I just freeze every time you see through me in the electric blue (week 2 of life in a pandemic for a 40-year old).
The snippets of joy that skitter through shadows and sunlight.
There may be families that are getting through this pandemic without occasionally - or frequently - wondering around in some combination of diaper, underwear, and/or shirtlessness. Those families may exist, and I pity them.
A beautiful blonde mom carries an infant while hiking outside in the rain with her toddler-age boy.
A pandemic at 40 years old.
I caught her stealing; a theft of great proportions and grand in its scope. What was it? You ask. Before I answer that question, let me answer the who. She stole from me. She stole from her daughter. She stole from her three sons. She stole from us all, and she did so with a mischievous grin as she took her thieved seconds and held a cup of coffee in one hand while she slinked on the edge of the bed, thumbing through A Gentleman in Moscow with the other hand, savoring the product of her criminality: those seconds that belonged to her. I alerted the children immediately, and we all descended upon her to reclaim the precious gift of herself that she had taken from us. May her penitence be real, may her future actions may not be so callous, may she remember that her time is to be divided amongst the treasures that are us.
She takes over the kitchen, Charlize Theron action star-style, flitting from cupboard to cupboard, nursing simultaneously, pouring, measuring, scooping, cleaning, dancing, making magic with limited ingredients.
She works her way through A Gentleman in Moscow, a work I consider one of my favourite fictional works of the last decade, and for which I am grateful to my sister-in-law Meilani for introducing me to.
She wrestles with her sons. Ferociously, fiercely, and my heart sings as I watch her taunt and annihilate them. “Because I’m your mom, and I’m the best wrestler in the family!” she screams at them. Or at least that’s how I remember it.
She plays with a boy outside, a three-year old. It is raining. They chortle and giggle while making a stew out of seashells and stones. It rains harder. They laugh. There is a dance, or a fight. The laughing continues.
She wears her blue flannel. There is something about this blue flannel that makes her eyes light up and my wandering gaze linger longer. A Scandinavian goddess in blue, in rough, playful, je ne sais quo blue. She is beautiful, but better and beyond that, she is pretty.
She makes food, a great deal of food, and it is mostly delicious food. Sometimes it is simply food. Saturday lunch was one of those, and pho is not a favourite in our family, though I stood steadfastly for her in the face of enemy children by reminding them that it is, in fact, calories. And they need calories in order to survive. She was feeling less upbeat about the strength of my support, and at one point referred to me as “Mr. Switzerland.”
She watched my brother - her brother-in-law - perform a live set of tunes and talking on Instagram. I love the ways that musicians such as him have continued finding ways to connect and keep making melodies. And I love how tuned in she is to catching every performance he gives.
She is generally up before me in the morning, and one of her favourite sneaky little things to do is to snap a picture of me and whatever child happens to be mashed up against me still sleeping. It is a strange and comforting realization every time I see another snapshot and realise I am with someone who loves me enough, even in the middle of a pandemic quarantine, to take my picture while I’m sleeping. This goes back many years, and perhaps she will someday receive acclaim for this photo series. To some, this might sound creepy, and honestly, if it was someone random who came in through the window to take pictures of me sleeping, then I would be less comfortable with it. But it’s her. I am glad she is who she is, and illuminates small moments over the looping waterfall of time.
Her hair looks extra pretty on rainy day, and I told her; but it is not my telling you that I told her that is important, though it is important to let people know when they are extra pretty in some way. It is the fact that standout moments need to be preserved in some way for the libraries of time, and the way the rain and the wind played with her locks and laid them down diagonally across her forehead as we walked outside in bluster was a dance that will never be enacted in exactly the same repetitions again. Her hair is pretty tomorrow, but I can see it is different, a different pretty, and I may choose to not write it about then. But I have today.
The euphoria of a late-evening cup of coffee, and the accompanying strange excitement at late-night paper sorting in front of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
I look at her cheekbones, the smile, a radiance; inimitable presence and humor, and I sigh in quiet happiness. It is a day amidst a cycle of days, and I am grateful.
She made nachos on a Saturday night; we snuggled in and watched a film with a fire going, and it was a fitting end to the second week of our pandemic. Life is strange, life is normal, but we have to be appreciative that life simply exists, and that we can count ourselves in that number. And let us remember and work to build hope, find solutions, and create community in the ways we can right now with those who are struggling. Those whose struggles are greater than ours, and those who are lesser. I do not take for granted that I am in this with people I not only love, but like.
I do not take that for granted.
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Coming up on the end of Week 2, we are smelly, loud, and…and alive. For that we sing.
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