After the good party, the kitchen feels melancholy. I pad down the hall and enter the room. Dirty plates stacked on counters, half empty glasses, crumpled up napkins, knives with cake frosting, the creamer jug and the coffee pot gather around the edges of the kitchen as if viewing a funeral. “What? It’s over? But surely not? We know these people”. The floor creaks overhead indicating my husband is awake. I look up toward the creaking sound and consider things, this morning after the party.
I begin to clear things. Silverware and cake plates clink and clank, rattling around and clashing together as they sink into hot sudsy water for their pre-rinse bath before heading into the dish washer steam. Bowls of richly colored mums and the arrogant blossoms of pink hydrangeas watch from their perch on the dining room table as my movement in the kitchen folds, turns, bends and evolves in front of them. I sweep away the brownie cake on its china platter and the rising patter of rain drops on windows and roof, sweeping along with a whoosh and windy rasp and they bend wet sounds and rivulets down the walls toward the discouraging view of the end of the party.
I don’t have time for melancholy today. I am 56 years old and I am at sixes and sevens. Those numbers flow well. Sixes and sevens. Now I can say, “Hello there. I’m 56 and I’m at sixes and sevens. 5, 6, and 7”. Marvelous. I am tempted to greet strangers with this announcement since I now hide behind face masks. Actually, being at ‘sixes and sevens’, my feeling confused in this new normal leaves me with fewer boundaries and greater inhibitions. I want to shout. I want to hide deeply. I am living in the middle of a pandemic and every day comes with a new set of rules. Nothing feels even.
I set to grinding the coffee beans. The noise seems particularly loud today. I’m grinding up a part of Puerto Rico. I watch the beans spin around and around as they pulverize. The aroma is magnificent. Somewhere, on some warm patch of land on the lovely island and long before this season of virus, someone planted and harvested a wonderful crop of coffee beans which in time, traveled far, far north and rested on a cold grocery shelf, and then in a cloth bag in my car and then in my cupboard and finally on my table…boiled up in a mug on the day after the party. That was a long time ago.
2020 started out with the usual celebrations, the cold nights, resolutions and the continual whoosh of the furnace. We settled in to long gray weekends, watching out frozen windows and drinking strong coffee…and suddenly, in a shaking of a down comforter and two loads of laundry, the year spun promptly downhill into strange days. Initially, we heard rumors…somewhere. Then a number of things weren’t so good. There was something about China, always China. Then New Rochelle, New York. New Rochelle was under quarantine. It seemed strange and not quite right. I remarked that New Rochelle was where Dick and Laura Van Dyke lived on their television show and my husband said, “Who?”
We listened to the radio about the history of the word ‘quarantine’ and it all seemed so old, so long ago, so old world Europe; not part of us. Quarantine. On a cold Friday…all of a sudden we were told to take our laptops home. It came over the PA system in school and for the first time, it felt ominous. We weren’t going back on Monday. Someone said, “It is probably for a week or so, until they can thoroughly clean the school”. I rolled my eyes, telling a colleague it was going to take more than a virus to get that building thoroughly cleaned. I thought the swine flu started on my office carpeting. I joked that day.
Now, it is after the party. We woke up one morning, after the party and now we are swimming in the big cooking pot with all the frogs. Frogs sit in cool water in pots on a stove and don’t sense danger as the burner clicks on and the temperature rises. Frogs sit and blink and heat up…and die. I think a lot about frogs these days.
On April 15th, our governor announced that we are required to wear a face mask whenever we go out in public. The masks are miserable, irritating things. I can’t breathe with them and my glasses fog up and I trip over the grocery cart with the spray bottle and the rolls of paper and the sanitizer and the heavyset guard is looking at me as I shift the mask over my nose. He looks uncomfortable. Everywhere in a mask is uncomfortable.
My husband enters the kitchen and glances at the dish and glasses chaos. I look out the window through raindrops onto the patio. All the chairs are covered in flexible rain proof dark green covers designed for winter protection. The chair closest to the house door has a tendency to shed the cover when gusts make their way around the corner of the house. It lifts up, folds itself neatly over into the center of the chair seat, and collapses. It’s off again. I sigh. I have placed a heavy brick on the arm, but today the brick is in the seat’s center. Heavy iron lawn poles haven’t worked either. The rain falls more insistently.
My husband looks out the window and then at me. He says, “Thank you for all of your work”. I nod. The kitchen is silent. It is the morning after the party and it is melancholy. I pour a large mug of strong coffee and return to the table to look outside at the soaking lawn. My kitchen drawer is full of face masks and we are watching the rain together.
690 Saint Paul 