These are Strange Times

The other day there was a cormorant walking down the sidewalk in my neighborhood. Cormorants are water birds. There are boat docks in this neighborhood and rocky outcropping just right for a cormorant to hang out and dry its wings (yes, cormorants have to dry out a bit from time to time). I have never seen a cormorant walking down the sidewalk.

A day before or maybe the day after the strolling cormorant I woke around 7 as I usually do. The sun had already risen. But when I went into the bathroom, I spotted the full moon above my neighbor's rooftop so bright that it might as well have been in a black sky.

Water birds on sidewalks, moons too bright to be real. Shocking new headlines every day. And the rain keeps pouring down in California. Hillsides have gone from brown to green almost overnight.

If all this can happen, well, maybe there will be other miracles. I'm still holding out hope that Donald Trump will decide that being president is just too much work. I'm still holding out hope that the ACA will somehow survive. That people with pre-existing conditions can get insurance and that an out-of-pocket cap will remain. And that the millions of people who got insurance under Obama will not lose it.

But I'm not going to stick my head in the sand. I'm going to Washington D. C. for the Women's March where I will proudly wear this button given to me by a T'ai Chi Chih student. She wore it for a march in '79.  I'd been out of college a few years by then and I was certain the ERA would come to be. It seemed so improbable that it would not be passed. Unbelievable.