taps microphone
Hello?
Anyone there?
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I'm trying to imagine an alternate universe right now, one where we decided to have a Spring Break staycation for no particular reason; didn't feel like skiing or camping, just decided to hang out at home and chill all together. I can't quite make myself imagine it vividly enough to enjoy myself.
Yesterday I made my last trip to a grocery store, not a big one, a small neighborhood natural-foods store, so I could stock up on the last few items for my freezer. I didn't empty any shelves, but took one thing here and one thing there; the exception was milk, which I'd just that morning remembered you could freeze; that memory was why I decided on the "one last trip."
I came home and was beset by anxiety for a few hours about having done it. Even if I don't set foot outside my house for the next fourteen days, I think I'll still have little waves of anxiety about it.
Tomorrow it will be fourteen days since I worked the polls on Super Tuesday. Thursday it will be fourteen days since the family went to the Children's Theatre. Saturday it will be fourteen days since I last had breakfast out. Sunday it will be fourteen days since H and I took four teens to see Twelfth Night at the Guthrie. Ticking them off one by one.
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Whenever I actually spend time working on something that theoretically will Help Us Get Through This, I feel better while I'm doing it. Early this morning I did laundry, extra focus on the towels and on the gloves we've worn in public places, and the scarf I used to grab all the door handles. Later I went downstairs and took inventory of the freezer. Then I made lunch for us to eat together as a family, Mark coming down the stairs with his coffee cup to sit with us, almost as if it were dinnertime.
I thought that would be a comfort to me, having us all together; but it seemed only to remind me today how very disturbed we are: we never sit down together for lunch on a weekday, I don't even sit down with the kids; I don't eat what they eat; the teenagers usually make frozen pizza or quesadillas and I usually eat leftovers or a salad. And here we were all six of us, Mark and me and the four kids still living at home, eating waffles and sausage and a sort of peach topping I made out of an ancient bag of homemade peach pie filling that I excavated from the freezer.
FIFO, y'all.
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I hope that after a few days it will start to feel like a new normal, and I'll cease being startled by it. We'll start doing school again on Monday, a week away, somehow or another; we won't go to H's, but we'll do something; I'll enlist the teenagers, hers and mine, to work out some kind of remote voice chat thing.
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I feel kind of lame about my attempt to sit down and write a blog post. I hoped I would write something different: either something a little more inspiring, or else something that might actually help someone, information and recommendations; or a meditation on this long unchosen Lent we face, that will stretch on beyond Easter; or, I don't know, almost anything else besides what I'm actually writing about, which looks like a rather dry accounting of being home for one whole day with my family (most of it) but it's really not about that at all; in fact it's about a wrenching sorrow that I'm tamping down and trying to keep below the surface, a sorrow for missed chances, for lost data of all things, for future lives everywhere that spool out like threads, the frayed end tucked under the few turns that are left, not enough length to hold the seam.
bearing blog 