Craving the Familiar: Notes from the Pandemic

From my side yard. 

I.

An acre of land surrounded the house where I lived. Every garden on that land was one that I planted. By now I would have had some pots of herbs growing inside and I would have had them ready to go outside soon. I would have had some containers of vegetables started too. Delicate green shoots pushed up through that loamy dirt. Fragrant. Stems that would thicken. Later there would be tomatoes.

The side patio was slate and lined with wide, curved garden beds. A bird bath Rob and I bought years ago in Maine sat in a small garden of hydrangeas. A copper bath birds came to swim and splash in. The many Mother Day plants I received are still growing in those many gardens.

Astilbe.
Butterfly bushes.
Crocuses.
Daffodils.
Delphinium.
Hostas.
Hydrangeas.
Lavender.
Peony.
Shasta daisies.
Tulips.

Nothing says miracle like a perennial.

Surrounding the side and back lawns were trees thick enough for bears and deer to roam, home to any number of uncounted birds. My back deck was large and comfortable. I painted there. Served family meals there. Listened to and watched birds wing from branch to branch, tree to tree. I spent every season outside there. Even in winter, Rob cleared the path of snow to the grill. Even in winter as it snowed, I would photograph from that deck, aiming the lens of my camera towards the woods.

II.

This is the first spring in the new place I live and it is industrial in design. No real gardens. A small slice of lawn, overly planned. Antiseptic. What was I thinking when I moved here?

III.

A need arises within me as I finish the 6th week of staying home. This pandemic has me craving the familiar.

The way the third stair from the top creaked.
The way birds made nests on the light fixtures.
How light settled and silvered the leaves of old growth trees.
The way I knew a storm was coming by hearing the birds grow industrious.
The hum of the generator as it tested itself every Sunday morning.
The way silence settled like an old friend each evening.

Nothing says safety like home.

#SOL20 - Finding Meaning: Notes from the Pandemic

I. 

"I'm trying to see this place even as I'm walking through it," is the conclusion to Catherine Pierce's poem, "Planet." That closing line has stayed with me the last few days. It expresses the way I have felt this last month. Not so much a stranger, but rather one who needs to better understand the overly familiar in some new ways. 

Pandemics shift the familiar, not by fundamentally changing what we see, but rather by changing who we are as we see. It's not the landscape that has been changing. Rather, how we see the landscape has been changing due to what we now are able to see. 

It is those new insights that I want to write about today.

II. 

Emily Esfahani Smith (2017), the author of The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed With Happiness tells us that it is in searching for meaning that solace is created.  She writes, 

"When we devote ourselves to difficult but worthwhile tasks...our lives feel more worthwhile...The most important parts of life require hard work and sacrifice...Only by facing challenges head-on can we truly find meaning in our lives" (p. 36). 

Years ago when Rob told me to live brilliantly. I first thought it was how I did tasks. Be the best mother. Live artistically. Teach well. Brilliantly was the driver of that sentence. 

As grief lifted, I began to see flickers of new insight. The verb, live,  seemed to be the most important part of the sentence. 

Live. 

How we live. 

How we respond to life is what matters most. 

It wasn't what I was doing that mattered as much as it was how I lived.

What we will make of this present moment is defining in many ways.  The question I wonder for myself is: In what ways will I compose better versions of myself?

#SOL20 - Exponential Threat: Notes from the Pandemic

This.

#SOL20 - Liminal Space: Notes from the Pandemic

Memory is the Diary We all Carry (M.A. Reilly)

"...memory, including cultural memory, is always permeated and shot through with forgetting. In order to remember anything one has to forget; but what is forgotten is not necessarily lost forever” (Assmann 2010, pp. 105–6). 

I.

After Rob died I could not see a possible future. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I was stuck, waiting for him to rise, like Lazarus, so that our lives might resume. Our lives, like many who have wed, were entwined. Rob was my partner for nearly my whole adult life. I did not know then that what rested in my hands all along was responsibility for my very life. 

I was white noise.

Static.

A boat slipped from its mooring.

II.

We want to share possible futures, as such imaginings are reassuring.  Even now, four years after my husband’s death I have forgotten much, and yet I remember the possible futures we dreamed.

Three dominant memories remain:

·      The small city college life.

·      The wild coastal west of Ireland.

·      A small farmhouse in Vermont.

III.

A pandemic calls into question any possible future. Fear creates liminal zones; spaces suspended between remembering and forgetting. We stutter-step through the days, harboring ourselves in our homes as best we can. At night we imagine those suffering.

Not far from here, people are dying. Mostly they are dying alone—sealed away from family and friends. Even four years later, the memory remains of holding Rob’s right hand between the two of mine as the pauses between his breaths lengthened until he breathed no more. I needed him to know, if by no other means than touch, that I went as far as I could with him. I was present.

Not far from here there are people struggling to breathe, unaided by machines. At each hospital, doctors and nurses are anxious, waiting for the promised shipments of masks, gowns, gloves and the blessed ventilators that do not arrive.

IV.

The President of the United States is responsible for these hardship, sorrows, and deaths. 

He told a worried nation to not worry. He told a nation that COVID-19 was a Democratic hoax, just like Russian collusion and the impeachment were hoaxes.  He told us that there were just 15 cases and soon there would be zero. He told us the pandemic would go away in April like magic. He urged people to mingle and to go to work sick. He urged people to fill pews in churches on Easter.  

He worried more about the economy than those people a few miles from here who struggle to breathe. He is deadly because he filters all events through a narrow, single lens: what effect do these happenings have on the life of Donald Trump? Nothing more matters to him. 

Nothing. 

He is neither boat, nor mooring.

V.

A pandemic is unforgiving.  Our responses to the uncertainty reveals what we value and fail to value.

In the years to come we will not remember all the details of these days. We may turn to records and even then, the recollection will be filtered by how we have lived. Many details will fade.  

Yet what we have forgotten will not be lost. The forgotten will find voice in the kind of country that gets built from the ashes.

Work Cited:

Assmann A. (2010). Canon and archive. In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. A Erll, A Nunning, pp. 97–107. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. 

#SOL20: Two Times: Notes from the Pandemic

Sleep (M.A. Reilly)

Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.  Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

I. 

I didn't mean to do this. 

I actually hardly noticed at all, until the skin on the wrist where I normally wore the watch grew dry and tight from so much hand washing.  It was the dry skin that signaled a passing of time.

On the first day of self-imposed isolation, I left my watch sitting next to the bed. Eleven days later, I can say that it hasn't been back on my wrist since. 

II. 

Pandemics reorient us in time in ways similar to what grief does to a body.  In each situation we attempt to lessen the entropy that is felt by heightening what the body feels.

It was body time, not clock time that oriented me to the world. 

III.

After the work meetings now conducted by phone or through ZOOM, or Google Hangout—I meditate.

Dinner is over.

Dishes are done.

The house settles like a contented cat around me.

There is nothing but a single word I learned to chant four years ago, until that word like time and space dissolves.

#SOL20 - The Obscene: Notes from the Pandemic

After (M.A. Reilly)

Tonight, I caught up on news.  Panic seemed to rule, as did the obscene. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told FOX News TV watchers that he preferred death over life if that meant getting people "back to work." Patrick told commentator Tucker Carlson,

“So my message is that let’s get back to work. Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it. And those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves, but don’t sacrifice the country. Don’t do that. Don’t ruin this great America.”

Patrick equates getting back to work, which in this case would likely create thousands and thousands of deaths, with getting back to living. He makes a dangerous proposition, one no one in service to the people ought to ever make, sound like a patriotic gesture that a John Wayne character might make in a film.

But this is not a film. Like it or not, this is a pandemic and we cannot control it by bluffing or bellowing like an idiot full of sound and fury. Patrick should step down. He is reckless, unAmerican, and his advice will get us killed.

Patrick's suggestion that America go back to work and ignore the Center for Disease Control's advice that the "best way to prevent illness is to avoid being exposed to this virus" reinforces the President's rambling nonsense about the cure being worse than the virus.  Trump announced in a two-hour blab-fest that he would re-open America for business in “weeks,” not months. 

So what happens if Americans go back to work like the President and Patrick are suggesting? What happens if Americans thumb their nose at COVID-19 and John Wayne their way back to work in order to boost the imploded economy?

See all that blood-red? That reflects the percentage of people who would likely be infected by COVID-19 by July 1, 2020 if we did as the President and the Lt. Gov. tell us we should do: Stop staying home and go back to work. Without control measures, the outbreak might sweep across most of the country by early May. By mid-May, it is estimated that new cases of the virus would reach 500,000 per day. 

The America that Patrick claimed to love would be no more. The economy would not have recovered and would now be in even worse shape as the country would be faced with out of control health needs and too few options to actually treat the sick.

More people would die because the President and his crony thought tough talk would effect a virus.

Patrick's question,  ‘Are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ is faulty. There is no individual in this scenario. His actions to return to work will affect scores and scores of others who will affect more and more people until the map of the United States is blood-red and our faulty decisions bleed that red across Canada and Mexico and from there it just travels on and on. 

That is the nature of a pandemic. It doesn't respect borders or border walls. It behaves as viruses behave looking for opportunistic ways to proliferate.

The advice from Patrick and the edict from Trump represent the forward way for a pandemic to claim a globe.