Thanksgiving in Distant Quarantine

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I think you like to pile it on, my new therapist said last week. So what's the worst that can happen? You get COVID and you have to stay longer. So you'll get a place and you will stay. I was curled in the armchair in my office, and wanted to throw my phone across the room. You seem to want to keep punishing yourself. I'm not saying this isn't hard. I'm not saying this is fair. But. 

Believe me, I know that the worst case scenario is worse than that. I can imagine that in exquisite detail. I also know that it is almost impossible for me to imagine anything other than the worst case scenario. What if we are okay?

Foredune trail


If I am not punished, then who? My child? He is a remarkably normal 15 year old, making it through the pandemic with grace. (At least now it isnt' just me who is isolated, who has to spend holidays away from friends, he tells me when we walk the dog).


If I do not take this upon my body, then who else will? And if it is my fault, if I can be punished, then perhaps there w



Lake Michigan, Tuesday evening

Lake Michigan, Wednesday evening, storm rolling in

ill be atonement, some reparation, some healing.

*

I have been in this little lakeside apartment for four nights; I have four more to go (as long as I'm COVID negative; if not, we'll be here another week. Not we--I. I am alone). For so long, my loneliness was palpable, muscular and sweaty next to me. While my friends went home to their children and husbands and families, three nights a week I went home to the dog, the cats, the empty dark house. I drove home from Christmas Eve services at midnight to an empty house. I spent Thanksgiving in the woods, learned to be a distance runner, forced myself to eat. Pictures of me from my early thirties show a too-thin gamine unable to make eye contact with the camera. Then I began to settle in to what it meant to be a single mother in the upper Midwest where most women my age were neck deep in children, where my childhood Chicago friends were just getting married. I had friends, students, tried dating a series of unfortunate men, some less unfortunate than others. But loneliness was my constant companion in that little surburban house near the reservoir woods, where the lights of the strip mall behind me twinkled through the bare trees in the winter, where deer ate all my tomatoes and left their delicate prints in the snow.

I have been in this little lakeside apartment for four days and I have four more to go. It could be one of the last long stays I have alone, as my boy grows more confident and likely to want to travel by himself eventually.


A large part of me will miss these stretches of being a ghost against my old life, these stretches of solitude where I am forced to worry about no one but myself. And yet, and yet.

Right before J and I left, the four of us took a family picture and I can't stop looking at it. How happy I am. How grateful I am to R. and D. and J. for this life on the Left Coast, how easy it feels compared to the self-flagellation I have always believed I deserved. (What happens when you leave abuse and it is all you know? You learn to abuse yourself because it feels safe.)  How I have learned, or am learning, to live in my body in the present, to accept love, to believe that I am home.

I will tell you my biggest fear: that having found safety it will be taken from me. No, that I will discover it was never real at all and I have been fooled. But over and over again, my life in Portland proves to be real and steadfast.

How I wanted to start this:

If I were a novelist, I would set my novel here, on the western shore of Lake Michigan in a beach town in the off season, snow scuttled against concrete pilings, cracked sidewalks, plain Victorian homes blasted with cold wind, sleet, Lake Michigan's off-season violence: frothing waves, frozen spray. I would set it in the abandoned foredune forests, chickadees and wintering juncos, downy woodpeckers, crows. Small-horned stags, slender does, black squirrels, red tailed hawks, sandhill cranes rising from lagoons, loons and buffleheads puttering beneath narrow docks suitable only for pontoons, small flat-bottomed fishing boats. Even the summer homes have a severity to them, Victorians stripped of most of their opulence, porch ceilings painted haint blue, cracked cement sidewalks, Dutch names in faded paint on wooden address signs. West Michigan is a land of Dutch Reformed immigrants, Calvinists loyal to Calvin, to a strict interpretation of doctrine and scripture. Beneath this veneer of Bigby Coffee and Meijer Superstores, Trump signs and Gun and Ammo stores was the earth, the water and sand and loam and beech-maple forests that saved me over and over again in my thirties.

 In eight years, I have spent a lot of time in off-season Lake Michigan beach towns. Sometimes in tiny apartments where neon hotel signs blink on and off in the window. Once in a log cabin where the mantle was carved with a poem by the first owner.  A few times in precariously perched dune cottages wedged between McMansions, once where I watched the teen daughter of the McMansion family across from me climb out onto the roof every night and smoke and cry. Usually, it is late autumn or winter, and the beaches are deserted, ugly orange plastic fencing zig-zagging down the sand to prevent erosion, tires and trash and logs and plastic tangled up on the beach. Sometimes it is late May, everything painfully green after a long absence of color; the air humid, birds and insects singing their sex songs.

A few times I have stayed down the street from the monstrosity that is Betsy DeVos's summer home; where many of the Amway folks summer. I stayed in Muskegon--past the blasted-out downtown, near falling down huts, a stretch of well-summer homes,  the weekend after marijuana was legalized in Michigan and the air was redolent with weed smoke. I have set off countless smoke detectors attempting to use stoves that aren't meant for actually cooking, have hiked barren beaches and dunes and shuttered boardwalks. I have drunk bottles and bottles of mid-price white wine, watched relentlessly bad reality television, discovered Great British Baking show, sung opera arias loudly into the empty woods, written two books of poetry.

When I left, my heart broke because here I found the best friends I had ever found in my Aspire Ensemble friends, my church choir friends (also, as FCC was the only church choir I'd ever sung in, I learned quickly that I was spoiled as to the quality of a typical church choir), my colleagues, my students. And being here among the beech-maple woods that are part of my blood, I miss being a teacher with a terrible ferocity. 

I don't want to admit I like having time alone here, because I am so grateful and in love with my life in Portland. I feel guilty for saying I miss it. I feel guiltier for saying I can't wait to go home. 

Late this afternoon a family pulled their minivans onto the lawn, brought coolers and blankets upstairs to the apartment above me for what appears to be a Covid-full thanksgiving tomorrow. Tomorrow I will run and then point my car North and spend the day exploring.


So far I feel fine. My boy calls and signs I love you. 


It's going to be okay, Mom, it's going to be okay, he tells me.


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