Last Thursday evening, I sat in my recliner, in my one-bedroom apartment in downtown Waynesville, and gazed over at the overflowing pile of old clothes and junk slowly sliding out of the nearby closet like some Southern Appalachian landslide after a heavy rainfall. 

So, probably like most of y’all out there, I’ve spent a lot of time during the continuing quarantine combing through the details of my life, physically and emotionally, whether I intended to or not. 

Sunday afternoon in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The date on my phone says April 5, but I really haven’t had any sense of time since early March. Coming into a month of the “new norm” during all of “this.” 

It’s a crazy world out there right now, folks. And yet, it’s always been kind of nuts anyhow, just more so under the current circumstances. 

So, here we are, eh? 

What a difference a day makes, where now each morning we seemingly wake up into another new normal in the fight against the coronavirus. It’s this existence of being stuck at home for the sake of society’s health and well-being — all dressed up and nowhere to go now taking on an entirely different meaning.

Being the nighthawk that I am, it was around 3 a.m. on March 3 when I found myself listening to some music and scrolling through Instagram. 

Suddenly, I kept coming across images of a massive storm in Nashville and of a pile of rubble that was once The Basement East music venue in the city.

In March 2011, I was a 26-year-old freelance writer traveling down Interstate 87 in Upstate New York to one of Levon Helm’s Midnight Rambles. The legendary singer/drummer for The Band, Helm held these intimate concerts in his barn-like home, tucked away in the backwoods of the Catskill Mountains. 

Walking up to the Civic Center (aka: Harrah’s Cherokee Center Asheville) this past Sunday evening, the building was buzzing wildly from a sold-out crowd of thousands eager to see Sturgill Simpson and Tyler Childers take the stage. 

It had been several years since we’d sat down over a drink and chatted. An old friend and former lover, she reached out randomly on a recent rainy day. 

“I’m having a shitty day. Let’s meet for a beer?” the out-of-the-blue text stated. Sure, I figured, always up for hearty conversation with good, genuine folk. 

By the time you read this, it will have been my 35th birthday. Yep. It’s here. No doubt about it, I’m officially, unashamedly in my mid-30s. As of Wednesday, I’ll be closer to 50 than 20. Sheesh.