It involves long hours in the greenhouse, a glassy enclosure I have dubbed “the conservatory.” It means breathing deeply. It means taking care to limit news after midafternoon. It means a constant background level of anxiety, only occasionally alleviated, exact source and duration unclear.

It’s the coronavirus experience, of course…coupled with the America of the Trump era. The latter was summed up this week by a New York Times columnist: like being on a long car ride with a drunk at the wheel. And while this is an excellent quip, the situation keeps expanding to include the corrupt lawyer in the passenger seat who keeps telling the driver how to avoid the cops. And probably a few more metaphors if I put my mind to it.

I don’t want to put my mind to it, that is the thing. I want to spend my waning years doing something more pleasurable and entertaining. Watching the repaving project down the hill would be more entertaining. Following an ant across our deck would be more pleasurable. In short, let me out of here.

Of course there is another perspective. When forced to slow down, to focus on oneself and fall back on inner psychic resources…. Well, what is there? Maybe there is this, a raft of unfinished psychological business, years of fear, for example. And that’s the thing, the other thing. When push comes to psychic shove, I have to admit that a certain fear level has long been part of my daily experience. I will even admit that this probably hails from birth. Although getting shot in the spinal cord at age 21 probably didn’t help things.

Anyway, here I am, sitting in the greenhouse, watching things grow. And I might just be one growing among them. In any case, I am among lettuce, Serrano peppers turning red, spinach gaining iron and strength by the moment, and above all, the ever-rising chorus of cherry tomatoes.

Here a discerning reader will ask what a Californian is doing raising tomatoes in a greenhouse in this, the month of August. Unless that reader is from San Francisco, in which case the reasons couldn’t be clearer. They couldn’t be clearer in the way that the skies couldn’t be cloudier. This is the foggiest time in our maritime summer, which is not so much a summer, as a fleeting glimpse of warmth before autumn.

A tiresome topic, I do acknowledge. But it is the sort of topic that one drifts towards when everything else is static. Yes, in this pandemic, life has ground to a curious halt. Which isn’t true at all, if one considers. As I say, living in a state of fear, the latter intensifying, then waning, with a tidal ferocity…all this is indicative of something happening. Internal processes triggered, even accelerated, by the confinement. In short, the lockdown will be over eventually, of course. Which will leave my psyche to find endless ways of distracting itself. And even I am forced to admit that this might not be all that good.