A World Turned Upside Down: This Is What Hope Looks Like

 

The folder next to my head is appropriately named.

I sat down this morning to write about the latest pandemic development and realized I had no picture to go with the post. Rather than take a selfie of my current post-workout self I stuck my celebratory sticker right next to a face on my monitor's screensaver. It seems appropriate that the picture is part of a family portrait taken in a moment when I was happy clear down to my bones, just as I was 10 days ago when a nurse jabbed my left arm.

I got my Covid-19 vaccine. 

As it turns out, it is possible to put a timeline on hope, and my clock started ticking at 10:17 a.m. Wednesday, February 10. That's when I masked up and left the house to line up with teachers, aides, and staff in the school district where I accompany the middle school choir. Three weeks from that moment I will get the second shot, then I will wait another two weeks before I begin to cautiously emerge from isolation. 

That second shot will come exactly one year after Baby Wonderful was born, the day we were able to hold and cuddle our hours-old dear one. The next day, as we were on the road back to the House on the Corner, the president addressed the nation concerning a crisis that already was spreading. In the hazy Is-This-True-or-Not world of a year ago, it was hard know how seriously to take his announcement, but then we heard that March Madness had been cancelled.

I turned to Husband: "This could be really bad." 

It has been.

It hasn't just been the constant, low-level worry about whether my children, my father, my beloved siblings and their families, were still healthy. It's also been actively avoiding other people when my Before way of life was built around being with other people. 

Picking up groceries rather than doing my own shopping. Moving my women's group and Bible study meetings to Zoom. Not eating in a restaurant during this entire year. Going back to work at the piano for a few months but realizing that the worry a child would unwittingly infect me was too draining, and taking a leave from that job. Attending church remotely, even after the church re-opened. Teaching piano via Google Meet. Not singing Christmas carols.

Getting to know my grandson by FaceTime and hoping he would recognize my voice when I finally hold him again.

This was not the way I had planned to be a grandmother. 

But then, last night Boy#1 texted us with a question: "Hey, when are you all supposed to get your second Covid shots? We're planning for Baby Wonderful's birthday party." 

We've reached the point where we can begin planning, albeit cautiously, and knowing this gathering is even a possibility is such a hopeful sign. 

Don't think that after a year in which Husband was literally the only other human being I saw for weeks at a time we will immediately go back to our Before behaviors. We'll continue to mask and distance and we'll limit our contacts to friends and family we know are similarly cautious and vaccinated. We'll avoid crowds and handshakes, and it may be years before I am not angry with non-maskers whose disdain for science and disregard of others has been so cavalier. (Your excuses are meeting my upraised open palm.)

The end of this is not even on the horizon yet, but we are vaccinated. 

We have hope.

One Is More Than Enough

 

Before I start today's actual story, I have two prefaces. 

The first is this: I am incurably squeamish about small critters. Even though I am the mother of four sons, I do not enjoy bugs, or snakes, or things that skitter.  I did my best to cover this personality failing when the Boys were little. 

"Oh, look! It's a cute little frog!" I would exclaim in a voice that was too high and a tone that was too quavery. Then I would grit my teeth and accept the frog onto my own palm for what I considered a reasonable amount of time before returning it to nature and fleeing inside to soak my hands in boiling water. 

I am also physically incapable of killing anything that might contain instestinal goo. Just the thought of that ooziness triggers my gag reflex. Step on a cricket? Nope, not happening. Clap a fly to death between my bare hands? I have tried, honestly tried, but without fail the clap veers off to miss the fly by a measurable distance. 

So that is the first preface to this story, and here is the second: Even though the House on the Corner is nearly a century old, in the 34 years we have sheltered within its walls I have never seen a mouse sheltering inside with us. Oh, I thought I did once, and even blogged it with what turned out to be the exact same clipart I am using today, but the "mouse" turned out to be rampant dust bunnies. 

That's why I was more than a little shocked last week when, as I sat in the recliner working on my latest knitting project and streaming an old "Columbo" episode, an honest-to-gosh mouse sauntered into the television room between me and Peter Falk. Believe me, the murder victim was much less surprised than I was. My room exit rate was in hyperspeed gear.

I texted Husband.

It's like he's never met me before. But God bless him, I married a good man. Within minutes, even in the full throes of tax season, he had locked the office door and was on his way home. Meanwhile, figuring the mouse would be occupied for at least half an hour before Columbo figured out that the baseball manager had clocked the star pitcher with a big chunk of ice and shoved him in the swimming pool (sorry, spoiler alert), I had moved to the kitchen.

And it was there, five minutes later, that I glanced down and strolling through the kitchen door was THE MOUSE! It stopped in the middle of the floor, not three feet away, and took a break.

I know! It's like it knew I am incapable of killing small critters and was taunting me. It's a classic mouse move. 

Sadly, even though I was literally surrounded by sharp weapons, there was no way I was going to impale it with one of my good kitchen knives (see also: intestinal goo) so my mind raced to a more humane method of disposal. 

Moving slowly, one inch at a time, I reached into the cupboard and pulled out a large plastic cup, the kind that holds overpriced Diet Pepsi at football games. The mouse was still sitting there.

I inched toward it, moving at the speed of a sundial. No rodent movement. 

Finally, fully expecting the mouse to dash off at the final moment, I slammed the cup over it. 

It did not dash off. 

Instead, my critter-avoidance instinct kicked in and instead of slamming the cup over the mouse I managed to slam the cup onto the mouse. If you drew a dotted line from its twitchy little nose to the base of its repulsive tail, that's where the edge of the cup smacked down.

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!

There I was, bent double and as trapped by the mouse as it was by that heroic plastic cup. I couldn't pick up the cup, because I wasn't absolutely sure the mouse was dead and I saw that episode of The Crown where the injured elk just wandered around in the queen's forest for days and days. No way was I letting an injured mouse loose. But I also could not bring myself to exert more pressure on the cup for a definite demise. Nope, nope, nope. Not in a million years. 

And at that moment, I heard a key in the back door. Friends, Sleeping Beauty was not nearly as happy to see her Prince pucker up as I was to hear that door open. 

"A little help here?" I croaked from from my bent-double position behind the island. 

Husband, who actually does know me very well, took charge at that point and held on to the cup while I fetched a pair of pliers so that he could grip that disgusting tail, remove the cup, and discover that Mickey was indeed dead as a doornail. 

Later, after he had gleefully sent pictures of the (completely flattened) rodent to the Boys and crowed about what a mighty hunter their mother was, he went back out to the hardware store and came home with six each of three different kinds of traps. Then he Googled the best place to set them (everywhere) and so thoroughly carpeted the ground floor with anti-mouse protection that we may never find every trap.

In the three days since, the traps have seen no activity. I'm hoping this means we're started on the next 34-year mouse-free streak. 

But if we do find anything in the traps, be watching the real estate ads. One episode of intestinal goo is more than enough.

A World Turned Upside Down: The Pandemic Check List

 

Brioche!

So we can all agree that this pandemic has gone on waaaaay longer than we would have preferred, right? We are tired of the masks and take-out restaurant food, and there is a real danger that Netflix may run out of content before we rise to the top of the vaccination wait list. (Not that I'm complaining, but as I have mentioned before, I have four tickets in the let's-kill-grandma lottery and am still a couple of months away from the jab, based on the priority list and the rate doses are arriving in the county.)

I have now moved from "Let's Be Smart About This" to "I AM NOT GOING TO WASTE ALL THOSE MONTHS OF HUGLESSNESS" on my scale of isolation. I no longer go into stores, even masked, and Husband is pretty much the only face I see outside of Zoom calls. (Just an aside: I've concluded hell must be an eternal Zoom meeting made up only of senior citizens. Honestly, I could not have made it through this without seeing the gorgeous faces of my friends, but trying to walk a newbie through the subtleties of the mute button is...challenging.)

The up side of all this isolation is that I am working down my pandemic check list with  surprising efficiency. I'm assuming you all have lists that you wrote out in a panic last March when everything was cancelled and the end was not even over the horizon, much less in sight? 

What were we going to do with al those empty hours stretching out inside the four walls of the house? 

I know, I know. I am so lucky that this appeared to be a problem. Parents of children who have not yet flown the list, I cannot express the depths of my admiration for you. I could not have handled this 20 years ago, when the Boys were all sulky teenagers under our roof. I could not have handled it 15 years ago when the college kids would have been sent home to suck up the WiFi and my sanity. 

But solitude does have a way of allowing one's mind to be super-productive and active in a dire, non-productive way.  What would I do to keep myself on dwelling on the constant, low-grade drumbeat of doom that was present in March of 2020? 

I made a list. 

On that list were things I've wanted to do or learn but never "had the time" for. The irony quotes are, obviously, to indicate that I know very well that we have the time for what we make the time for, and it's all about choices, and blah-blah-blah. But I hadn't done these things, okay? And I wanted to, okay? 

On my list were some items I've already bragged about here. There's the sourdough starter, for example, which was so delightful and yummy that two weeks ago it was flushed down the garbage disposal because ye gods, so much bread. Some day I will have to wear clothes again. There are the aforementioned Zoom calls which had intimidated me but which now are my primary means of communication with the outside world. 

For years I've wanted to learn to do brioche knitting. I'm a fair-to-middlin' knitter and have loved this stitch since the first time I saw its intricate patterns (on both sides!), but in spite of YouTube tutorials and even the purchase of a book, I could not figure it out. This week, thanks to a stocking-stuffer video class from Husband, I have learned to brioche. Hooray! Hats and fingerless mitts for everyone!

But perhaps the list item that delights me most right now has me setting the alarm clock for 7 a.m.: I'm taking an online Zumba class. 

I know! Me, the worst dancer in the world. Me, the person least likely to move out of the recliner. Me, the person whose lack of coordination is legendary. 

Three times a week I push back the coffee table and tune into a Silver Sneakers Zoom session led by Damaris in Miami. She is a Li'l Dumpling-shaped dynamo in Spandex, and she has all of us old people doing cha-cha and meringue and the twist, sporadically yelling "Hey!" and making heart-shapes with our hands as we pump our fists. I am so bad at it, and it is so much fun that I don't even care that I'm bad at it. By the end of the 45 minutes I am sweating profusely and have achieved a self-righteous glow that will last all day. 

So maybe that's the best thing to come of my list--I'm enjoying trying things I'm really bad at. I have enjoyed but am not bragging about my bread baking or my knitting. I knew I could do those things fairly well already. The Zumba class? That was light years out of my comfort zone, and here I am, loving it.

I'm not looking forward nearly as much to the next item on the list. Maybe adding random "Hey!" and hand hearts to attic cleaning would help? I can't wait to see if Husband agrees.