It's me on the side porch, still in workout clothes from my daily epic walk, grateful for the sunshine, the warmth, and the salad I just ate straight from the bowl while Annie did her math beside me. I am guiltily grateful, though, which is my one of my new normals: guiltily grateful for this Great Pause, for the lazy mornings and my family close and the lack of hustle that this situation has bequeathed. Since we’re healthy, and so far our savings is holding up, this pandemic has meant homemade bread and no alarm clocks and lots of podcasts and family dinner and Office marathons and naps and books and so much time it’s hard to describe. We’re rich with time: to create art, to let cinnamon rolls rise, to start each day with coffee together, to practice yoga for a full hour, to mix a cocktail before a phone call with a friend, to soak in the hot tub on the chilly nights and then come inside to play games and make sweet little peanut butter cups.
It’s not always – not often – sunshiney side porch, happy hours, laughter, and ease. It’s just as often teenage angst, a family bickering over burps and loud chewing noises and wet towels on the floor and whose turn it is to clean up the cat barf. It’s everyone trying to be in the kitchen at once, it's someone constantly making tea and leaving the honey on the counter, it’s flour on the floor and loud phone-talking and no privacy ever and arguments about nail polish and Boggle words. It's another of my new normals: This is never going to end. We're trying to give grace and second chances, to be gentler with each other. When the wheels come off every 9th day or so, I remind our little quarantine pod that nobody is being their best self right now. Why do you keep saying that, Mom?
It’s a gnawing anxiety about when normal will return, and what normal will even look like when it does. It’s one grieving a soccer season while still doing her ball work in the front yard, the other missing the buzz of a track meet but still lacing up her shoes every morning. It’s knowing without exactly knowing that we won’t, actually, be getting on a flight to Switzerland in June. It’s wondering when we’ll ever fly again. It’s my heart breaking when I think about the lives lost, the lives scraping by at the margins, the systems and the individuals who are suffering in all the ways we’ve been mostly able to ignore until now. It’s mainlining news first thing in the morning and last thing before bed even though all the podcasts say not to, and it’s the small bits of wisdom that keep popping up in different places, over and over, until I notice them and squirrel them away on a scrap of paper or share them in a conversation with a friend, ten feet apart in her front lawn.
It’s what’s saving me right now: yoga teachers who keep sharing their online classes with absolutely everyone, the resilience of my girls, the generous spirit and culinary creativity of a husband who’s suddenly always around, the text threads with dear friends and occasionally their faces on a screen, the way people walking and running are keeping their distance but almost always saying hello and smiling when I meet them on the path, the spontaneous little acts of generosity in our community and our world, the smart scientists thinking so hard to create a way forward for everyone, Kelly Corrigan’s BYOB happy hours, an almond thingy from a friend for no reason, the fresh flowers I add to my cart whenever I brave the system for the Trader Joe’s run, French jazz during family dinner, sunshine, books, hope.
