“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything!” my mother would repeat most days during breakfast. Never a morning person, I needed her constant reminders to stop belly aching and just eat so I wouldn’t miss the bus. Mean girls, gym class, homework hassles—all such commentary was censored while she jibber-jabbered in her usual Merry Sunshine style about the weather, the cute boy she saw bagging groceries, or whatever.

Except that one morning when she got uncharacteristically bratty. Finding out she’d been passed over during the previous night’s school board meeting as a candidate to become the next school nurse, she called the newly-hired lady “nothing but an old piss pot.”

“Jeez, Mum. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything!” I told her. And for the next few days, we both shoveled our Cheerios in complete silence.

Mum did eventually become the next school nurse, and good friends with the nurse she potty-mouthed. She had a wonderful time of it, too. But I never forgot the “do as I say not as I do” look on her face when I parroted her advice. Kind of like Kenny on South Park. Her eyes got big as saucers and she tried to use the collar of her bathrobe to muffle herself so she could mumble something unintelligible. Probably something not nice about me and my back sass.

Good thing neither of us has to go back to school this year during the pandemic! Instead of spreading gossip and nasty notes behind my back, mean girls would probably just cough all over me. And Mum would have to tackle way more than head lice patrol—and that mother who kept telling her a Table Talk snack pie was a nutritional lunch for her kid. She got the official school nurse home visit talkin’ to.

“Boy, we’d sure be sputtering and swallowing hard trying not to crab about the COVID!” I said during one of our recent morning chats. I’d give anything to have breakfast with Mum again, even a silent one. Heck, I’d settle for just blowing her a kiss on the other side of a nursing home window—like my friends whose moms are the same super ancient, wicked high risk age she’d be by now. It’s a blessing, I guess, that we never had to do any social distancing. We’ve got a pretty good spiritual closeness thing going on, though. Meaning I sit in my meditation rocker, appreciating the lake view she never got to see, and yack away while she listens. And after 46 years of practice, we are pros.

“Gosh, I wish Corona was just a beer again, and face masks were just for Halloween and hospitals,” I said. “And social distancing meant spacing out dinner dates and other commitments so Tom and I didn’t over extend ourselves, and our excitement came in small doses rather than a huge burst all in one weekend? That was awesome.”

Even though it’s getting harder, I am still finding nice things to say about life during the pandemic. Like how much I appreciate not having to go back to class—whatever the heck that means this year—or figuring out what it means for any offspring requiring me to suddenly embrace home schooling. How wanting but not really needing to go anywhere most of the time is such a blessing. How every day of thinking positive and not testing positive is a gift.

But I do have my moments of verbal despair, when I have to repeat my mother’s motto like a mantra to live up to my name, to keep finding the bright spots and, when I can’t, to just keep quiet. Moments when I feel like everyone, myself included, is being an old piss pot.

“What is wrong with people?” I mumbled at my laptop the other day. “Just wear a damn face mask and be nice to each other. It’s a piece of fabric for crying out loud, not 60 grit sandpaper strapped on with barbed wire!”

“I thought you said you weren’t gonna talk about it,” Tom said.

Aw, snap, he was right. “No more Corona this and COVID that!” I’d promised that morning, the 48th day of Junlygust in the Summer of ‘Rona. Ya see, contrary to what I always fantasized about before moving upta camp for good, it is possible to get up on the wrong side of the bed here. But you gotta be stubborn about it, and pretty much blinded by things that aren’t right outside your window. Like a pandemic. I wasn’t even sick with it, thank goodness, and neither were my loved ones. I was making myself sick over it. And, apparently, the filter between my thoughts and my mouth was wearing out, springing leaks.

Especially now that Junlygust has rolled into Augember, I definitely need to just clam up about the current Corona state of affairs, to not say the C words so I don’t end up bitching about the damn virus. For me, that means not reading, hearing or even thinking about it—basically blocking out all avenues of egress into my noggin and back out my yapper. Because, especially when I’m frothed up over you know what, my stream of consciousness lets everything that trickles in come rushing back out faster than spring break-up on the Androscoggin.

But I am getting better retreating into silence with a shrug and a smile. It’s pretty simple, really, if I follow a couple basic rules.

Pick the right screens and the right direction. Do I lift my head, back away from social media apps and TV to gaze out my actual window screens and get myself back out there? Or do I sit, scroll and scowl while my real life app—the custom primo one engineered for living the good life on big lake in Maine—just runs in the background? Of course, I gotta focus up and away into what’s real, what’s all around me. Because peering down into the virtual world—at statistics and reports and county maps with all the “COVID’s comin’ to get ya colors”—that can be a rat trap rather than a resource. Information without fixation, that’s my goal. To absorb enough to keep me safe, sensible and out in the sunlight on the best days of Indian Summer in God’s country rather than holed up like Gollum, illuminated by eerie laptop light.

Don’t dig too deep. Some days I’m making positive pandemic proclamations and managing to sing and dance about my “new COVID things.” Other days, I’m scrounging around to find one piddly nice thing to say, and coming up empty handed. That’s usually when I’m not following Rule #1. I’m picking the wrong screens and the wrong direction and, as my kids would say, “doom scrolling.” It’s the social media version of what self-help guru Wayne Dyer termed “looking for opportunities for resentment.” I’m endlessly looping through posts till I find something COVID-related to latch onto and vent about. Venting is good, natural, I’m told. It helps me feel less vulnerable and afraid. What’s not good, though, is when I start harping about all the mean ‘n nasty plague-ridden stuff people are saying and doing way outside my personal space. When I try so hard to place blame that I’m digging for resentment opportunities deeper and harder than an Oak Island excavator. And giving Tom a full-blown Facebook report. That’s when he has to give me his “are you really still talking about this” look, steer me out of my chair and back to a place of gratitude. Like out on the lake, or our backyard bike trail. Or even just standing in my well stocked pantry. Those are our places of gratitude, where we see that help is never very far away, where we can keep doing our very best with the chaos beyond our control.

Slip ups still come out of the blue, though. Days when I must stop myself from going on a rant. I start to say the C words, then unconvincingly change sentences mid-syllable like a shifty John Lovitz character on Saturday Night Live.

“Hey…did you see that new article about Corona morphing and coming back next year?” I started to say over dinner. What actually came out was: “Hey…did you see that new article about Cor…um…cor…about courses…yeah…Franklin County Adult Ed courses this fall. There’s a bunch of new ones.” And trying to repeat a morsel from my latest doom dredge, I almost said: “COVID cases are skyrocketing now that Florida re-opened.” But, instead, I managed to stammer: “CO…ah…COLD. It’s supposed to be a really cold winter.”

Mum would be proud, I think.

“I just can’t say enough nice things about how Rangeley is going above and beyond since all this started,” I said after our latest supply loop. Doing the “loop” sure has changed, but not necessarily for the worse. Thanks to the wonderful “essential” people doing most of our leg work and other errands that used to entail leaving the truck, groceries and dinner out can now be had with a couple emails, calls, and grateful double thumbs up to whoever loads up the Tacoma. Off loading back home, I noticed all our bags from the week’s haul were marked “Curbside Cloughs.” That’s how I’d signed my email list to my Rangeley Indispensable Grocery Angels (AKA the IGA), and I guess it stuck.

“Curbside Cloughs,” I giggled. “Well there’s two C words with a nicer ring to them!” And I won’t mind repeating them. Until we flatten the curve and, hopefully, find a cure.

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For more Corona bright spots see:

• April Fools’ amnesty
• Vaccine vigil
• Walking on
• A few of my new COVID things
• My college to COVID(eo) composite
• Pandemic proclamations