We're In This Together

How are you doing as the world as we know it appears to be dissolving around us? I've been feeling a little dislocated and unmoored and like everything is not quite in focus. The last time I felt like this was eighteen-and-a-half years ago, holding four-month-old M on my lap on my sister's couch, 2,000 miles away from home, watching airplanes fly again and again and again into the World Trade Center towers. It strikes me that my oldest son's life has been bracketed, so far, by these two world-changing events: 9/11 and COVID-19. Yet he was too young to remember the former and he hasn't quite grasped the implications of latter (not that any of us have, really).

Interestingly, it's not my kids' safety that's my first concern this time around, for possibly the first time ever. Rather our older friends and family members have taken up most of my worry space during the day. At night I dream about zombies, which is weird since I've seen maybe one zombie movie in my life.

At the same time, I've been feeling a lot of gratitdude. For living in a safe, warm home with plenty of outdoor space around us so we can get out and move our bodies. For C no longer working in the gig economy but now having a steady paycheck and a job that he can make work remotely. For M having gone to college close by so bringing him home was a simple matter. For having my family at home, for them being homebodies who won't mind weeks of social distancing, and for us having had practice living almost on top of each other in a tiny tent for a whole summer. For my kids being older and more self-sufficeint and healthy. For not having a wedding or graduation or big travel plans on the calendar for this spring. For having learned how to bake bread and make yogurt years ago. For having a ridiculous number of hobbies and a long 2020 to-do list full of tasks that I need to be at home to do.

In fact, I was starting to look at the next few months as a chance to catch up on many undone projects, to delve deep into reading and writing, and to play Little House on the Prairie. But then I read an article that said we may have to spend 18 months in social isolation, until a vaccine is available, and I went from feeling unmoored and out of focus to feeling like cymbals were crashing along my nerves. Half a year at home I can handle, but a year-and-a-half? Suddenly my kids' ages no longer seemed like an advantage. Missing out on a year of high school or college will be immensely disruptive, and with the economy cratering, prospects for meaningful, well-paid work will be even more dismal than they already were for new college grads. And what about those vulnerable friends and family members, whom we won't be able to see until 2022?

It's all a little too much to think about at once, so I watch dopey TV shows, stay up too late reading so I won't lie awake at night before I fall asleept to dream about zombies, and go outside in the morning mizzle to listen to the birds. The chickadees are singing their hey sweetie songs, the robins are descending in flocks, and the redwing blackbirds are in the tops of trees singing in spring, oblivious to human concerns. They'd be out there even if we weren't here to hear them, which doesn't sound like a comforting thought, but somehow it is.

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