Do you ever have one of those days where you want to be around people, but you don’t necessarily feel you have the energy to engage with people? That’s how I woke up this morning. I wanted a quiet day among people, exchanging smiles, but I wasn’t feeling up to big conversation. I was feeling in need of whatever is the opposite of “bustle.”

And the Cosmos gave me exactly what I needed today.

I started out at Fred Meyer’s. I got there pretty early, and there weren’t a lot of people there, yet. I moved through the store at a leisurely pace, exchanging smiles now and then, and enjoying the quiet. It was lovely.

Then I drove into Mount Vernon to run an errand and get in a walk along the river. I probably got there before 9:00 and most of the businesses were still closed, and the streets were quiet. Perfect! As I came to the Ristretto coffee shop, I found myself turning in for a coffee. I found a quiet table in the corner, and sipped my coffee and enjoyed the sounds of the quiet conversations going on around me.

A man came in with a Mariners cap and as I passed him to exit the shop, I said, “Go Mariners!” and then we both smiled and kind of grimaced at the same time at the thought of our poor Mariners. We talked about the Mariners for a while – their ups and downs, defeats and victories – and then our conversation moved on to other things.

I learned that Jim was a pastor in town, and he learned that I was “Karen” – which, as I’d hoped, got a healthy laugh out of him. We learned we both have Dutch in our backgrounds – his antecedents had come from the northern part of the Netherlands, my dad’s parents had come from near Amsterdam. I told Jim about dad’s mountaineering background, and he told me about his friend who does mountain rescue work in Nepal. He learned I was a retired teacher – had taught in Burlington for years, and ended my career at Emerson, the old alternative high school in Mount Vernon. Jim told me that his church is actually where the alternative high school had originally been housed years ago.

I told him I’d retired from Emerson the summer before the pandemic hit, and Emerson had closed for good not long after that. My dad, I told him, had died at the age of 101, the day before the first reported case of COVID in the States – the first case being reported in Snohomish. Jim nodded his head, and said he’d actually had a friend in health care who had been part of the health care team for that first COVID patient.

We talked about how the pandemic had changed teaching and education. I told him that my friends who were working in education during that time told me not to go back to teaching right then, and Jim told me one of his relatives had started her first teaching job just a few weeks before the pandemic hit. It was a pretty crazy time for her.

And during this conversation with Jim, there was laughter and empathy and connection. There was a feeling of community. There was no bustle, no high-energy exchange, no expectations or obligations or responsibility to “fix” anything. Jim was the exactly right person for me to meet today.

After I left Ristretto, I went up to the river for a walk, and to see what there was to see up there: I snapped a photo of the bridge enclosed in a pink cocoon as repairs are made on it; I met a rescue pup named Gooper; I stopped to wave a worker in a golf cart to pass by me, and he smiled a friendly smile and thanked me; I saw about a dozen bicyclists parked at the revetment – it looked like they were getting ready for an adventure; and the flags were full-blown in a gusty wind. I sat at a table with my coffee, and turned my face into the wind, and enjoyed my solitude.

I had a lovely morning.