sarah in nyc

Friday night at 7:00 people in Manhattan began clapping and shouting out their windows to show their appreciation to healthcare workers and others on the front lines of Covid-19. It was a moment that was surprisingly moving. It probably didn't do a whit of good for the healthcare workers but it was profound. Unlike the videos I have seen of Italians  or Israelis singing together from their balconies, most of us along Broadway don't have balconies. Hearing the faceless whoops and claps of my neighbors reminded us that despite sheltering in our own apartments, we are not alone. Last night at 7:00 the whoops and the claps began again. Again we joined in Tonight my son brought me my shofar and he took the other shofar. We added that ancient cry to the sounds our neighbors were producing. We heard clapping and shouting and responded with our shofarot. The sounds were supposed to last for two minutes but for about ten minutes we let our neighbors know that we are not...

As we do our best to live through this crisis It's important to tend to both our physical health as well as our mental health. Our Pesach food order arrives late Monday night and we switch our house over to Pesach mode on Tuesday and start the cooking Olympics. Yes, we are starting early, but not as early as we normally would ( there will be fewer mouths to feed over the course of the holiday). Never the less, our usual rhythms matter as so much of our lives has been out of order. I baked challah with almost the last bit of our white flour. I probably could have found bakery made challah but it will do all of us good to eat our usual challah. We can eat pancake for breakfast on Sunday. I only baked two challot instead of our usual four. We aren't eating meat. We are eating fish and noodles and spinach. As I got my challah dough going I watched for the corona of blooming yeast in the bowl. The familiar work of making the dough come together was a comfort. ...

At noon I decided to take photos of bits of the view that I don't normally focus on .As always, I love the shadows cast by fire escapes. shadows of tree branches on an empty Broadway When I first moved to New York the third window down was my room. Once my now husband and I were on the phone. He was living in our current apartment. We waved at one another. The used  book vendor has returned. I made rolls using ground up left over grains. They were made primarily of corn, rye and oat flour. They tasted exactly the the rolls that might have been served at a health food restaurant run by hippies in 1974. I haven't eaten a roll like that in about twenty years. It tasted very virtuous.

Our sons are both working from home. They are fortunate to both be employed. The Max's bar-mitzvah has been postponed until fall so I stopped working on his tallit. I had done a bunch of work with a client on her tallit for her wedding in mid-May. I assume that that wedding has also been put off for a while. I had one piece that was on the to do later pile. In the mid 1970's Navah needle-pointed a tallit bag for her husband. She was working on the project while she was working at Camp Ramah and she asked one of the members of the arts and crafts staff to draft the lettering for her husband's name. When Navah's son became bar-mitzvah Navah used the same design for her son's tallit bag and I can't recall who she had draft the letters. For the past several years Navah and I have gotten together so I could draft the letters for the tallit bags for each of her grandchildren.  A while ago I drafted the letters for  Ziv Pela, the very last grandchild. A fe...

Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading lots of posts on Facebook about how to survive being confined to home for a long period of time. This morning I recalled when I was essentially home-bound for not quite six months. My youngest turned twenty four this week. When I was three months pregnant with him I went into labor. My doctors said that until I hit 38 weeks I was to sleep eight hours a day, lie down eight hours a day and was allowed to be up as long as I didn't start having contractions. Most days I could be up long enough to get our older kids up and ready for school, I could shower and I could eat sitting at a table with out having contractions. That is most days, but not all days. In 1995 we were not yet hooked up to the internet. I made it through those months with the help of tons of friends and family. People took care of us. I also had to adjust my brain so that I could survive mentally and not get too depressed at being home bound. I got showered and d...