I hope you all had a good week, considering the circumstances. A week where you were able to take good care of yourselves and found a way to alleviate some of the stress that you are most likely under right now.

I had a week that felt like a roller coaster. Some days I felt strong and determined to tackle my list of things that I needed to accomplish, such as searching for new health insurance, filing for unemployment, and changing my direct deposit information for the IRS. It seemed that those little things took so much brain power to accomplish, where in normal days, I would have ticked them off my list in minutes. Those productive spurts came few and far between, but I managed to get at least one task accomplished each day.

Other self-care days were filled with rest, art projects, long walks on the property, and jigsaw puzzles. It was a combination of losing myself in art, physical activity, allowing my stressed out body to rest, and mindless things to steer my brain away from reality for a bit.

One of the best things that happened last week was a Zoom get together with seven girlfriends that I have known for 42 years now. It was so good to sit and chat with them about the current state of the world, our families, and just to have a good laugh for a bit. I felt the weight on my shoulders begin to lift and kept a smile on my face for much longer that day.

This virus has forced most of us to consider life and death in ways we don’t normally focus on it. As we grow older, and our parents begin to age, we do think about it more than we did in our younger years, but right now the topic has slammed its way into our daily lives and it has become a consideration that is difficult to ignore.

Some of us have had experiences in this life already, that have brought us face-to-face with death and our own mortality. I have had several of those experiences, like the one I spoke of in episode 9, “Staring Down the Barrel”. I experienced another one of those moments back in the 70’s.

It was the summer following my sophomore year of college, and I decided to apply for a seasonal firefighting position with the California Department of Forestry, which is now referred to as Cal Fire. This was way back in 1978 and I became one of just 26 women in the entire state of California to be hired to fight fires that summer.

When on-duty, I lived in a fire station with an all-male crew and even bunked right there in the same sleeping quarters along with my fellow firefighters. I learned very quickly how to earn their trust by proving to them that I could pull my weight with the workload that was required. They became like brothers to me and were very protective when we were out on the fire line, especially if the convict line crews were working close by.

We were a multi-engine hose crew so we responded to all types of emergencies including auto accidents, structure fires, grass, and wildland fires. When out on wildland fires, we were often in steep terrain and had to carry 90-pound hose packs up hills through dense brush in order to extend the hose line towards the fire from the engines or water tankers. It was physically taxing, stressful work, but the satisfaction we felt after knocking down a fire was immensely rewarding.

Our lives were endangered every single time we went out on a call. There was always an underlying level of stress even when we were working around the station between calls. It was like waiting for the next shoe to drop. The radios would echo through the station, the alarm would sound, we would dash for our Nomex clothing, run to the engines and head off with lights and sirens blaring. There was a level of excitement to this type of work, but when we were in midst of some of the more harrowing situations, the excitement dissipated, and we survived entirely on adrenaline to take us through the challenges.