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.

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.