my perfect birthday,
in my mind, pre-corona,
would never be this
(there might be mountains,
a fondue restaurant, views
not in the background)
but with so much time
and simply nowhere to go
love works its way in
my middle’s painting,
a dress hand sewn by my mom,
hand-dipped strawberries
and saved till tonight
my oldest breaks, repairs me
with this card; her words
my perfect birthday
brought to me by a virus
with two gifts: Time. Love.
i don’t fit in here
day forty-one in this house
it could be better
it could be tulips
it could be the longest ride
or the furthest drive
it could be a hike
or getting up before noon
or saying thank you
it could be a plan
a plan, for once, that’s not mine
without complaining
it could be me, free.
sewing patterns, riding bikes,
walking my puppy
or someone knowing
the hard work to make this work
that i always do
instead, i’m a nag
i’m a demon, i’m a bitch
i won’t leave them be
i won’t leave them be
when all they do is leave me
for forty-one days
if i lived alone
i could do what i wanted
(always moving, me)
no one would question
no one would complain, name-call,
or outright ignore
it would just be me
cross-stitching my way through days
one peace at a time
these organized shelves
ready to be fully stocked
with his last paychecks:
they represent us,
our Coronatine journal,
worry turned to work
work we’re still doing
with tiny pics on small screens
working for our kids
our creative kids
with a cat-house-building night
paw prints, love, and all
“new normal” softens
as we make the best of fate
on day thirty-eight
I can do four more days of gratitude, right? Because I am getting anxious to return to my usual bitching.
Day 2 of Quarantine Gratitude. It’s been a pretty rough day, and I’m disappointed by online learning for Newcomers, so this is going to be hard, but I am trying here!
The day begins with this chicken lining the bottom layer of an IKEA/Costco bag beneath the bagels I’d actually been searching for, beneath its canned chicken counterparts, beneath a giant double box of mini-wheats.
This $22 worth of chicken, sitting at the bottom of a bag for five days and not put away into the freezer. This double-grocery trip, gloves and mask on, this bucket of Pinesol and hot water ready on the porch, me carefully removing the packaging, carefully scrubbing down every last item with the cloth rag and my made-up formula, carefully trying not to bring this virus into my house.
This chicken that I asked my oldest daughter to put away.
In my mind is everything: her loss of prom. Of not being in the first and only musical of her life. Of her not lettering in dance (her only chance of a letter). Of her high school days abruptly ending on March 13 because she’s already signed up to take all her classes next year at the community college. Of her missing AP Physics with the same pain she’d miss a boyfriend.
In my mind is everything: her words to me last week, completely out of the blue: “I’m moving in with my friend and her parents the second I turn 18.” Her friend since kindergarten running off with a boy in the middle of the night, her mother’s frantic phone calls at 3:30am, and my daughter’s candid retort the next night over dinner, after the friend had been found: “I’ve thought about running away so many times. So many times.”
In my mind is everything: soon to be without a second income, soon to be without decent health insurance, I’ve been stocking up on every last thing so that my storage room looks more like a second Costco and my freezer is (should be) filled with this goddamned chicken, and why can’t my ever-so-smart daughter do the simplest thing, show me some semblance of respect?
Everything spills out over tears that I can’t control before it’s even 7:30. Everything, everything: the wish to run away, the wish to move out, the haven’t-I-tried-to-be-good-to-you, the you-know-I-love-you-so-why-do-you-hate-me?
She is a lump in the bed, unresponsive to my words. All I can do is return to my room, flush out the tears, and record my daily video lesson for my Newcomers, which takes an hour longer because I have learned how to add subtitles for a deaf girl in my class, a refugee who cannot hear a word in any language but can draw Anime art like no one you’ve ever met.
Then Bernie drops out, the stock market immediately takes a leap of faith because this country will always be profits over people, and it seems there is no hope in the world on day twenty-six of this cursed Coronatine.
I pound my frustration into chopping vegetables for the pot roast, its scent soon spreading through the house like a virus worth scintillating.
I decide to finally make the summer trip cancellations, hoping for some semblance of refunds, but the travel industry is one of the most unforgiving on the planet, and I am left with a few small rewards and thirty hours of research and hopeful anticipation lost to sickness, layoffs, and disappointment that brings on wave after wave of new tears.
She doesn’t come downstairs for hours, and when she does, she is all made up, beautiful and young and representing the promise that everyone would want for our future. She avoids me further for another forty-five minutes, then offers to help me with the second sourdough I’ve attempted within a week, setting the timer to fold and re-fold the dough. She agrees, later, to watch Dirty Dancing with me because it’s the only thing I can think of that will cheer me up, and laughs at my pathetic attempt to chainsaw the juniper.
She makes her special sweet coffee drink for everyone, including Fabian who never in his life had heard of iced coffee, but gulps it down happily within seconds.
And I know that she is more than this stupid $22 worth of chicken. That seventeen-year-old girls say mean things to their moms just fucking because. That every problem I have listed here is a first-world problem.
And I know that small things are beginning to blossom in my yard. And I have to stop thinking about “What if” and “Why can’t we?” and start thinking about these small shoots and sprouts and flowers that pop up when I need them the most.
And my girls are still in spring even as I approach winter. They need sunlight, soil, refreshment.
And forgiveness.
And I have made it through another day of this. Just. Like. That.
the moon rules this day
not knowing what happens here
(we wait in shadows)
empty city streets
spring trying to break branches
reaching for its light
another day ends
yet its return is constant
giving us new hope
dough starts the morning
(impossible sourdough)
kneading, needing, rest.
victory garden
burns through this false spring sunshine
as we drill, hammer
my boy is fearless
removing every last leaf
from our high-pitched roof
my girls love salad
work the seeds into the ground
ready, row by row
we plant potatoes
in our newly-built raised bed
(plants will save us, right?)
it angles others
in defiance of the times
(ready to win this)
my baby makes art
a YouTube challenge (with hearts)
and we win this day
just in time for bread
that rises as the sun sets
we are safe. and well.
should i skip a day?
is the sunrise worth noting?
will it save us all?
bare naked branches
waiting for a better spring
and a lifted tail
Colorado blue
that everyone came here for
ready to break you
(could you be grateful?
could you ride/walk/talk it out?)
Could that save him? No.
so I’m bitter. Yes.
afraid, bitter, hopeful. spent.
like a sunrise. Lost.
My elderly uncle with the ‘No Solicitors’ sign on his door happily steps right out onto the covered porch to collect the three Costco-oversized boxes of tissues that I have brought to him.
“Are you going to come in?” he asks as I creep backward, down the three concrete steps.
“You better wash your hands now that you’ve touched those boxes,” I immediately reply. “I could have it, and it lives on cardboard for 24 hours.”
He brushes me off and acts, quite nonchalantly, as if he’s been expecting me. “Thanks, I was waiting for something like this. I use five or six tissues every time I have to clean my catheter.”
What a lucky find, I think. “Well, Floyd, you’re the master of social distancing. How have you handled the Coronavirus?”
It’s true. He’s been reclusive, the middle child and only boy wrenched between six sisters, for his entire adult life. He lives in the same house he bought as a young man, the 1950s Mayfair ranch decorated exactly the same as the original owner, and “Why should I change what’s already there?” He worked as a TV repairman for as long as there were TVs to repair, and happily retired twenty years ago to a lifestyle of only visiting the grocery store and denying most social invitations from his six sisters.
But now there are no tissues in his grocery store. No toilet paper. No frozen vegetables. No eggs. No sense of security for the five square miles he drives within any given week.
He talks my ear off in the fifteen minutes I stand in his front yard, keeping my six feet of social distancing requirement.
This isn’t like yesterday when I drove to all corners of the city to deliver my students their much-needed headsets, folders, notebooks, and supplies, when their parents seemed grateful for my latex gloves and, more importantly, my brevity. “Check Schoology!” I found myself shouting too many times, “It has everything you’ll need for your life right there!”
This is Coronatine, Day Thirteen: my elderly uncle, my not-so-elderly parents (who also need tissues), who I can only stand on the porch with, and not really visit.
“You’re really not going to come inside?” they inquire, and I mention Italy. We’ve all heard about Italy. My father’s mother was from Italy, still has living relatives there. “Over sixty, Dad,” is all I really have to say (my parents are 66).
And how did I manage in the Costco line today? The rain hadn’t started yet, nor the snow. It was cold, and I had my latex gloves on, plus my ski mask (I didn’t think far enough in advance to buy medical masks, so when I put it on in the parking lot, Fabian said he’d prefer to wait in the car. I didn’t care. I’m not fucking with this shit). I waited a good thirty minutes to socially distance myself, six feet back from the guy in front of me, to get in the store.
And they still didn’t have toilet paper.
This was after we visited the Mexican Envios, always open, line out the door, everyone ready to send money home to their poorer-than-any-of-us-here families back home. My boy was in and out in fifteen minutes, but his poverty-stricken father had to wait in line for three hours to get that money we sent him because this was the first day out of seven that the banks were open, and the seventh day out of infinity that he is unable to work and support those two baby girls.
Never mind that he lives in the most dangerous city on Earth with a corrupt government and police on every corner making sure you don’t go where you’re not supposed to.
Never mind that he doesn’t even have a mortgage because his house is a shack on his boss’s property constructed entirely of corrugated sheets of metal.
Never mind that however bad you think this is for us, standing in the cold in the Costco line, cleaning your catheter with the last bits of tissue, wishing you could hug your parents…
We still live here. Where capitalism, evil as it may be, allows me to trump the system and send an extra hundred dollars home to Honduras because, God, why the fuck not?
This is Coronatine, Day Thirteen: six boxes of tissues delivered. Check. Three hundred dollars sent to Honduras to buy food. Check. Wondering who has it among us, and which ones will die. Check.
What else is there to say?
I planted spinach just in time for the snow to water it. Please let it grow. Please, God, let it grow.
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