Why I'm Feeling This Way

 

When I was younger I slept deeply no matter what position I was in. 

I could sleep on my back, or on my stomach, or with my head propped up on the too-high arm of a sofa when I fell asleep during a television movie. After a few minutes or a few hours or even an entire night (barring nursing sessions and child nightmares) I would wake up, stretch, and walk back into my life. 

As I have gotten older, I have discovered that aging bones and tendons mean that too much time in one position leave me ossified rather than refreshed. If I sleep on my back all night, for example, I can barely stretch my creaking skeleton back into usable form. I roll my creaky shoulders and achy feet like a ballet dancer just to walk down the hall to the bathroom.

So instead of sleeping like a log, I sleep like a rotisserie chicken: left side, stomach, right side, back, left side, stomach...and so on for the hours I'm in bed. Sleep has become lighter and more easily interrupted.

You may think that I'm complaining, but I honestly I am not. In fact, I would say that having to change positions during the night is a delightful benefit of old-ish age. 

When I wake up in the night and realize I am curled into a fetal left side heap of tightened knees and sleep-needled hands, I make a quarter turn and stretch completely out, toes over the end of the bed and fingers curled around the top of my pillow.

It is the most delicious feeling, knowing I will rest easy and stretched between cool sheets. The pain in my hips that woke me is almost magically relieved and I flex my feet and smile just because I can. It is a fresh start during a night that has become intolerably painful. 

This morning, as I put on my pearls and lit a candle for the unity of our nation, I tentatively flexed my feet. 

All of my muscles suddenly relaxed and I smiled.

A World Turned Upside Down: A Thrill of Hope

O Holy Night has never been my favorite Christmas song. 

Oh, it's beautiful if it's done absolutely perfectly. The hushed opening crescendo-ing up and up until it bursts into splendor--magnificent! But the chances it will be done perfectly are slim. Most singers can reach the opening notes, a few good sopranos can reach the mid-part of the song when we FALL on our KNEES to HEAR the angel VOICES. Rare, though, is the belter who can confidently reach the E-natural of the NIIIIIIGHT, and even fewer can reach the G-natural of the NIIIIIIIIIIIIGT DIVINE, before shushing back down to the night when He was born. 

I've accompanied this song maybe a thousand times in my life, and every single time I've sympathetically dreaded that G natural. 

This year, though, I have this song on mental repeat. I sing it to myself on my morning walk, delusionally confident no one is seeing me in my ratty work-out clothes. I hum it as I wash the pans in which I've baked peppernuts and combined cereals for party mix. I mouth the words in the shower, and as I wrap presents. 

They are my end-of-year anthem for 2020, because dear ones, we are going to make it. Even as the noose of numbers tighten around us, and friends and loved ones test positive, I feel it: 

A thrill of hope. 

Did you sob as you saw the first health worker being vaccinated? I did. And I sobbed again when my Lovely Girl #2, a frontline doctor with high-risk health issues, posted the picture of her own arm being jabbed. Every vaccination picture of those health workers, who must be so tired and so sad, made me cry.

A thrill of hope.

When the first of my immediate family let us know he had tested positive in spite of scrupulous precautions, but then emerged with only manageable symptoms, I began to unclench my jaw 

A thrill of hope.

When the political signs all but disappeared in Small Town and I began to think we may survive with our democracy threatened but not destroyed. 

A thrill of hope. 

It doesn't mean we are somehow back to the Before, of course. We have so very much work still to do, to keep ourselves and others safe and to move forward to a more communicative, more-inclusive us on the heels of so much division. 

We will never forget the ones who did not make it through the pandemic, and the scars on our businesses, our schools, our psyches, and our confidence will never disappear although they will inevitably fade. 

But it's there, that thrill of hope, and we can hit the high G with confidence.

A weary world rejoices.

We Gather Together, Apart

 

One Thanksgiving pie

In any other year, the very thought that I would sit down at 9 o'clock on Thanksgiving morning to write a blog post would send me into peals of hysteria-edged laughter. 

Thanksgiving is my favorite day of the year, as I've noted in this space every single year. I love the season, I love the food, I love the lack of commercialization as vendors leap over this holiday to get to Christmas. And most of all, I love that for as long as I can remember, my extended family has gathered to celebrate the day. 

For the better part of three decades that gathering took place at the House on the Corner as my parents, all my siblings and their families, and any other un-familied friends I could gather in would pack the house for hugs and laughs and turkey and all the pie we could eat. When the expanding family outgrew the house we moved the celebration to a college meeting room, then to a church fellowship hall. We began alternating hosting duties with Much Older Sister in a different part of the state, and last year there were dozens and dozens of best-beloveds hugging and squealing and passing around new babies.

The event was not without its glitches--one year my mixer gave up the ghost before the potatoes were mashed, and another year the turkeys weren't cooked through at the appointed eating time--but it didn't ruin the day for even a second. 

We were together, and that's all that mattered. 

This year is, well, this year. 

Husband and I will sit down to turkey in our dining room table with only two Boys, both of whom quarantined and tested before they started home. The other two Boys are with their own nuclear families in their own homes. My siblings are likewise siloed with their immediate family members, and my youngest brother is cooking a full dinner for Dad and his wife. 

There is one turkey, not six. One pie rather than 13. Quantities scaled down from 60 servings to four, plus leftovers.

It could not be more different from the Thanksgiving I hold in my heart. I should have been up at 5:30 to sauté the onions and celery for the dressing, mentally checking off when the sweet potatoes needed to come out of the oven and when the green bean casserole needed to go in.

I'm sad, of course, that I won't see my Dad, or be with Baby Wonderful for his first major holiday. I'll miss the almost tactile swell of love that gusts in with the arrival of each family.

But, oh, you cannot imagine the gratitude with which I am counting my blessings. Maybe it takes a year like this, when we're all so close to the precipice, to be able to articulate the causes of our joy.

The family, today all safely tucked in their own homes. We cannot take tomorrow for granted, but today...

The friends from every age of my life, who this year have been so precious in the reconnections and checking-ins. 

The technology, without which we would not have seen or heard our dear ones. 

The new tone of hope in our national discussions, a time in which our elected leaders are urging us to be kind and think of each other. 

The selfless, beyond-exhausted service of our health workers, our teachers, and especially our minimum-wage store clerks and farm workers. 

Every single person I see wearing a mask and acknowledging wordlessly that we are in this struggle together. 

I could fill the internet with the my list of blessings, even in 2020. All of those who last year I assumed I would see today are counting their own blessings around their own small tables. 

And next year, God willing, rather than gathering apart we will once again gather together. 

World Turned Upside Down: That Was Unexpected

 

Well, no one can say the current epoch has been without surprises. 

I mean, there are some bombshells that are less surprising to many of us than they have been to others. Your county has been systematically ignoring the mask mandate and you've been posting pictures of your birthday parties and family reunions on Facebook, and now you are shocked (SHOCKED, I tell you!) that schools are going from in-person to remote as far as the eye can see? Huh. You believe your cousin's chiropractor's dog-walker's claim that this is no worse than a cold, then are flabbergasted that your knee replacement is going to have to wait because there are no hospital beds even for heart attack and stroke victims? Science is shaking its head at your amazement.

But once in a while there is a moment of true surprise during this pandemic. 

Last Saturday, for example, was grocery pick-up day. That was not a surprise. I've been picking up groceries since the second wave began (or rather, the latest punch of the first wave) and folks, if there's one wonderful thing that has come out of this malarkey it is grocery pick-up. 

I loooooove it. 

No masking up and holding my breath as I try to reach around the unmasked guy who is not only breathing on all the Honeycrisps but is also touching each one before putting it in his cart. No seeing how many people are spewing death out of their faceholes because they do not know how to properly cover their noses. 

No, curbside pick-up means I place my order online, avoiding the kind of impulse purchases that have led to a bottle of clam juice languishing in my pantry for three years. (Why even?) Then I drive to the store during my pre-appointed pick-up time and someone brings the bags right out to my already-opened trunk. 

It's like having magic elves a computer click away. 

Sadly, Small Town does not have curbside pick-up, so the magic elves live a 35 minute drive away, but that hasn't been a problem because even the round-trip is faster the amount of time I would normally spend doing my grocery shopping, and the lack of clam-juice purchases more than compensates for the gas expense. 

Saturday's shopping trip was not the well-oiled experience I've previously had, though. Husband and I pulled into the pick-up zone well into our scheduled one-hour slot only to get a phone call from the store. "We're running really late, and it's going to be at least an hour before your groceries are ready. Could you go run your other errands or something?"

Husband will tell you that I did not react well to this. In my defense, I had not had my morning coffee yet, but I also will point out that killing time in someone else's town is no longer the grand adventure it was seven months ago. Yes, there's a yarn shop next door but am I going in? Not likely. 

So we drove around for 10 minutes while I fumed and pouted, then we parked back in our spot and I fumed and pouted for another 55 minutes while pointing out that there were only three spots occupied in the 10-car delivery area, and that I could have done the dadgummed shopping myself in less time, and what's the point of life anyway? 

I was a glorious, sunshine-filled companion for a full hour. Then the attendant brought out the bags of groceries, handed me my receipt and hot-footed it back into the store before I could look at the receipt and realize that a full third of my order had not been fulfilled because it was out of stock. At that point Husband suggested maybe we could drive through the Sonic for some coffee--"That might make you feel better?"

Finally we got home, Husband went back to the office to finish a project, and I started carrying in the bags. 

There, at the bottom of the piles of plastic bags, was a surprise. 

Instead of the six bags of frozen Brussels sprouts I had ordered was a cold 12-pack of Smirnoff Seltzer. 

Someone else's day had just been completely ruined, but mine was made. In my follow-up evaluation to the company I pointed out that it would have been nice if the surprise had been some form of chocolate, since the QueenBee family adheres to the "lips that touch alcohol will never touch mine" maxim but we do love our chocolate. Still, it was a lovely thought.

Surprise! And condolences to the recipient of the Brussels sprouts. I hope you love them as much as I would have.

I'm Choosing Hope

 

The pearls are for RBG.

The button is for smart, hardworking, windmill-tilting women.

The "I Voted" sticker is saved from when I voted in advance. 

The hope is for all of us.

Dear Baby Wonderful: The World Is Still Upside Down, But Toes

 

Toes!

Dear Baby Wonderful,

Well, well, well. I was truly hoping that if I closed my eyes tight and didn't blog during this weird, unexpected time that someday we would be able to gloss over the jaw-dropping weirdness of the months since you were born. We've had the pandemic, of course, and that has divided the world into Maskers and Idiots Non-Maskers. And we've had the presidential election, of course, and that has divided the nation into Red and Blue. We've had the two-day October ice storm that has divided absolutely no one because we can all agree that THIS IS INSANITY. 

So, business as usual for 2020. 

But over the weekend I was able once again to access the panacea that puts all of the 2020 madness into perspective, the healing balm that is the best medicine for what ails me. What ails me specifically is the ever-present low-grade rumble of fear that alternates with frequent spikes of terror, and the balm to this terror is baby toes.

Last weekend, when your mom and dad needed to focus on someone other than you (I know! How dare they!) I got to spend two days in Baby Nirvana. 

Okay, okay, it had only been two weeks since I had seen you. There's currently a self-indulgent, tone-deaf meme circulating that is based on a tweet by a person who's famous for being famous. "After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time," she wrote.

Well. If that doesn't put into perspective the rift between the haves and have-nots, I don't know what does, but it turns out our family is among the haves and our private island was the House on the Corner. Two weeks ago, properly tested and quarantined, all of your immediate family of loved ones gathered for the first time since last Christmas. So many uncles! So much passing-around-of-the-baby! It was as if the universe had suddenly dropped into proper alignment for the first time in seven months. I spent the weekend nibbling your neck and patty-caking your feet together. And bouncing. Heavenly days, how you love to bounce.

I was still in the happiness hangover from that weekend when, last Friday, I was called to Granny-Nanny once more.

You had changed, just in those two weeks. You are not yet ready to crawl, but your rolling game is stellar and has become a way to get from Point A to Point B. You still like to be held on my lap in a position that gives you an upside-down view of the world, but now you very nearly have the six-pack abs to pull back up into a sitting position. And you are more and more able to communicate exactly what you want: It makes me laugh when you're done with sitting on the floor, thank you very much, and stiffen your arms and growl.

Perhaps my next-to-favorite moment is when we tussle over who should eat those delectable baby toes. I nibble on them and you laugh, then you grab them back and stuff them into your own mouth.

You have the reputation of being a terrible napper, though, so the very best time is when you've fallen asleep as I hold you and I know that there's no reason I need to put you in the crib. Then, with my iPad playing The Great British Baking Show on mute beside us, we rock and snooze and I know I'm living my very best life. 

This dreadful year has nearly ruined my faith in a large swath of my fellow human beings, and we still have a couple months to go before we can tear that page off the calendar and burn it ceremonially. But if the Pandora's Box that has been 2020 has included pandemic, politics, and pandemonium as its defining features, it's also included you. 

Baby toes always win.

Much love,

Grandma QueenBee

World Turned Upside Down: Wake Up and Smell the Toothpaste

 

Pandemic sister selfie

This is my morning routine: I wake up, get out of bed, stumble to the bathroom, sniff my toothpaste, ask Google to play the news while I brush my teeth ...

Yes, in another of those I-never-thought-I'd-be-doing-this moments, taking the cap off my toothpaste and inhaling deeply has become a part of the first moments of every day, and appreciating the heady aroma of Sensodyne Extra-Whitening is always followed by a single thought--"Oh, thank God. I still have my sense of smell."

Life in a pandemic means that self-assessment for symptoms is never-ending. Is that tickle in my throat a seasonal allergy or Covid? Am I feeling tuckered out because I just helped a Boy move ten gazillion boxes into his new digs or because that guy who walked way too close to me in the grocery story yesterday should have worn his mask UP OVER HIS NOSE?

(I apologize for the all-caps last phrase, but geeminy. If you have on a mask but are still expelling your aerosols through that enormous uncovered honker, I will not give you an wink of responsible solidarity but will mutter curses at you under my breath. Sheesh.)

Anyway, I have never appreciated smells more, because loss of smell and taste seem to be the most definitive of the Covid symptoms. Fever? Not good, but could be a lot of things. Sore throat? Ditto, and dittos also to runny nose, gastrointestinal symptoms, and nearly all the additional multitude of Very Bad (Or Perfectly Fine) Signs. The exceptions are the absence of taste or smell. If you notice these you should hie thee to the closest testing station.

The upside of having these two distinguishing symptoms is that I am really, really appreciating those senses these days. It's ironic, honestly, that they were often the senses I most wanted to damp down. If you've ever had a rotten potato in the spud bin, you know what I'm talking about. Now? Hey, that mushy potato smells TERRIBLE!  Yay! And the skunks who live on the hill seem to have visited a neighbor's dog! Hooray!

The Boy who was moving will now be at home in the city that is home to Much Younger Sister and practically within spittin' distance of the home of Much Older Sister. MOS welcomed Boy to their neck of the woods by bringing over the most most wonderful breakfast last week on unpacking day. 

We sat outside in lawn chairs, well-distanced, and balanced our plates on our laps as we removed our masks to dig in to breakfast casserole, the most decadent coffeecake ever concocted, and steaming cups of coffee. In the Before days I would have appreciated the food and the company but on that day? Every bite tantalized my nose before it went into my mouth, then the sweet-salty-savory-bitter reminded me that I was alive and well.

And truly, isn't this a gift during an awful time? The reassurance that we're still among the uninfected is savory and delicious and we are able to hold our breath and take a quick selfie with ones we love before we social distance again. 

Even with the skunks and rotten potatoes, I'll take it with gratitude.