bigotry. Queen Victoria loved him, and so did a lot of the British populace. The press called him “Dizzy.” He was a conservative reformer, which seems to be a contradiction in terms, but isn’t. He was a compassionate conservative before the term was invented.
• Bismarck, on the other hand, was a piece of work. He comes across both in the biography by Apsler and in Dreadnought as a power hungry genius who managed young William I, Emperor of Germany, with adroit flattery and finesse, until he didn’t. And William fired him, or removed him from office.
• William I, Queen Victoria’s grandson, was also a mess, as far as I can judge. He seems to have had a difficult childhood, partly due to his mother’s expectations and the burdens of being the crown prince, and he grew up up to be a proud, impulsive, self-centered, and sometimes irrational emperor with a lot of power. That’s a dangerous combination. I hate to say it, but William’s personality and his decisions and statements reminded me of a certain president whose name begins with T. William I considered himself to be a stable genius who knew all that was important to know about anything worth knowing.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle comes into the story of those times as a civilian, not a prince or a politician, but still a man who had political opinions and acted upon them. Doyle volunteered as a doctor during the Boer War and believed in the British cause during that war. As far as I could tell, the British were out of place, domineering, and downright cruel in that war and shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But Doyle couldn’t see that from his perspective, and he actually wrote a defense of the British actions in the Boer War that was published all over Europe and was quite influential in swinging public opinion to favor the British over their opponents, the Dutch-heritage Boers.

I learned a lot of other tidbits. Dizzy was a sharp and unconventional dresser. Doyle grew up poor and never managed to make a good living as a doctor. He made his fortune from his Sherlock Holmes stories. Bismarck (and his successors) stayed in power partly by threatening to resign and leave poor William with someone worse or less amenable. It seems a strange way to retain power, but because of the way the government was set up, it worked most of the time.

I recommend all four books, but Dreadnought is a slog. It’s worth it, if you’re interested in the history of Europe leading up to World War I. However, it takes some time and concentration to get through the book. Maybe check out one of the biographies first. Or try a biography of Queen Victoria or of other people from the time period.

I tried to find some articles today online on how the education system and the imparting of knowledge and wisdom to children and young adults might change for the better as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. I found lots of articles like this one extolling the virtues of technology and computer-delivery of education. Many subjects and skills do lend themselves well to online video education as venues such as Khan Academy and BrainPop and MIT Open Courseware have been demonstrating for quite a while. While I’m glad we have the resource of online classes and online educational plans and ebooks, I’m also hearing a lot of complaints from parents about the online lessons that are being provided and sometimes required by public and private schools. The parents and older students say these online classes are no substitute for in-person classes with a teacher. Some students and some subjects just aren’t ready or aren’t suited for computer-based classes. So, I say digital is not the complete solution to education in a corona world.

For example, my daughter teaches French at the university level. Without the ability to meet with her students in person both in class and during office hours, she feels she is unable to give them the individualized learning experience that she could give before the pandemic shutdown. Some of these students have little or no access to technology–computers, internet, recording and playback equipment, etc.–and even those who do have that access are struggling to learn a language without face-to-face contact with teacher and classmates. In person discussions are important in learning about literature and history and philosophy. Individual attention is vital to teaching young children to read and write and make music and art.

In the meantime, I read other educational and disease experts who say we will not be able to go back to “school as normal”, not in the fall and maybe not for a long time, if ever. They’re talking about classrooms with only ten or fifteen students (an improvement over class sizes of 30-40) and desks spaced six feet apart. They write of schools where the students stay in cohorts of 10 in one classroom all day, and the teachers move around to the different classrooms. Also, there are perhaps to be no visits to the playground, or the library, or the cafeteria (lunches served in the classroom), no team sports, no choirs, no large group activities, since social distancing in those communal spaces is almost impossible to maintain. And to get those smaller class sizes, maybe students will only be going to school two or three days a week, trading off school days with home days when they do assigned school work at home.

While those don’t sound like schools where I would want to send my children, many people will have no choice. In families where both parents must work as well as single parent families, children must be in school for the family to survive economically. In other cases, the parents just are not prepared emotionally or physically to homeschool their children.

However, wouldn’t it take some of the pressure off of the public schools if those parents who can and who want to homeschool were encouraged to do so? Instead of seeing homeschooling as a threat to public and private schools, maybe it should be seen a true and even noble alternative. If many parents choose to give up time, energy, and extra income to educate their own children at home while still paying the same property taxes to support public schools for the benefit of the entire community, wouldn’t that relieve some of the pressure on class sizes and individual attention and give teachers and administrators a bit of breathing room and time to focus on those students who need public schools the most?

Instead of telling parents that they are not qualified to teach their own children, what if we came alongside and helped them to see how they can, if they have the desire, be effective educators, give individual attention, and help their own children to thrive in a home atmosphere free of worry about spreading disease or social distance? What if those parents who have enjoyed the somewhat constrained and limited introduction to homeschooling that they have experienced in the last month or two were encouraged to continue to homeschool, for real this time, in the fall? What if we quit instilling fear about children “falling behind” (behind what?) and “falling through the cracks” and instead assured parents that their children will learn and can learn if only they are given the opportunity to do so–at school or at home or at some combination of the two?

What if public schools re-thought their purpose and became resources for the entire community, both the in-schoolers and the homeschoolers? Maybe teachers with expertise in specific subjects could teach their small 10-student cohorts in the mornings and could then be available in the afternoons to meet one-on-one or two or three at a time with students who are being homeschooled but who need extra tutoring once a week. Or maybe those libraries and playgrounds could be available for all the children to come to, a few at a time on a sign-up basis. Or the libraries and the cafeterias could do curbside service as some are already doing. We can all work together to spread the feast of learning before our young people, and this crisis can become a catalyst for change.

Some good ideas are in these articles as well as some I don’t agree with, but let’s start talking about how homeschooling can be part of the solution instead of its being a problem or a threat.

Homeschool goes digital during coronavirus outbreak. The title to this one is deceptive. It starts out as pro-digital education, then quickly veers to something I’m much more interested in: unschooling or freedom to learn. “With all these new ways of schooling available, families will be able to choose the kind of learning environment and education that works best for their kids when the pandemic is finally over—whether that’s in a conventional school or not.”

Education Won’t Be the Same After the Pandemic Passes.

The World’s Homeschooling Moment. “While the virus has caused illness and hardship for many, keeping children out of school is not a global calamity. It is worth remembering that children can be educated without being schooled. They may even be better educated.”

Fraise: Coronavirus Has Turned Families Into Unwitting Homeschoolers. Some Suggestions for How They Can Treat It Like an Opportunity.

A few books that might be helpful in rethinking our approach to education as individuals and as a society (disclaimer: I haven’t read all of these):

• The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan.
• Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education by Susan Wise Bauer.
• Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler’s Guide to Unshakeable Peace by Sarah MacKenzie.
• A Charlotte Mason Education by Catherine Levinson.
• For the Children’s Sake: Foundations of Education for Home and School by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay.

I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry all month, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of her poems, both in quantity and in depth of quality. She wrote more than 1700 poems that were found after her death. Some of them are rather like riddles; others are short epigrams. Still others are about nature and Emily’s observations thereof—or about love or death. She wrote a lot about death.

Here are few brief quotations that I collected from her poems and from her letters as quoted in the biographies I read:

• “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”
• “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
• “A Letter is a joy of earth—/It is denied the gods—“
• “A letter always feels to me like Immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone.”
• “My heart grows light so fast that I could mount a grasshopper and gallop around the world, and not fatigue him any!”
• “The only commandment I ever obeyed — ‘consider the lilies’.”

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise.
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

The last two are my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, although I can hardly be said to have tasted of her poetry since I’ve read maybe forty poems out of the 1700. But I plan to go on tasting.

So, what’s been happening on the coronavirus/Covid-19 front?

Well, our county judge, who seems to have a lot of unilateral power or at least think she does, has mandated that all people who leave the house in Harris County (Houston) must wear masks. There are some exceptions, and the police say they don’t have the time or the manpower to enforce such an order, but some people are all upset about it anyway. In fact, Judge Hidalgo is being sued by Republican activist Stephen Hotze, who says the mandate is unconstitutional.

“In Judge Hidalgo’s Harris County, the heavy hand of local government will fine individuals who refuse to wear a mask, fail to wash their hands, get within six feet of another, or inadvertently touch their face.”

I am ambivalent about it. I tried on a mask today that a friend made for me, and I don’t think I could wear it for longer than five minutes without ripping it off and running screaming down the street. Maybe not that long. And I’m not sure one government official should or does have the power to unilaterally decide that all four million people in Harris County have to wear mask to leave the house.

On the other hand, maybe the masks will help everybody to calm down and feel better about getting outside? And maybe they will help protect people from the ‘Rona? I don’t know. (And you don’t either.) And the prior two sentences have become the mantra that goes through my head every time anyone makes any assertion about this virus and our response to it. Too much uncertainty. Too many unknowns. And too many people pretending to know things that they can’t possibly know.

It’s a bit frustrating, and I go back to the idea of giving one another grace. We’re all trying to make what could be life or death decisions without the proper information to inform those decisions. We’re all trying not to rip it all off and go screaming down the street. Wear your mask or don’t wear your mask. Stay home or go to work. Keep your distance. Wash your hands. Make the decisions that make the most sense to you. And allow others the freedom to do the same. Oh, and try not to scream too loudly.