Last time I was here was almost two all weeks ago, and I see that I was in a funk. There’s a surprise, eh?

Life is all ups and downs these days. Only two things surprise me about finding that I was blue the last time I wrote here:

• That I managed to write at all while in a funk
• How long the funk lasted (well over a week)

In any case, I’m back, and in a better mood. I think we’re all having ups and downs, better times and worse. Here in the Midwest, the weather matches the mood. It was clearly spring a week ago, sunny and warm. Now it has snowed three of the last four days. Not snow that sticks, thankfully, but snow. I actually woke this morning to news of a multi-car pile-up on one of the local expressways. It felt like I was in a time warp.

Today’s snow was thick and heavy and fluffy, very pretty and perfect for building snowmen though it didn’t stick around. It was nearly gone by early afternoon. Yesterday’s was light but hung around a little longer, though it never accumulated on streets. Different days, different snow, different moods.

Today’s mood started out as a cooking one, and I pulled out a couple of my lesser-used cookbooks to inspire a marvelous dinner. Then I looked in the freezer to see what ingredients I could work with and found so much food, already cooked, that I’m now banned from buying anything but produce and fresh dairy products for the near future.

I did manage to turn my personal yen to cook into an assignment for my husband to bake bread. So tonight’s menu is for Finnish cardamom bread and a lovely kale and lima bean soup I made some time back. I will bake a pie, both to feed my creative cooking urge and to use peaches from the freezer.

Does anyone else’s life feel a bit random these days? I wake up wanting to cook and instead write a blog post. I plan my garden and order seeds but have only started a handful in soil since they arrived. The first craft project I planned to undertake during social distancing is still waiting for me, the supplies I thought I had on hand having actually just recently arrived.

It’s all topsy turvy. I’ve actually come to appreciate cold and rainy weather because it keeps more people inside. And I take my longest and most relaxing walks at night, when fewer people are out and about.

Perhaps even stranger, I’ve had trouble reading anything but poetry. This has significantly increased the amount of poetry I read, but at the cost of a certain escape that I typically find in prose. I think I found a solution, though, in young adult literature. I wrote about that over on Escape into Life, in the column I’ve started calling “Accidental Coping.”

One thing I’m grateful for everyday, though, is the extra time I have with Old Dog, the 14-year-old cardiac patient who spends nearly every waking moment wherever I am. She sleeps behind me while I work, paws at me to join her when her day’s rest is over and she wants a walk, and lies at my feet when I’m on Zoom or FaceTime calls with loved ones. I don’t know how much time she has left, and I’m happy for every minute of it.