One year, one year, one year

-

 One year ago tomorrow, I called into work with a low-grade fever, cough, splitting headache. The headlines were about the shutdown in Italy (can you believe it? that must be so weird!).  Every time I went to the bathroom, I counted to 25 while washing my hands. I coughed into my elbow. A few weeks before, I'd run my second race of the season and actually won my age division in the 5K, something I had never done before. I had never run that particular race before, but thought: well, I've been doing a lot of speed work, let's see how that plays out if I run full out? Apparently, it worked out well. So I was looking forward to my annual 5 miler for St. Patrick's Day, then a 10K near Easter, then I would start training for my favorite half marathon in July.  Spring break was approaching and I knew my boy and I had to travel. 

The first COVID case was confirmed in Oregon, in the town where I'd won my race. 

Monday, I told another colleague who I knew always ran the St. Patrick's Day race that I was considering not running it--it was the biggest race in Portland of the year, and I wasn't sure how I felt in such a big crowd. Eh, we'll be fine! he said. 

The week before, we interviewed new deans. A colleague came to the interviews sick as a dog, coughing and wan. Oh, I just can't miss this she said. I was sick but now I'm fine.  At the interviews, I wouldn't hake the candidates' hands. I felt like an asshole.

A week before, a colleague who is also an epidemiologist told me he wasn't worried about this emerging virus. He is someone I trust, kind, intelligent. It made me feel better. But then, Wednesday morning he found me in the hall and said Sara, you should know I'm worried.  Thursday I woke with a fever. I should probably stay home? I told my boss and HR. We were already talking about COVID, thinking maybe we might need to close for a few weeks? I took my spider plant from my office home that night, thinking I'd cut one of the babies off and root it and bring it back in. I took nothing else out of my office, figuring I'd be back on Monday. The public schools announced they'd be closing early for Spring Break. J. asked if he could take an extra day off school. I agreed.

In April, I was supposed to go to the first writing conference where I was a featured writer. It was cancelled. Everything was cancelled. 

*

It has been a year since I have been in my office. (Hey, little chocolate candy in my desk drawer that I bought from a colleague's kid, I'm sure you've been eaten by the Rat King who has surely taken over by now). J. and D. haven't been in school for a year; J has seen his best friends only a handful of times, masked and outside and distant. We have had dozens of COVID tests, traveled cross country wearing N-95 masks. The college's enrollment, like almost every other community college, has plummeted. My hair has grown long and I haven't worn real pants in a year, have grown feral and can barely hold a human-level conversation with someone I don't live with. J. and I walk every afternoon and talk about socialism and gender and birds and raccoons and how insane it is that we are now living here, on the edge of the continent, where we both belong. I have been taken to court, gotten stitches, been the ER thrice for a high fever, vomiting and a broken elbow; have started seriously considering a career outside of higher education, have written and published fiction for the first time and been nominated for awards; we adopted a new chicken; the chickens ate the entire fucking lawn. We got a new roof, my car broke numerous times, J and I both bought overalls.

*

Today I woke to a grey sky, ran in lemony sunshine and air that smells of daphne, edgeworthia. The boys are getting straight As, are discussing college and politics and i have learned to bake bread, have collected baskets of eggs, have been (with J) the grunt labor of building a chicken enclosure, learned what it means to be part of a collective terror instead of an individual one.

*

Look: whatever it is, we are always in it. Don't listen to anyone who tells you that you're exaggerating, that it isn't a big deal, that  you're making it all up. The progression, j. said on our walk today,  is from monarchy to capitalism to socialism to communism. When we figure it out it's because we'll be taking care of each other. Please believe me when I say: the kids are all right. 

Crocuses are pushing up everywhere. The air smells like spring, like fucking, like the world continuing with itself despite us, because of us, with us. We are all here, now.

*


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High Summer, Still

-
Image
 In so many ways I have built the life I have always wanted: I come home to a safe house, my child is content in his life, has a community (stayed out far past midnight at a park watching bats darn the sky near the river with friends); I sing, I am doing theater again, I run--though less than I did. Summer is starting its long, slow lean toward fall. We aren't to the hottest parts yet, but the lawns are all yellow and the light is pink at night and baby orb weavers have begun building webs everwhere. I walk down the stairs with a spider stick each morning, carefully unknotting one end of a web from one side of the stairwell, letting the little orange spider clamber into the rosemary. An  hour later, the web is back. Some are slung twenty, thirty feet above the street between the deodar and the yellow cedars.  In three weeks, R. and I head up the mountain to write. I love that week, our world just river nad tree and scree and words. In less than a week, I need to put down ...
Read more

Spring and All (redux)

-
I have been trying so hard to write, to think these days. I am so busy. My job doubled in January, quite literally. This is tech week, and then opening night for the opera and I just finished the penultimate chamber choir tour of the year.   It has been one of the most beautiful springs I've experienced in Portland--vacillating between warm and floral scented, and wet and chilly. It has been perfect.  I've dug another pond in the garden, I've gotten a 20 cubic yard chip drop that i've hauled up the 30 steps, 5 gallon bucket by 5 gallon bucket.  I can't sit still, I bake bread and make occasional dinners. R. is working two jobs, 7 days a week, and some nights when we finally fall into bed, it's the first time we've been still together. Two years ago, I was almost as busy--opera and choir and J. graduating from high school and publishing my third book, and then those disastrous months in late summer and fall, where the world fell apart. Then a year ago, I was ...
Read more

High Summer

-
 When J. was young, and I was still teaching, summer was languid--long hot days in our little Moorish apartment or in the house on Grosse Pointe, cicadas and humidity, trips the Lake, long hours we spent simply being with one another, hot and sticky, pointing the hose at the dogs, lying on the basement floor while tornado sirens wailed over the green skies. There were also those nights that J. would be at his father's where I would drink myself into a stupor, sit in my office or the little front porch or at the dining room table watching evening seep up from the reservoir woods, write poems or blog posts, so deeply sad and lonely but also free. Then, I often felt guilty for the few days or hours that J. would be gone and I would be young and free. I went on dates, or spent the night with various boyfriends, went to movies or played poker with H. and D. I knew none of that would be possible if I had J. all the time, but I wished for it desperately. Summer was a stretch where he was ...
Read more