week 3

every day, i walk by a tibetian prayer center. in the front yard, obscuring the front entrance, is a cherry tree that in the last few weeks has been bursting into white clouds. i would sing a song in my head i learned in grade school about popcorn popping on an apricot tree. wrong fruit. the streets would be relatively still. it was often gray and rainy. no noise save for distance traffic and the click of my boots on the concrete. i would stand at a crosswalk waiting for the light to turn, only as a gesture, as a matter of course, because there was no one around to wait for them to pass.
i went to Oakland on wednseday morning to get onboarded. i rounded on a single person as practice. it came back quite naturally. the whole ceremony. gestures to walk through. standing at the door, quick chat with a nurse, coating my hands with hand sanitizer. walking up to the bed, introducing myself. the cursory exam. sitting back in the doctor's room, stumbling over the overwhelming maze of digital information to peel back the relevant bits.
one more patient testing positive. he went to the ER, and was obs'd.
one more week of waiting.
i am rather nervous for the future of my career. what is it going to mean to practice medicine from now on?
yesterday i noticed the intermittent rain pelted all the fluffy white cherry blooms of that tree into the ground.

everything depends on the red wheelbarrow.