Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

Spotify told me at the end of last year that my most-played song was Crowded Table by The Highwomen, which seemed a little ironic considering that our table has been set for a maximum of 4 throughout. But our background music is often a balm for what we’re missing or need, an emotional cohesion between what’s happening in our lives and our hopes or fears. It’s why we belt out heartbreak songs along a ribbon of highway even when we’re currently in a perfectly happy, supportive relationship and why certain songs bring us straight back to 1995 and high school friends’ hot concrete summer-sun driveways (looking at you here, Coolio and Weezer with a side of Warren G). Because at some point, we’ve been there. At some point, our hearts swelled or broke with those chords. We have an emotional flexibility that allows us to feel the highs and lows of our previous selves and of others’ through soundtracks.

I’ve made a lot of stupid decisions over time. I’m not sure if my tally is higher or lower than an average Jane of my age and background, but I can certainly tick a few off. Some had exceptional consequences. Some had less. Getting married young to a grifter? Not awesome. Getting dropped off by an airport bus in the center of Rome with nothing but a backpack and a passport? Could have gone very wrong. Turned out fine. We create resilience by recovering from poor decisions. We pick ourselves up and thereby understand what it’s like to have been down.

I have been incredibly fortunate to luck into a few really good things, to have escaped the worst in a few others and to have worked really hard to fix a few of the bigger mess-ups. Through a combination of stupidity, luck and hard work, I’m a solidly middle-class American with a mortgage, a family, a job that pays my bills and an expectation of a few weeks’ vacation time. I like to think of myself as a fairly progressive world citizen, but I admit that I have some caricatures of the non-Western world that have crept unbidden into my subconscious. I’m definitely not proud of that but I think that by and large, as Americans we grew up with the assumption that as the holders of illustrious blue passports, we were born into a democratic moral superiority that gave us the obligation to police the rest of the world when it professed a misguided preference for strongmen and corrupt oligarchs. This may be obnoxious of us at times, but it’s part of the American ethos.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton swept the nation – and the world – in 2015 and even though COVID has shuttered performances, people eagerly await postponed performances, swept up by a buoyant soundtrack and the story of a founding father who has been on our money but is less familiar to us than George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. Alexander Hamilton, like his fellow compatriots, was far from a perfect man, and the musical doesn’t pretend he was, though there has been criticism from some that the slavery of the Revolutionary War era was not highlighted in Miranda’s patriotic depiction of the birth of our nation. We love Hamilton for the singable music, for the patriotism and the fervor, for the belief that we can all be Hamilton of a sort, maybe down but don’t count me out. We identify with the America Hamilton believed in, that we fought King George for, and that we built on the certainty that democracy is the eagle-soaring, majestic mountain virtuosity into which we have fashioned our identity – our tradition, our legacy, our due.

It’s been a rough year for sure. I love my family. I love our dog. I like the bright, sunny rooms of our house. I like our neighborhood and the dozen or so neighbors I know well enough to chat with about the weather, again, on one of the dog’s four daily walks. The ponderous routine of month 10 of COVID. But sometimes I just want to scream. I want to get in my car and just drive to somewhere that isn’t quarantined, that isn’t restricted in a dozen ways. Apparently I want to drive to 2019 or 2022 (we hope).

Last week, my youngest daughter found out that winter sports, which were rumored to be coming back when they go back to hybrid school later this month, are in fact still canceled or perhaps re-canceled. She’d been hoping to join basketball partly for the sport but mostly for the comradery. She was upset. “I hate covid y can’t it just go away and leave us alone so that we can do stuff we want to do instead of it getting canceled when you are excited” she texted me from her bedroom. I have no answers for this because I basically agree. Our kids have given up a lot to keep the rest of us older, comorbid people safe. It stinks. It’s not fair. We had plans. Google Maps recently sent me my list of places I went in 2020. 18 cities, it claimed. So now I know what Google Maps calls the 18 metropolitan areas within 30 miles of my house. 

In some ways we are suspended in time, Han Solo in carbonite, waiting. Cranky, tired, disappointed, canceled. Our actual physical isolation has perhaps contributed to our intense political divides. No longer going to work or to happy hour where I hear other people express views not quite aligned with, even opposed to my own creates an increased sense of detachment. I choose who I talk to. I choose who I listen to. I wonder if people have in some ways forgotten that we’re going to eventually re-enter the world more or less as it was. It’s as though this is an epoch that will be held separately from time, an anomaly that we can disown when we get back to it.

Except that our divide didn’t start with COVID. America is, in part, the land of middle class largesse, but not for everyone, and it never has been. Despite the ideals of our founding fathers, despite our soaring rhetoric, it has never been everything that we have wanted it to be. Langston Hughes was an African American poet of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1936 he published Let America Be America Again. It’s a poem about America’s great promise, even when it fails. It was never America to me, Hughes writes. But he hopes it can be. Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed, he wrote. O, let America be America again – the land that never has been yet – and yet must be. He died in 1967, after Selma, but before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was an America in transition, as it is still.

I see hopeful memes about going back to the America that was, that we grew up in, that our parents grew up in. And yet that America wasn’t the dream the dreamers dreamed. It was good for a few, tolerable for many, and still tragic for some. But there was a sense of forward momentum. The problem now is that we’ve lost our compass. We still have blue passports, but we can’t use them to get anywhere, and as we watch our own citizens attack our Capitol and call for the deaths of our lawmakers, we’ve certainly lost our perceived democratic superiority. We’re unmoored and drifting. Facts have become malleable. Hate has become fashionable. Great swaths of our country have been convinced that they can’t trust anyone who expresses faith in science, that everything is a conspiracy so deep that there is no evidence for it and if told not to believe their eyes, they will willingly blind themselves.

Months before the Presidential election, our nation’s President began to claim that no matter what, the election would be invalid unless he won. Hedging his bets, he wanted to make sure that seeds of distrust were sown, and he planted a bountiful crop. Election officials worked tirelessly to ensure that the record number of votes, cast during a pandemic, were counted faithfully. They were re-counted. They were hand-counted. Lawsuits lodged to try to disqualify votes were thrown out, by both Democratic and Republican-appointed judges, time after time. No evidence was produced again and again and again. As threats grew violent against public servants and volunteers who had simply counted and recounted the votes, state officials from the President’s own party went on television to plead with the President and his cadre to stop spreading the flames, to stop throwing fuel on the fire. Instead, the drumbeat of misdirection and sleight of hand continued from the President’s camp.

Our elected leaders, many of them lawyers themselves with a complete understanding of our court system and what such an absolute lack of evidence surely meant, added their voices to invalidate what the courts, elected bipartisan officials and the multi-counted vote tallies made clear. Trump had lost. More people voted for Biden. In the democracy begun by Alexander Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, this is how the process works. Votes are cast. Votes are counted. The winner advances, the loser retreats. This is what we expect from other nations. This is what we, from our democratic ivory tower, have demanded from strongman totalitarian governments around the world.

And yet… Don’t believe what you see. Blind yourself, the President commanded, and so it was done. Now, after an attempted coup, a riot in the halls of the Capitol in which the crowd chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and brought Molotov cocktails and zip ties and killed one police officer with a fire extinguisher to the head while beating others unconscious with American flag poles … now those Republicans arsonists who burned down a democracy have the audacity to ask for unity. To ask for unity and insist that less than a clean slate is somehow irresponsible of those who won the election, while they wipe the last of the cinders from their lapels.

This is how you gaslight a nation.

Except that half the nation did not blind itself. Half the nation knows an abusive manipulator when they see one. And it turns out, the half he gaslighted was his own. It’s up to them if they want to pick themselves up, put in the work and, with a little luck, earn the resilience that comes with having been down, and picked oneself up. It’s been a rough year. We’re all tired and cranky and disappointed. But not all of us are buying the bullshit. Some of us see just fine.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed… let America be America again – the land that never has been yet – and yet must be.

My oldest daughter is now of the age where she texts of an afternoon to be picked up at Barnes and Noble at 5pm, rather than school at 3pm. And since I’m a big fan of brick and mortar book stores, and appreciate her appreciation of the same, this week I picked her up at 5pm at Barnes and Noble. She had purchased a Classics edition of A Tale of Two Cities, which is one of the many reason I love her (she spends all her money on books).

I’ve read A Tale of Two Cities. Or more technically, I had it read to me, chapter by chapter, in Mr. Roseberry’s 9^th grade World History class. There are a lot of details I don’t remember about the story, but I do remember pretty vividly that it’s a complicated story line with a lot of double-crossing, and people who look like other characters, and are in love with the wrong people. If you haven’t read it, it’s not really worth summarizing here, and I couldn’t, as it’s been way too long, except to just reiterate that it’s a story about revenge and redemption and love, as so many good stories are.

Probably the one thing we all may remember about A Tale of Two Cities, if we remember nothing else, is its opening lines, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

Seems pretty prescient. I guess the world has gone through some hard times before. Since my daughter brought the book home, I’ve been thinking about those well-known lines. How everything seems to be at opposite ends of a pendulum lately. There is incredulity on both sides of our political spectrum. One side of our country is engulfed in fire, and the other in a stream of hurricanes. Even specific to this pandemic, some people have lost everything, and some people have been only modestly affected.

One thing that seems universal is that we’re all stressed out. We’re on edge. We’re not coping quite as well as maybe we’d like. I’ve been searching for balance lately, so I thought I’d put a little effort into what isn’t apocalyptic lately.

I have taken more walks with my youngest daughter than at any point in our lives. And we’ve made more meals and baked goods together. And practiced more Beginner French conversation. And just in general shared more time together. In the past, I admit that I couldn’t have said for sure what topics my children were studying in the majority of classes. But this year, I know. And I know what’s been challenging, and rewarding, and frustrating… because we know each other’s lives better. Just as I no longer disappear into an anonymous office, their day also unfolds in front of me.

Our dog now thinks that he gets four walks a day. This has been an easy thing to accommodate through this amalgamation of mostly warm weather months since COVID. This quadruplication effect may be tested as it gets colder and darker, but I specifically bought a winter jacket with that silver polka-dotted thermal reflective layer just based on how freaking excited the dog gets every time his beseeching puppy dog eyes win out. You just can’t have the power to grant that kind of joy to another living being and not use it for good. He’s happy, we’re happy. It’s win/win.

Now, this may seem like a small thing, but it brings me great joy – a large percentage of both my leggings and dresses have pockets now. So that’s amazing.

Autumn is really just a gorgeous season. I went outside today at lunch to go for a walk and it was that perfect 80-degrees where it feels like you’re in a perfectly regulated sunbeam and the trees were in peak autumnal turn. I made pumpkin muffins last week and pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting this week, both of which are delightful treats that somehow don’t fit quite so perfectly with any other season but fall. Give me all the spiced apple cider and baked apples and pumpkin muffins and I’ll imagine that I’m living in a farmhouse in Vermont with an orchard outside and a fire in the hearth.

For sure, this has been the worst of times. I’ve seen the worst of me during it. The me who is angry and brittle and despondent, despairing of the world ever bending toward justice again. But it’s also been the best of times. I’ve been gifted more memories with my family than in any other season, more time to drink hot tea in my pajamas before rushing into the morning routine, more honest conversations. How are you? means something more now than it did a year ago, and I’m really glad we’ve been given societal permission to say, “This is hard.” May we not lose that.

It’s the best of times, and it’s the worst of times. We have pockets in our leggings, but we’re hanging on by a fraying thread. It’s not exactly balance –but it’s something, and there are pumpkin muffins to go with it.

There are three flies buzzing around the dining room where I am trying to work and I think I’m about to lose my mind. The dog is incensed and I’m frustrated. I’m irritated by the flies. I’m annoyed that doors were left open that should have been shut. I feel my most adult, and possibly hypocritical, when I demand of everyone and no one at once, “How hard is it to shut the screen when you come in?!”

I’m angry with my own inability to do anything but wave a hand wildly as the little demons dive bomb my person, kamikaze screaming past my ear with a high-pitched buzzing whine that makes me grit my teeth. One lands on the edge of my open laptop and rubs his dirty little front legs together smugly. I want the old orange plastic flyswatter on its wire handle that used to hang in the kitchen of the farmhouse I grew up in. I don’t even own a flyswatter now, though I’m thinking about running to Lowe’s at lunch, but I can very clearly hear the satisfying thwack that comes from knowing you just dispatched one of those little suckers. Across the street, every house’s windows open on this first day of Autumn, a baby cries and cries, and honestly, I get it.

Lately, I vacillate mostly between angry, frustrated and peckish. I have stern talks with myself about getting more exercise and eating better so that I feel better and want to exercise more and then eat even better in a spiral of wellness. I sleep poorly, but it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning because really, what new hell will be unleashed on us today? I think I’m waiting to see how the state of the world sorts itself out before I commit to coming out of my wine and cheese induced stupor. My favorite cheese right now is manchego, for its substantialness, important in a frustration snack. Something that you need your teeth for, just a little. And as for wine, just keep it coming, but not merlot.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with my daughters about magic. And how it does not exist in this house. There is no magic that stocks our fridge or pantry. No magic that makes school lunches or folds laundry or empties bathroom trash bins. Magic does not close their shower curtain to keep it from mildewing, nor pick their discarded clothing from the bathroom floor. They were largely unimpressed. This was my most direct foray into the pressure cooker that is bubbling inside me on a daily basis while I maintain an increasingly fragile sheen of understanding, calm, nice mom. This is the growing storm that no amount of wine and cheese can deescalate. A few days later, at the drop of some overdue French homework and a smirk, I became a banshee. Our neighbors with the crying baby were likely relieved that they weren’t the ones disturbing the neighborhood. I yelled until my throat hurt, and I felt no real relief. The pressure valve had popped, but there seemed to be no end to the cooker’s streaming contents which remained now uncovered but at a rapid boil. My children left for their week at their father’s. My youngest refused to hug me good-bye. She called to apologize that evening. And then the next morning texted that “because you were screaming at me yesterday, you made me forget my language arts book.”

And somehow, in that moment, I realized that in a world that is in shambolic straits, we only control what we take control of. I can’t expect the world to bend to the things that I am keeping seething inside. I am in the midst of pandemic fatigue, school fatigue, political fatigue. I’m mourning a life that I was taking for granted, but in my grief cycle, I can’t seem to get past Anger. I’m devastated that an impeached, amoral charlatan gets to set the stage to strip my daughters of rights that their grandmothers already fought for. I’m seething that even as our country literally burns down, federal climate change policies are being toppled so that oil can be drilled out of our national parks and our vehicles can belch out nitrogen oxide unrestrained. We’re so entrenched in systemic racism that the phrase Black Lives Matter enrages whole portions of the population. I never would have guessed when I was my daughters’ age that we could be here today, and I worry for them and for their far-future 40-year-old selves. We’re a broken, hurting, angry country finding new ways every day to be more broken, more hurt and more angry. I have no clear sense of how it ends, how it gets better.

I cried the cry of pure grief when Justice Ginsburg died last week. The sobbing that hollows you out and leaves you puffy eyed and head-achy. It was partly so many disappointments and fears colliding in one very crystalized event. And it was partly the fact that, a little bit, I was still holding on to the hope that even if magic doesn’t rinse dinner plates or vacuum up all those little corners of construction paper after a craft project, maybe there was still a little bit left in the world, even so, and maybe we could use it to steady the path for my daughters as they go forward, so that they don’t have to fight for control of their own bodies and workplace parity and breathable air.

I can’t control all of that. Not even Greta Thunberg or Bill Gates or George Clooney can control it. It’s overwhelming. But I can start in my own household by turning down my own bubbling rage and setting clear, concise expectations. French homework gets done, or electronics go away. The dishwasher gets loaded after dinner by those who ate but didn’t prepare the meal. Dinner conversation will be expected. Personal viewpoints and anecdotes encouraged.

When my daughter told me that it was because I yelled that she forgot her school book, I resisted the urge to be sorry and replied, “No. Regardless, you are responsible for your own things.” And in the end, that’s the point. We’re all responsible for our own crap, no matter how long this pandemic goes on, or who is in the White House, or how disappointed we feel when we wake up in the morning to another news cycle that breaks our hearts. And so, to live by non-magical example, I’m going to start expecting more from me, and making sure that, if there is only a tiny part of this wildly spinning planet I can command, I am in control of that little corner, rather than being controlled by my roiling emotions.

It’s the first day of autumn, and one of my favorite autumnal reminders is, “Like a tree, let the dead leaves drop.” Those things that do not serve us, hurt us. They drag us down and wear us out, and we can’t hold on to it all in any case. So I’m keeping cheese. I’m keeping wine. I’m keeping all screen doors tightly shut. I’m realigning my expectations to the things that I can control in this moment, without magic. I’m raising children who will be on the side of science, empathy, and respect.

 And I’m voting.

Pretty much everyone I talked to this week agreed, This week was terrible.

And it wasn’t terrible in any of the worst possible ways. I’m aware and grateful for that. It was just one of those weeks where my work hours were super long, and my kids were very understanding about how long my hours were, which made me feel guilty for my awful work/life balance. We all stood around for 45 minutes past when I was supposed to take them to their father’s and their grandmother because I was just waiting, waiting, waiting for replies to half a dozen emails and messages.

And there were the extra stresses of the school district changing from 100% in person to a hybrid 2-day a week option, and all the questions that I didn’t have answers for. And knowing that when school let out in May, we all hoped, were fairly confident, that by the fall, things would be back to normal. Instead, I’m excited but trepidatious for those two days a week. My children have questions I can’t answer, because there are no answers. What happens if… or if… and I don’t know. I hate not knowing for them, and I hate not knowing for me. The endless uncertainty. But I also can’t wait to ask, How was your day?, and truly not know until that moment.

All of this is to say, it’s Friday night. We made it. And while I told my boss, who was very nicely and genuinely concerned about my week as well, even though hers was also equally dismal, that I would take a long walk and unwind, instead I poured a glass of wine and made dinner, and now I’m not out taking advantage of the cooling evening air, but instead I turned on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives while somehow my body, which has been mostly in front of a computer all week, aches in ways that would imply I’ve taken up marathon training. The marathon, I guess, is just life.

We’re all just so tired. Tired of not knowing. The uncertainty of when we’ll make plans again and feel even a small degree of confidence about them. Will we ever not purchase traveler’s insurance again? I literally never have. But now… it seems crazy not to.

We’re tired of being in the same walls with the same people, even though the walls are our homes and the people are our favorite people. We want to miss our children and our partners. We want to see the people we do miss.

And through it all, through this longest of terribly long weeks, my people were my people. My best friends were a text away. We are intimately connected to what we’re each doing, even though it’s been months since we’ve seen each other. We are full of plans, even though plans are so tenuous in the present. We are taking a girls vacation. I am hugging my parents. I am having a night out at my favorite places, and last call will again be later than I can stay awake and I’m taking a Lyft home and I’m posting photos of me next to complete strangers whose health history I neither know nor worry about.

Tomorrow morning, I am sleeping as late as possible. I am having a video call with my soul sisters, and I am going to the mountains where last call is basically as soon as the sun goes down and the day’s fresh air is as good as an Ambien and we just stumble to bed as Vintage SNL barely makes it through 2012’s Weekend Update.

I am so truly bone tired in this moment. This week was a marathon in all the ways that boring, every day, routine pandemic life can be overly exhausting, when work-home balance is laughable, because there are no boundaries to either. Just a little farther, I tell myself. Just a little farther. It’s like the end of a grueling workout. Just 10 more minutes. That’s just 5 minutes twice. That’s just counting to 100 three times. This is nothing. This is fine.

Just a little farther, and even in the Upside Down, tomorrow is the weekend.

My hair dryer broke a few weeks ago. In a normal world, this would be a quick stop at Target on the way home to be ready for the next day. In this world, I have done nothing about it. A week back in the office will likely necessitate some sort of action on my part. Masks eliminate earrings and lipstick for me, both signs I’ve at least tried for pulled-together professionalism, so I really shouldn’t drop blow-drying. Or is this the time to redefine everything – for the good of the next 40 years of mornings routines?

In our lives, we have rarely spent so much time with so few people. My immediate family consists of me, my other half, my 14-year-old daughter, my 12-year-old daughter, and a handsome, quirky canine. We’re all pretty witty and entertaining and interested in the world, I think. We have family dinner every night, and it’s still one of my favorite things, but when we’ve all been within shouting distance of each other all day, we’re caught up with each other before we sit down. We’ve told most of our stories, not just of the day, but also of that time I flew from London to Rome in college, and about moving across the country in a car without air conditioning and a beta fish in a bucket on the floor boards, and about seeing the cherry blossoms in Michigan in 1994. And we’ve celebrated three out of our four birthdays, so we’ve even retold all of those stories.

One day, Google stopped pushing local traffic info to me in the morning. I have no idea when it happened, but just realized one day that I hadn’t seen an alert in probably weeks. Maybe months. Maybe for as long as there hasn’t been traffic, which is something I’d be okay keeping long after this virus is mitigated.

But even without traffic, I’m frustrated by canceled plans and I’m nostalgic for the summers that were, and a little despondent when I think about the uncertainty of, well, everything. I haven’t met my one of my best friend’s 6-month old daughter. I never guessed that could happen. My college best friend and I have rescheduled a trip to see each other twice, now open-ended, and I really could use a good visit with both of these women who have been through so many years and so much life with me. Add to the uncertainty the angst. Politics, racism, mask ire. Every tv commercial is either a political ad or an injury lawyer. It’s so heavy for adults, with all of our adult experiences to draw from. My heart hurts for the children. The virus is novel. Our worlds are novel. And yet in their novelty, they’ve become awfully repetitive.

I’ve read a number of parenting-teenage-girls books. (Or I’ll be honest: I’ve started a number. I’m well-intentioned, and something is better than nothing, right?). One of those books, Untangled by Lisa Damour, uses the metaphor of a swimming pool for these teenage relationships. You’ll be the secure walls of that swimming pool, somewhere for them to sometimes push away from – a full on athletic flip-turn at times – but the place, too, where they can come to rest when they get tired of the open water. It made sense. I was prepared for some pushing. But as yet there are few parenting-teenage-girls-during-pandemics books, so I’m not sure what advice there is for when there is no where to push into. We’ve all been home, in this house, for months. Instead of a swimming pool, we’re gathered in a hot tub. A small one, at that.

And so we watch the days go by. We have occasional game nights. To mix things up, we’ve sampled our local pizza places, Thai, sushi, Indian, Cuban, Mexican. We’ve ticked through series television and movies and read books and baked things. We watched Hamilton. But the other thing that we’ve done is we’ve kept in touch. We’ve texted, we’ve called. We’ve video conferenced and sent gifts.

I have several text threads that are as reliable as the sunrise, and so do my children. My oldest has a constant dialogue with friends from whom she’s been distanced for months. My youngest talks to her grandparents and documents her daily life into video. I rely on these touchpoints.

I haven’t met my best friend’s baby, but I’ve seen her laugh. After a canceled spring vacation, I haven’t seen my parents in nearly a year, but I’ve watched a monarch butterfly open its wings in their Ohio flower beds. And the times that I’ve needed my tribe *right now*, we’ve been on a phone call within hours. We’re thousands of miles away, but not distanced. It’s a brand new world, but our tribe remains the same.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the long-term effects of this virus, 10, 20, 30 years from now, and a lot we don’t know about the long-term effects of who we’ve become as we live with it. We’re living in a footprint that even Google has given up on tracking, and our children’s childhoods will forever be a part of a COVID generation. Their remember-whens around the kitchen table with their own families will likely include these odd days. But will it be a footnote to them, after life moves on, or defining? Maybe they will become a generation of scientists because of it. If nothing else, they will know exactly how to wash their hands.

If our tribe knows all our stories, is that so bad? We will almost certainly make more, both together and those to bring back for future dinner conversations. If we are steadfast in our virtual connection while we wait to see our people in person again, then our tribe is still strong. We may miss the baby smiles, but we’ll watch the toddler wonder at her first steps and ocean waves and ice cream dripping off a summer cone. Our teenagers will figure out how to push away from the edge. And doubtless we will miss the days when we were all in the same house, day after day, all within shouting distance of each other.

After two months of remote learning, this morning was student pick-up for locker and desk belongings for my daughters. We drove up to a long line of brown paper Trader Joe’s bags tagged with students’ names at one school, and a distribution of clear trash bags with Sharpie names at the next. At neither location did we get out of the car. It was, as so many things are today, curbside and touchless.

My oldest was able to see her core classroom teachers, standing outside on the curb, masked and wearing gloves but with warm words of encouragement and support. She cried when we drove away. I cried, too. It’s hard to process all the ways that life has changed on a dime. Some are huge, like remote learning, and some are small, like stepping off the sidewalk when taking a walk, so that everyone can pass one another comfortably, or my go-to almond milk brand not being always available. We’ve taken for granted a lot more than we ever realized. Maybe that’s inevitable when we’re regular-but-ever-so-lucky people, living lives with normal everyday complaints about work and traffic and our HOA, but wanting for nothing.

My youngest daughter is moving on to middle school next year, and her 6^th Grade Continuation ceremony was online last Friday. It was well-done, as 6th Grade Continuations go. There were seamless and not-so-seamless transitions between student speakers and teachers and photo and video montages. The video production skills of all teachers have my gratitude. We tend to start thinking in rosy nostalgia around this time of year, and photo montages play upon our already brimming emotions. This year is no exception, except that our nostalgia is not just for when our children were ponytailed cuties with bangs and scraped knees, but for that pre-March time when life was routine. Driving the familiar loop to my daughters’ two schools today, I couldn’t help but think about how long it had been since we’d done that once-daily ritual, how long it’s been since I’ve gotten up at 5:15am, and how fun and exciting this last week of school usually is, rather than the emotional avalanche of continued distance this year.

One oft-used graduation video montage quotation is the classic, The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost… And it’s like hearing Sunscreen by Baz Luhrmann, or seeing that pencil-sketch still of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet holding hands. Certain emotions are necessarily evoked. But I don’t think I’d ever heard the full quotation, which continues,  The world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us.

I’m not going to call a pandemic a mere accident, of course; it has rocked us. Loss is our least favorite thing as humans. But life is, truly, both awful and beautiful. Loss and gratitude are two sides of one coin. We are all grappling with the idea – and just the very idea is uncomfortable – that we could lose a loved one to a previously unknown disease far before we are ready, or a loved one could lose us. We feel young (even as we meet new decades with some surprise that they have crept up). We feel healthy (even as we reach for one more glass of wine). But even if we remain untouched with personal, physical loss — and please may we all — we’ve also already lost a way of life that we assumed would just continue on its pre-COVID trajectory.

Most weekends, my household leaves our suburban neighborhood with its children-at-play signs and chalk-art driveways and we head to the much smaller mountain town where we can breathe a little more deeply, where the dog smiles more, and where most of the time, you can be sure that there is no one within probably 600 feet of you, let alone 6.

It’s in this town, this weekend, where I went grocery shopping for the first time in probably 6 weeks. Grocery shopping has long been my household gig. I make most of our meals, so it makes sense that I put together and execute the general grocery plan. I make a list, but I also know in the back of my mind what items we use as staples, even if they aren’t on a list, and what to pick up because it’s a good price, and how much room we have in the freezer, and what favorite treat or fruit or good-smelling shampoo will make the people in my little household happy. If I come home with raspberries, green grapes, and York Peppermint Patties, I’ve been able to wordlessly say, “I love you.”

I’ve been very lucky as far as how I’ve been affected by this pandemic. I switched from working solely in the office to going in every other week, as part of the low-people-density safety plan. I’m a long-time hypochondriac germophobe, and even though community microwaves and conference rooms freak me out, I haven’t had to wonder about my next paycheck. Super lucky, I know. And I’ve had to come to terms with how terrible I am at sixth grade geometry, but my children already know how to read and add and navigate email and Google Classroom and sign into video meetings. Also super lucky.

I read an article recently that pandemics end in two ways. One is when the virus is eradicated, and one is when the fear begins to evaporate, and whether the virus remains or not, people begin to go about their lives again. I’m not quite ready to let go of the fear yet, which is why I’ve been avoiding grocery stores. If I have carpal tunnel numbness in my hand, I’m going to Google MS symptoms. If I had a dollar for every time it wasn’t cancer… well, I’d have about $5, but I’ve sweated those times out. I always jump to the worst-case scenario because – I’m not sure. I guess I assume that if there’s a 2% chance, someone is going to be in that 2%. Why would I assume it wouldn’t be me? What makes me teflon to the margins? It’s definitely sucked years from me, like the Machine in the Pit of Despair. “I’ve just sucked one year of your life away.” That’s me, on worry. Me, on anxiety. On fear.

My biggest pandemic loss has been that part of me that feels in control of my family, the well-oiled machinery of my household routine, my microcosm of the giant Universe. What I’ve lost is the sense of identity that comes with keeping multiple balls in the air and feeling satisfied when – for the most part – they don’t come tumbling down. It sounds so very boring, but I miss the part of me who anticipates when we will need more canned Italian-style tomatoes, so that we can have them at the ready when we decide to make sauce, and who knows when my daughters will logically need their shampoo replaced and puts it in their shower before they need to ask. I miss the me who can decide on a dime to have salmon for dinner, because I can swing by the grocery store on my way home without a second thought. Today, if I make a grocery list, my non-germophobic other half will purchase anything on it. Again, very lucky. But it’s left me questioning my place in our usual domestic balance and feeling at a loss for how to regain my sense of equilibrium. Who am I when I’m not the me who does the things I’ve always done?

This weekend, because of the way the day lined up for both us, and because there was only one morning’s worth of coffee for two mornings of breakfast, it only made logical sense that I drive into town and pick up coffee and maybe some more Pringles, if I was going to be there, anyway.

At the mountain town grocery store, a smaller building than my suburban monstrosity that sells everything from sweatpants to liquor to artisan olives and 2,000 cheeses, I took a cart from a front-line 16-year-old in a face mask whose job was now disinfecting hot touch surfaces. I turned into the produce section and I looked at my list – coffee. And I looked at the ripe quarts of strawberries and remembered that back in suburbia, we were out of baby carrots, and certainly both of those items would survive a 90-minute drive back down the mountain the next day. And so I bought a full cart worth of mostly non-perishables, because it felt so damn good to be in control of – really, anything – just for a few minutes. What this pandemic has taken from us is our very basic sense of order in chaos, the idea that we have control of the balls we have in the air.

Every female member of my household cried today. We went through shades of awful and beautiful, amplified by the stress and comfort of having been our own insular, small Universe for so many weeks now. As we relied on each other to soothe our weary souls, I began to realize that my household is still a living, working engine, even if my role in it has changed a bit.

I haven’t reinvented myself or taught myself any new skills while in quarantine. We have only made cookies once. But we’ve sat around the dinner table for a lot longer after plates have been cleared. And we’ve become much more strategic at Qwirkle and Skip-Bo and we’re still making the youngest one do all the adding up when we play Rummy. Sneaky math to supplement remote learning. My oldest daughter has kept her circle of friends tight, and even added new people to it, all in the midst of a pandemic. My youngest has a full sketchbook, and better understanding of the area of a trapezoid than I do.

I’m beginning to realize that I still have a dozen balls up in the air, they just look a little different – and for the most part they haven’t come tumbling down. This isn’t where we thought we’d be. But here we are. And maybe I’m still me.

It seems unlikely that just one month ago, we were supposed to be in San Diego. A family vacation for Spring Break. It’s been a long month, certainly, but still it’s supposedly been only 4 weeks. It seems unlikely, as well, that in the days leading up to that planned vacation, I spent considerable time debating whether we should go. And while we didn’t, it seems surprising that just a month ago, I thought there was enough wiggle room in that question to debate it at length. It’s been a hella month, for sure.

I haven’t slept well in more than a decade, and one of the unfortunate parts of that is that when there’s a pandemic, it’s hard to remember how you felt <before> when you didn’t sleep well. I have a headache and my neck hurts and I’m generally tired. Am I near-asymptomatic? Mildly symptomatic? Psychosomatic? Suffering from seasonal allergies? Just tired? Probably the latter few, but since my job has us rotating in and out of the office on a week-on, week-off rotation, I somewhat obsessively take my temperature, anyway, just to be sure. And sure of what? What was my average temperature before this? I have no idea. But so far my daily pronouncements have not been cause for alarm to my other half or my children, though they’ve ranged from 97.4 to 99.0°.

I want desperately to be the sensible yet confident, with-it, together mother who is concerned enough to keep everyone safe and informed, and yet also able to whip up baked goods, make savory, nutrious soups, teach basic algebra, use the extra family time to perhaps broach some of those awkward teenage conversations that we’ve backburnered, and of course keep wild-eyed what-if fears buried deep inside a vault of pragmatic rationality.

“You don’t have COVID, Mom,” my oldest daughter tells me as I rinse the thermometer (she’s been a voice of pragmatic rationality far before this). “Because,” she continues, “I don’t have COVID, and so you also don’t have it.” This makes sense, and yet. And yet.

“We’re super lucky,” my partner says. “We’re still working, the girls are rolling with all these changes, and if we do get it, we’re healthy to begin with, and after we recover, we can donate plasma to help other people and be part of the solution.”

This is all true. He’s completely right. But I still had a breakdown after coming back from the grocery store and getting gas last weekend. He tied on my bandana mask, gave me two pairs of gloves (one for the gas pumps, one for the grocery store), a plastic bag to put the gloves in when I took them off, and a bag of Clorox wipes, and off I went. The mask was hot. The gloves made my hands damp. Most everyone else was wearing a mask, and a lot of people were wearing gloves. And then I came home and we disinfected what we needed that day, and left the dry goods in the garage. And I was a mess. “I’ll go to the store from now on,” he said. But that’s not the sensibly confident pragmatic me I want to be. And yet.

Years ago – probably decades ago – I watched an interview after some big sports event. NBA finals, maybe? Or the Super Bowl? I don’t remember now. But I remember that the athlete being interviewed used the word surreal repeatedly. And I thought, a line from The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Surreal seems like such a dramatic word. Almost superlative somehow. And while winning a Super Bowl probably is surreal, I laughed about the interview, and even remembered it in the way of small, trivial memories. But now, it’s the only word that seems to make sense. Our lives are surreal. This epidemic is surreal. They call them 100-year and 1000-year floods. I hope with everything I have that this is a 1000-year pandemic.

During their time at home, in the midst of remote learning and without a steady stream of in-person social activities, my children have taken different tracks in their new worlds.

My oldest reads a lot, and she watches tv and movies while on the phone with her friends. Thank goodness for wi-fi calling. My youngest is producing sketches at a rapid pace. Name the first thing you think of right now, she says. And she’ll draw it, with some modifications. That bunch of black grapes? What if I draw a grape monster instead? And it’s the most amazing grape monster you’ve ever seen. And she’s learning to skateboard. She has a friend who’s helping her learn the basics, and she’s consulting the ultimate teacher, YouTube. But in the end, she’s also just putting some skin into the game, which is the most time-honored way to learn anything. Her palms are scraped, her helmet is scuffed. But she thinks she’s getting it.

She was pragmatic, as I hope to one day be.  “You just put all the energy you would have put into hitting the ground, into rolling instead.”

You put the energy you would have put into hitting the ground into rolling instead.

And there it is. Our days are both crazy dull, and also crazy strange. We have no choice but to roll. We are afraid to leave our homes but appreciate Spring’s still weak but warming sunlight more than ever. We spend more hours with the people in our households than ever before, but we are reaching out to friends and family via a dozen video platforms at unprecedented levels. We’re six-to-eight-to-ten feet apart, but our communities are standing on our front porches, waving, as police cars create a mini-parade to wish our neighborhoods’ 5-year-olds a happy birthday, and as teachers decorate their cars with balloons to wave at the students who have suddenly become a trial run for remote learning.

I’m anxious, and I’m lonesome for people I didn’t even realize were so salient to my life. I miss Sean, the barista from Starbucks who called my name when I walked in the door, before I even got out my phone app to pay. I worry about the tiny woman who must be 85 if she’s a day, who cashiers my get-out-of-the-office-for-a-few-minutes snacks at the Natural Grocer’s next to my office. I worry about the small non-skiing mountain town that we escape to on weekends, an escape that is so essential to my heart, where winter is a tricky season to begin with, and Spring is supposed to bring a much needed thaw to the weather and the economy.

We celebrated New Years with optimism about 2020, such a recognizable, round number. We planned vacations, we planned visits with friends and family. We planned concerts and every day happy hours and quick stops at the grocery store on the way home to pick up just that one forgotten thing.

And yet.

It’s surreal. But … we roll.

When I was in college, each Spring there was a spontaneous day that we simply felt in our souls, not contained by any calendar, something between the End of Hibernation, Awakening, Opening Day… Whatever you called it, it was that day in which Winter, while perhaps not over, had lost its grip. Spring was now inevitable. At the End of Hibernation, in every college town, students hung out in small groups on front porches of rented houses drinking beer that was designed to break the ice and not the budget, the smell of bbq started to waft down streets that had been ice-covered just weeks before, music and laughter spilled through screen doors and from rolled-down car windows. It is the Christmas of the Vernal Equinox, where everyone loves their neighbor, calls out greetings to strangers as though to long-lost friends, and the sun is warm and life is beautiful again.

It’s been a minute since I was on a college campus on that perfect first day of Summer’s Coming. But this weekend in suburban Denver was the cul-de-sac equivalent. Garages opened. Vehicles were washed in driveways. Bike tires were pumped up and seats adjusted for winter growth. Sweatshirts were piled in front yards, discarded as the sun rose higher. Children cried and yelled in backyards and laughed and then cried again and were called in by parents whose ears still judged neighborly seemliness by winter’s inside volumes. Dogs searched for bunnies on their suddenly longer, more frequent walks. And the smell of bbq started to waft down streets that still have just enough snowmelt to create a constant trickle to the city grates at the bottom of the hill.  

There is something about those first days of warm weather, when it’s not just a fluke of the jet stream but the beginning of a seasonal trend. Life gets better when we can count on the sun bringing back to life a string of daffodils and tulips and tree buds and greening grass. Life gets better when we can wave to our neighbors and wear light jackets.

I’m tired almost all the time. Sometimes I’m tired plus something hurts. Back, knee, heart. For a lot of people, the past week has held some disappointment, some anger, some fear, in varying degrees about varying things.

A great thing about Spring in the air is that it’s so much easier to turn off the constant barrage of politics and Corona virus warnings and … that’s really about 94% of it. To turn off the noise and sit on a patio and close your eyes and feel the sun growing almost too warm on your face and forearms and remember that despite everything, there are green sprouts of tulip shoots popping up where there was snow on Monday. And that even if it snows again next week, there is a small army of children’s bicycles that are ready to go as soon as the sun comes back out again.

Spring is now inevitable. And I am grateful. Still tired, but grateful.

I will go to work tomorrow with a little weekend sunshine still stubbornly remaining, splashed across my winter-pale cheekbones.

Our childhoods are made up of everyday moments that have no reason to stay with us for 30, 40 and more years, but that nevertheless do. Just yesterday, I was recounting Mr. Barber, who was an up-the-next street neighbor from Arlington, before our family moved to Ohio. His hedges of raspberry bushes at the side of his house remain my adulthood dream. This summer, I will plant those memories in a shady corner and think of Mr. Barber when I do.

My school bus driver, after we moved to Ohio, was Bernie Johnson. Every childhood deserves a Bernie Johnson. I had in many ways a Norman Rockwell childhood, growing up on a farm in a small community with a graduating class of around 100. And Bernie was a vivid supporting character of that life, part of my day 5 days a week, knowing how smoothly our morning had gone by the way we flew out of the house to meet him.

Sometimes, as part of the general safety routine, our bus would pull into a parking lot or other off-the-road spot, and we’d fire drill, all lined up down the aisle, ready to jump out the back door. It was fun, really.

Someone once said that having a child is to have your heart go walking out into the world. I’m sure this has always been a terrifying proposition. In the days of Viking raids, or smallpox, or when farming meant crossing prairies in a covered wagon to face winters with sparse provisions and unknowns at every turn, parents certainly had to tenaciously have more hope and faith than fear, just to face each morning anew.

Parenting is knowing that life is not navigable without heartbreak. Their hearts, and by extension yours, will bruise and contract with each playground slight, with each goal, hard-fought, but lost. Birthday invitations that don’t materialize as expected. Test scores that don’t belie the timr and struggle put into them.

Parenthood is knowing that your children may laugh and thrill to a bi-annual school bus fire drill, but that the reason we have fire drills and wear seat belts and yell, panicked from across the street, “Look both ways!”, is that we are indeed sending our hearts walking out into the world, and it’s a wondrous, beautiful, terrible, heartbreaking place. We know it, and we all just want to bind up our children, and friends, and family, and those of everyone we know, in a force field of our fierce love, protecting them all from the stings and arrows and worse that life can hand out.

Recently, both of my children have had to navigate changing friendships. My youngest called me at work, in tears, confused and hurt by a friend who has chosen a new group of friends who are perhaps destined to be the Mean Girls of their grade, who, at age 10, delight in exclusion and petty insults. An actual seizing of my heart and chest occurred, right at my desk at work, even while I said as calmly as possible that friendships change, and that walking away from people who aren’t a good fit for us any more is an inevitable part of life, from childhood through old age.

“But it hurts,” my daughter said. And what can any parent do but agree. It does. Too often.

But on the flip side, my daughter’s other-mother, the mother of her best friend, swooped in with the world’s best spur of the moment play date. A heartbreaking, but ultimately a supportive love force field day. The other-mothers and the Mr. Barbers and the Bernie Johnsons of our children’s lives are a portion of our hope and faith, tackling back our fears for what lies beyond our front doors.

I think perhaps the most important thing that we can teach our children is that we are who we choose to be. We can be the yin or the yang, the darkness or the light. We have to teach them that we’re going to occasionally choose incorrectly, screw things up, and that we then have to do what we can to fix what we can. We choose.

In the aftermath of yet another shooting, I see countless posts arguing for gun control, and then also against. For the most part, they are the same Posts we saw after each previous tragedy. The Onion, a satirical online newspaper, has an article about the futility of change that they repost each time, with only names and dates changed. It speaks to the entrenched, disparate views of the nation.

Each time we renew the debate, there are posts and articles pointing out that people break laws all the time. People still speed. Still steal. Still rape and murder. That more laws won’t keep us safe. That children today are products of distracted, fast-food flinging workaholic parents who have taken God out of the lives of this broken generation. That mental health is the real culprit, that guns don’t kill people. People kill people, and have since Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel with a rock. Would we outlaw all rocks?

I will say that my stance on guns is evolving slightly. I’ve still never shot one. But when I’m hiking in bear and mountain lion territory, I don’t object to my hiking partner having one, someone who is skilled and respectful of both the wildlife and the gun. And while I don’t ever see myself owning a gun, I have, in fact, checked under beds and in closets for an unlikely intruder when I’m home alone at night. I know the fear, and I won’t judge anyone who sleeps better for having a gun responsibly kept in their home.

And I know that when I see my child palm a second cookie furtively behind her back, I don’t think my rules have failed. I don’t think it’s proof our household should now have open season on cookies. I think it’s an opportunity for conversation and correction.

I think that social change, like parenting, is about who we want to be. I think that we can choose our hope and faith over our fear. I think that we can look for one thing, just one thing, that we can agree about when we get into the spiraling black hole of online debate. I think we can agree that the terribly common mass shooting headline is not who we want to be as a nation, even as we agree that it’s a complex issue.

If you believe that mental health is the real culprit of mass shootings, call your congressperson today and demand that the one third cut to the Institute of Mental Health be rolled back. If you believe that the family unit is broken and producing broken children, become a mentor. If you believe that existing gun laws should be enforced, or assault rifles restricted, advocate for that. We don’t have to come to full agreement to do something. But we should all agree to do something. Let our goals be lofty where we are tempted to give up and send just thoughts and prayers.

When we send our hearts out into the world, we know that childhood will leave none of them unscathed. But let their scars be the inevitable pitfalls of adolescence in so much as they possibly can. Let’s teach our children that resilience and action and kindness are linked. That those three things have always been stronger than our fears. And then, by our actions and our time and our money and our strength, let them see who we choose to be, for them, our hearts.

When I was a girl growing up in New England, Robert McCloskey’s award-winning children books were a staple of my childhood reading list. Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal… but lately, the one that my mind has been wandering back to is A Time of Wonder. In its watercolor pages,  a hurricane shakes Penobscot Bay in the midst of an idyllic summer. 

And after the storm passes, the island is left quiet and changed, sea salt decorating the window panes like frost, and giant trees downed, uprooted, creating caverns of ancient treasure at their roots – arrowheads and pottery older than the trees themselves – and fallen skywalks of their leafy trunks. It’s changed, but it’s beautiful. Sometimes the calm after the storm is the point. Sometimes, the beauty is in the mess.

This year, I’ve found that the higher the elevation, the deeper I can breathe, the clearer my head, and the lighter my thoughts. The higher the elevation, the more likely I am to feel my breath rasp, purposefully, in my lungs, my legs burn from some small effort, and my shoulders and jaw unclench. Summer in the mountains is a verdant escape. The soft flutter of aspen leaves is hypnotically relaxing, the fall of a hidden waterfall riotously gorgeous. Birds call. Marmots chirp. It’s a constant conversation.

I’ve never particularly enjoyed being cold. I don’t ski. I don’t ice skate. I don’t actively seek out toboggan hills. But there’s something about winter that throws everything into sharp relief. Maybe it’s the annual realization that Nature is always bigger than we are, that we can acclimate, adapt, adjust… but in the end, we’re only visitors, ultimately headed back inside. Much like standing outside on a night deep with stars, winter reminds us that we’re perfectly small and insignificant, both connected to the universe in an elemental way, and also, comfortingly, a footnote to it.

In the winter, the air is sharp in our lungs before we begin to move within it. We are a series of contradictions. The cold air against our faces, the tops of our ears, the tips of our noses, waking us up, but bundled in practiced layers, our core is warm. Winter is a reminder of everything we can’t control, and conversely everything we can.

Recently, I was alone on a winter’s morning in a quiet wood. I had with me a borrowed dog, whose incarnate joy was soul affirming. My feet made a soft, muted sound as I walked, the feel of softened pinecones giving way under my boots. The frosted ground, the fallen trees, sharing their treetop secrets with the forest floor, brought me back to A Time of Wonder. 

The world is loud. Our lives our loud. Our heads are loud. Sometimes, in the middle of it all, we need to go to where the storm has passed, and take a quiet walk in a cold, winter wood, and wrap ourselves in being simply a tiny spot of quiet joy in an endless universe.