​This past weekend, I did several things for the first time in 18 months. I stepped out of my normal routines. I donned a mask and moved back into the germ-filled world. And it had a profoundly healing effect on my mind's health. 

If like me, you’ve been working at home for the past 18 months. If you live in a rural part of America. Or if like me, many of your family members live on other continents thousands of miles away, most of your human contact may have been reduced to screens in recent months. And perhaps like me, without quite realizing it, a great chunk of your common humanity has become electric, one dimensional, and disembodied. I don't know about you, but all this remote work, all this pandemic living, has got me feeling distinctly odd in recent weeks.

Today was intense. It involved tears. You may remember when I gleefully wrote about my first driving lesson.

It was two summers ago. I had sat with a group of 15 year olds through a Driver's Ed series (I was old enough to mother them all) and then my driving teacher, DJ, took me out for a spin. 

​That blog contained the seeds of freedom and glee. I did my written exam, got my permit and... two years passed. And not much driving practice occurred. I found many other things to do and practicing driving was very low on the list. Admittedly, our car also fell apart numerous times, which didn't help. Last month we witnessed the final death of our kind VW Golf. Its transmission sputtered its final breath. So we got a Subaru instead—complete with four wheel drive and a moon roof. 

Today was the time to head out to the empty parking lot behind the Maine Mall again. To acclimatize myself with these new wheels. To attempt to master this mind-bogglingly difficult task of driving a car.