Book group tonight will still be virtual. Going for groceries will remain my only weekly outside-the-house errand. Working-from-home has become routine, as have my take-a-quick-break strolls around the backyard.
It was on one of those yesterday that it dawned on me that this new life is making me a miniaturist. Not someone who builds tiny dollhouses or paints illuminated manuscripts, as tempting as those occupations might be, but "miniaturist" in the sense of paying attention to small things.
I notice the gall on the poplar and the chicory that has sprung up by the fence. Those parts of the yard that I seldom used to enter have become my secondary landscape, the place I go to make the world go away. And there is beauty in the small and quiet, the "violet by the mossy stone, half hidden from the eye."