It is what, forevermore, in the dark of this time shall rise (week 2 of life in a pandemic for a 43-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 pandemic at 43 years old.
My imagination remains colorblind vivid; the only entity that can fight it for supremacy is my memory.
Formal schooling continues in a form; I cannot avoid availing every opportunity to engage my captive fellow students in dialogs about the world’s knowledge; a list which includes but is in no way limited to, this week, Othello, Latin, poetry, mathematics, Carl Linnaeus, and stop motion filmmaking. We have a giant whiteboard, for which I am grateful.
My patience weakens and I fight; oh I am fighting and it is a valiant fight, but there are moments (sometimes many moments) where I hang my head in defeat and vow to strike up the fight again. I shall overcome.
I hope I remember how to drive a car again. You may take from that statement that I am not is what is known as an “essential worker.” Therefore, I do important things from home, and at home. But my time driving to mountains and forests and oceans is on sabbatical. As it is for the world.
I FaceTimed with my niece; a human who is unable to speak words that I understand, but whose glubbing, drooling, and general state of being has captured all four chambers of my heart already in her shallow months of existence.
Three-year old boy clutching treasures found in woods.
I took a walk in our woods, and a tree came down. Not on me, it had happened at some point in my absence, and I don’t know the last time I saw this tree alive. But now it gone forever, aside from providing nourishment to an ecosystem. #soylentgreen
A chapter and change of an Alice Munro collection while a boy slumbers in my arms; the taking away to a different world.
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At the end of Week 2, we are smelly, loud, and…and alive. For that we sing.
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