like a pregnant mom
i wait for this peony
(bring blossoms, bring hope)
the first bloom beckons
all that is good on this Earth
(even the ants know)
Coronatine, Day Sixty
gratitude
Coronatine, Day Fifty-eight (Mother’s Day)
we’re stepping outside
into this beautiful yard
to celebrate love
it’s a bit risky
and only sixty degrees.
but it’s Mother’s Day.
each girl made a card
and worked to include this boy
in conversations
it’s as good as weeds
ripped from choking my garden
so beauty can breathe
Coronatine, Day Fifty-five
and from this soil
from blustery spring breezes
good news can blossom
Coronatine, Day Forty-nine
until they close this
we might be here every day
(Colorado beach)
humans love water
in all its fake and true forms
(dams, no dams, fresh, salt)
our Friday night lights
makes this feel like our old life
as fresh as sunshine
Coronatine, Day Forty-eight (Time for Pupusas)
if i just listen
i can gather up his words
thick as pupusas
in between masa
filled with all that he has lost
yet still hopes to gain
(i cannot fill them.
my love will not be enough.
but now we have time.)
quarantined time
to wait for flowers to grow.
to cook together.
it is a gift, life.
(even when the batter breaks
we learn to make more.)
Coronatine, Day Forty-three
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.
Coronatine, Day Thirty-eight
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
Coronatine, Day Thirty-five (10×9)
This will make 90 things I’ve managed to muster for gratitude during the quarantine. Today is not hard. I am going to try to make this easier day by day, but today is unique.
- What a sunrise. There are benefits to never being able to sleep in.
- Mythili let me cut her hair. Sure, I’m not a hairstylist, but why not? Thank the lord my girls didn’t get my curls, otherwise I surely would have screwed this up.
- Izzy let me braid her hair, and I think, after fifteen years of this, I have improved!
- Riona made this lemon pound cake for Izzy. For all of us. For tonight.
- Fabian helped me move all the furniture in the basement. Or, as he pointed out, he moved all the furniture while I was a spectator. He also blew up all the balloons, nailed these sheets to the wall, and made our basement Virtual Prom ready.
- We managed to surprise Izzy!
- This man. Walking home with champagne to put into the orange juice I spent an hour hand-squeezing and a bouquet of flowers for his daughter’s Virtual Prom 2020.
- This family ready to eat risotto, filet mignon, and cashew salad (thank you Costco). Everyone wearing their best.
- My middle Mythili making this professional-grade prom poster with some of the tagboard I snatched in my five-minutes-allowed trip to my classroom, tagboard that’s the wrong color for our theme, but who the fuck cares?
- My girls being girls and kicking me out of the basement for taking pics or videos. Being teenagers. So happy, so full of sass, so themselves.
Be grateful. Be yourselves. Make the best of this shit. That’s all for today.
Coronatine, Day Twenty-eight (10 x2)
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!
- Gas prices. I know Trump’s an asshole, and these countries are having a bidding war right now, and I should have an electric car, but these prices are eleven years old, this is the first time I’ve filled my car in a month, and it’s a relief.
- Speaking of cars… it’s nice to run an errand with just a little traffic. Denver has horrible traffic, and it’s been nonexistent lately.
- People listening to the governor. Went to the grocery store today, and they had it all set up for social distancing with one-way aisles, a line around the store, and most people were wearing masks! It was good to not be the only one.
- Speaking of food: our school’s food bank, and in particular, Jaclyn Yelich. She called me two days ago because she just knew some students weren’t getting food. In the midst of a crisis, when she had to move her entire food bank to another location, she knew that some of my ELLs were getting desperate. We made a plan. She formed her delivery team, she asked me to help, and we brought food to six of my Newcomer families. She had a whole warehouse of boxes and bags ready to go for each family. This woman has worked all her life, raised her daughter, and now has given up her entire retirement to feed the families at our school, which takes more time than a full-time job. She gives hope when there is no hope.
- The moon. I have always loved the moon, and in high school even won an award for a story titled, “Catch Me a Moon.” In all its clichéd symbolism, its constancy is calming right now. Knowing that it’s up there, shining bright, so far from all of our problems, connecting us all with our own special glimpses of it wherever we might be in the world, is a comfort.
- Gardening friends. I am certainly not a master gardener, though I bought a house from one! What a joy today to receive the generous gift of an entire tray of spices and vegetables for my garden. Their petite green stems bring life to this sunny window, waiting, just like us, for the frost to stop and the world to be ready for a permanent move to a better life that is waiting on the other side of the glass.
- Audiobooks. In a house of six, it’s difficult to sit down and read. So many distractions and background noise. I love audiobooks because I can take them anywhere with me–in the car, walking the dog, gardening, or cross-stitching.
- Cross-stitching. I will never be a seamstress, but this I learned to do when I cross-stitched baby blankets for my three girls. It is relaxing and methodical, and fulfills my need to always be doing something with my hands. And when this is all over, I’ll have a pretty picture to hang!
- Work flexibility. My district and school have handled these crazy circumstances very well, and they’ve offered us so much flexibility with office hours, grading expectations, and the amount of assignments. It has been so refreshing to work within a schedule that I create, which as a teacher, just never happens. It’s so nice to have time on weekdays to run errands, to fit in an appointment, and to make my own schedule.
- To go with the theme of weekdays and flexibility, it’s refreshing to be able to clean my house whenever I want and not try to cram the chores in between a harried workday, harried dinner prep, and a harried life. Cheers to vacuuming on a Friday morning and a non-harried life!
Coronatine, Day Twenty-seven (10×1)
I’ve been bitching a lot (and crying a lot), so here goes: ten good things about quarantine for ten days straight.
No promises. But I will try.
- I actually love being alone. The older I get, the more introverted I feel. I have very few actual friends anyway (the blessing and curse of being overly opinionated), and see them infrequently, which is fine with me. So the social distancing aspect is not challenging for me at all.
- Dinner. Isn’t it every working mom’s nightmare to be running between work and children’s activities and trying to do laundry and trying to grade papers and trying to keep a clean house… and trying to come up with a dinner idea every night? Well, now that I’m home all the time, I can set out meat early in the day (see yesterday’s post, haha) and pull up recipes well before noon. I can easily fit in a meal plan without feeling pressured or rushed.
- My garden. You are about to be overloaded with images of flowers and vegetables. Raised beds. Compost piles. Green grass growing. Perfect pink crabapple and redbuds blooming. Weed-pulling. The two hundred plants that fill my yard and take hundreds of hours of work to truly care for… hundreds of hours that I now actually have at a time of the school year that is normally jam-packed with so many activities that I can barely breathe. Well, now I can breathe.
- My dog. Sleeps on my legs and keeps me up half the night, cuddles right up against wherever I’m sitting and takes naps throughout the day. Jumps into my lap for extra cuddles and when he fears I might be considering going back to work. Never says no to me when I want to take him on walk number eighty-six. Trots happily beside me, leash or no leash. Has no idea why none of us ever leave anymore, but couldn’t be happier. There is no purer love than a puppy’s love.
- Not having to pack a lunch. Just feeling hungry at whatever random time, combining various leftovers from the fridge and never having to lug the Tupperware, the lunch bag, the silverware, the cloth napkin back and forth and forth and back.
- The mute and no camera features during virtual meetings which occur 90% less frequently than the endlessly wasteful meetings I normally sit through. I just want my thoughts, not my face, on the screen. It’s quite magical to have that sense of privacy, to be able to listen without being watched to see what my reaction might be.
- Casual Friday every. Fucking. Day. I think my comfy clothes alone could make this time actually magical.
- Never having to deal with silencing and unsilencing my phone. So simple, so redeeming.
- Seeing my children blossom in different ways (when they’re not driving me crazy). Riona building up her YouTube Channel, taking on art challenges, endlessly chatting with friends on FaceTime, getting all her schoolwork done with zero nagging and her handy checklist when I can’t ever get her to do homework on a normal day, giving me hugs, helping me when I ask for help, and being her ever-sweet self. Mythili taking walks or bike rides with me, never commenting on the length or the speed, working on her digital and painted artwork for hours or days, piecing together puzzles, easily managing her homework. Izzy creating coffee drinks to share with everyone, garnering followers with her quick TikTok videos, working on her badminton skills and perfecting how to curl her hair (often letting me braid it just like when she was a little girl). Fabian never once complaining, helping around the house before ever being asked, pulling a too-heavy compost bin off me with the strength of an ox, building a weight with a bar and some chopped old logs, getting his schoolwork done before the rest of the class meets on Google Meets each day at 1pm.
- I am so damn lucky to live in Denver. In a city with a thousand days of sun. With easygoing neighborhoods and walking-distance parks. With snow today, gone tomorrow. With a liberal governor and mayor who offer support for all people, broken-not-broken, immigrant or citizen, homeless or homed. With a network of streets that you could spend your life meandering through and never get lost. With my beautiful school across the street from the greatest park ever known. With bike lanes and bike paths everywhere. With everything I need to feel safe in this nightmare of unsafety.
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