All this gabble about "opening up the states" is exhausting me. Given the numbers of people who are still dying, such a push is, of course, completely irresponsible. But even beyond the public health risk, I wrestle with a private fear about climbing up out of the manhole. What will it be like to actually start planning for the future again?
Today I'll be working on the Frost Place curriculum, which I guess you could call planning for the future, given that the conference will still be happening this summer and I have to reconfigure it as an online entity. But really the task feels more like planning not to drown. In the meantime, I received an email from the woman who usually cuts my hair, saying that she's tentatively starting to schedule appointments for June and would I like to make one? In a mere six weeks, a person I don't live with might have her hands in my hair? I tried not to shudder. Instead, I answered her cheerfully and penciled in an appointment on my calendar. The date she suggested was wide open.
I think we'll have sunshine today, maybe even a speck of warmth. I'll hang clothes on the line and inspect my various garden plots, and try to retune my mind to the here-and-now. Yesterday I watched a female cardinal bob and hop in the neighbor's dogwood tree. I watched the neighbor children putter with their skateboards and hula hoops and listened to a squirrel lambaste my cat. I braised pork chops in a lime marinade and sipped at a small glass of cognac.
Today, maybe a few new leaves will unfold on the maples. Maybe a pileated woodpecker will swoop and scream among the crowns. Maybe I'll sit on the front stoop with a cup of tea, wrapping my hands around it for warmth, not exactly shivering in the thin northern sunlight.
1 comment:
It is a frosty GORGEOUS spring morning here. School has started up again, and many of my students seem grateful to be back in the fold. The elusive ones are still hiding.
I share the ambivalence/fear of re-opening. I keep looking at the curve, knowing that the same numbers will appear on the right hand, unseen-yet, downward side as are already there on the left hand, upward slope (does no one understand the "normal curve"?). And NH's curve is still rising. I don't want to become paralyzed with fear -- after all, as my cancer surgeon told me when I left the hospital, "Don't let cancer worry you. You might get hit by a truck when you walk out the door." But I do have respect for science and Nature and unknown viruses, as well as for runaway trucks. Does anyone want to be the last one wheezing in a lonely hospital room? My husband does all the shopping and errands, so I am out of practice. The few times I do go out, I sense a little panic attack lurking in the background, which is weird because I have never had a panic attack. I do know that the first time back--at school, at church, at "an event"--will be fraught with some crazy physical and emotional reactions. But until then, here on my little island, my dance card is full!
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