Quarantine Harvest Moon

It’s not just the pandemic, not just that I have been working from home for seven months, that I haven’t seen my friends or anyone outside of my family and a slew of essential workers. This is part of it, but not all.

 

My world has shrunk to the size of a pin. A phrase that has its origins in hyper-specific arguments about theology and angelism; or, a modern idea to prove the inanity of academic arguments. But the fact remains-for some of us, the world has become incredibly small. It is a world that my mother, that my grandmothers, would likely recognize: a world the size of the domestic sphere, the household, the family. This yard, to the chain-linked perimeter of our little house, the neighborhood—the fancy rich western side, the working class eastern side. Each side extends a half mile, our house the center.

 

I still work—the thing which I believed made me meaningful in the World-writ-large, but I do not exist as a Writer, or Singer anymore, as most of us don’t exist as the People We Are in the World for now.  For now. And my work feels more than remote. It is done almost wholly without seeing another person. This is the world my husband has inhabited for decades, but it is new to me. I hurled myself into the world as soon as I could, desperate to shake off the manacles of femininity, of the Cult of True Womanhood. Pin my heart high up the pyramid of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs because I am incredibly privileged to do so, though shamefully it has take me 43 years to understand that it is privilege, not determination. I still dream of teaching, though I cannot imagine a way to get back.

In the 19th century, the Cult of True Womanhood was a reactionary movement against the growing acknowledgement that women (i.e., White women, let's be completely honest) were people. It prescribed two spheres: the World for men, the domestic for women. Men went out and worked, governed; women stayed home and mothered, did cross stitch, were spiritual. Men were active, women were vessels. Partially this was a reaction against the shifting economics of the Industrial Revolution: with the rise of the middle class, women moving from farms into factory jobs, etc--the middle class woman could suddenly afford servants to accomplish her regular domestic labor, and the men were no longer toiling in the agrarian fields, but at desk jobs. White middle class women had access to leisure and education: a direct threat to the monopoly of power of white middle and upper class men. So we developed this cult of femininity which at once valued women for what we could offer: beauty, breeding, culture, and abashed us for it. Lodged white women like me even more firmly into the shit-fueled machine of White Supremacy.

At any rate, I grew up in a middle class white family where my father declared a wife of his would never work and the spheres were clearly delineated: the household and child rearing was the domain of the wife and going to work in the world (and breaking and killing one's body) was the domain of the man. One was more valuable than the other. I mean, who pays stay at home mothers a salary?

Anyway, anyway. I (thought I) hurled myself out of that at 18 and into the world of The Mind and believed anything in that former sphere, that Domestic sphere of the Household, the Yard, the Garden, the Mothering, was less-than. I was teaching college students at 22; I was a tenure-track instructor at 26, tenured at 29. I was a fucking dean at 36.

As if that would erase what else was happening to me. As if that would make the rest of it okay.

I believed feminism would save me, I wrote once.

Then the world caved in.

 

In my 2020 world-the-size-of-a-pin where I have not been to my office in seven months, have worked remotely (I am so fucking lucky and privileged, I know) I have started to notice everything. The chickens. So much of my days are spent going in and out of the back door, watching the chickens, chasing them out of the neighbors’ yard, building jacked-up fences of hardware cloth and zip ties to keep them in my my yard, out of other people's. Watching them sleep in the garden boxes, eat every plant left. That Artemis, one of the Easter Eggers who was bullied severely by the others when we didn’t let them free range, and lost all of the feathers on her rear end and stopped laying eggs last February has finally started growing pin feathers back. She lays green eggs when she lays, was the first of the feral chickens to start laying. I take pictures, daily, of her bare backside, the black pinfeathers pushing through. I wander into R's office to tell him about these developments, and he turns, pretending to be interested, kisses me when I'm through.

Duck, the baby Blue Andalusian (maybe?), is a teenager, two and a half months old. Her mother, Athena, the other Easter Egger, has started laying again, smooth pink eggs, and while she still feels somewhat protective, will leave Duck for long periods, ignoring the plaintive and panicked cheeping. I dreamed of chickens when I lived in the Midwest, though my suburb wouldn’t allow them. Now, a future retirement house is contingent on a coop and as many chickens as I can adopt. I will never not be enamored by the way they run to me when I come outside, their quiet cooing while they walk beside me while I’m gardening, their warm eggs in the palm of my hand.

 

It smells different here than where I’m from. Food smells from neighbor’s houses, woodsmoke, rain. The smell of wet earth, cedar, fir. To feel at home even when it is different is a miracle that I never thought I’d experience.

 

The murder house on our walk (the weird house that J. and I had decided was abandoned) has a full persimmon tree. The murder house is a newer house in our neighborhood, whose blinds are always shut and garbage cans never seem to move; which has paper snowflakes permanently taped in a window, bleached siding. But once J and I saw into the kitchen, when the garage door was up, and it was decorated in Midwestern Country Chic—dusty blue hearts and ducks and stiff lace curtains. J and I stole one the other day because they are beautiful and I have never eaten a persimmon. It is hard and green and unripe. Everywhere too, there are apple trees and plum trees. We have some volunteer plum trees on the DMZ hill between our house and the house behind us, and I hope they will bear fruit while we live here. (I cannot imagine living anywhere else, am desperate to feel like this is home and permanent, but I also know that once the boys are gone, a sorta-5 bedroom 110 year old house with 30 steps up to the front door will probably be too much.)

Spider plant from work office, thriving in home office

The Italian plum trees are all heavy with fruit and the neighbor’s yard is full of them, ripening and rotting and fermenting. The back yard smells sweet-sick, like cheap boxed wine. I do not remember this from years past, but I have never been here so much. The roof needs repairing, the skylight leaking. The little pollen cones on the deodar cedar are an inch long, still closed. Little clouds of goldfinches buzz over the trees, and flocks of geese bark over the world at night. The harvest moon is full. Thursday morning, the sky was orange from California wildfire smoke. Our own smoke has receded, after a week of unbreathable air. Horse chestnuts have fallen, and the smooth brown buckeyes litter the roads where I run. I am still compelled to pick them up, pocket them, run my fingers over the silk-cold surface.

 

When we first moved here six and a half years ago, I picked up everything—cedar cones, rose hips, buckeyes, Korean dogwood fruit; wondered at ferns growing from the elbows of trees, staghorn lichen and moss clinging to every surface, dripping from the trees; the weird geometry of the monkey puzzle tree, the peeling cinnamon bark of the madrone, the towering Douglas firs, little scrub oaks, banana slugs, hellebore, camas lilies, salal, Oregon grape, kinnickkinnick. I knew the names of none of them, but nothing felt hostile. It was the first time a landscape felt benign though foreign, though perhaps Michigan also felt that way before I was eaten alive.

 

And o, I miss Mother Lake, I miss knowing the names of plants and animals and ecological systems. But I’m learning that here too, learning the smell of cedar and dry summer earth, can identify banana slugs and lichens, know a scrub jay’s raucous call, a towhee’s rasp, a stellar’s jay for its indigo plumage. On a fifth grade field trip a few years ago at Oxbow Park (Twilight filmed scenes here, the kid at the entrance told me) the guide told us about horsetail fern and sword fern and the great Missoula floods that created the Columbia River Gorge. I know Mt. Hood is really Wy’east, that the Sahaptin word for the Columbia River was Nch'i-Wana which means ‘Great River.’  Even the ordinary, 21st century world feels friendly—neon signs for Carl’s Jr and Fred Meyer and Les Schwab blinking past on the highway feel friendly. Whisper my god, Ramona, you moved your entire life HERE.  R. has a moment in his first novel where his protagonist looks around LA and realizes that it could be a place where actual people lived. When you grow up in the Midwestern suburbs, the west coast is a fantasyland, not where real people actually life. When I first moved here and met people who’d lived their entire lives here, who were over 60 and the west coast was all they knew, it was a minor revelation. Everything doesn’t have to be terrible to be real, the small voice in my mind now tells me, amazed and mystified.

 

And R.’s hand on my knee and as we drove out to the apple orchard on Thursday afternoon, a haze of yellowish smoke clinging to the hills, then walked and picked Winesaps and golden delicious and the boys were weird as 15 year old boys were, that we came home and, and, and. When I got divorced 14 years ago, I had an ampersand tattooed on my left forearm. And is the most optimistic word in the English language, Ellen Bryant Voigt said to me 20 some-odd years ago at Warren Wilson.  The apple varieties at the orchard, the west hills rising up around the Willamette valley: this world which never pushed me out like a splinter, is home. Perhaps this is the blessing of quarantine. Of being forced to be in the same place.

 

I have made boules of white bread and loaves of cinnamon bread and challah and cookies and cakes and chicken alfredo for my boy and chili and chocolate zucchini bread and soup and sat on the porch and drunk wine and watched bats dart over the yard; I have sewn napkins and curtains and begun to learn Elgar and how to coax my voice to sing both a low F and a high G. I have run in virtual races and donated money to candidates and social justice organizations and read books and books and books, more books than I have read in years, though not poetry because right now my inability to write—my fear of writing anything at all about my life—is staggering though perhaps not unexpected.

 

R. and I have fought and fucked and cried and loved harder than we ever have. I dream vividly every night, wake up sweating and inferno-hot every morning near 2:00AM, I have fallen and gotten stitches and scheduled my second mammogram and cut my own bangs. The POSPOTUS has been diagnosed with COVID, and an increasingly large circle around him has too. We are only halfway through this. The election is in a month. We must believe in hope.

(clockwise, right-left) Duck, the 11 week blue andalusian, Artemis the bald easter egger, Lilac the barred rock, Athena the mama easter egger. OMG I LOVE THEM SO MUCH I WANT A THOUSAND CHICKENS DON'T TELL R