Almost a year now. I’m watching March sunlight dance on the window, the walls…the new green throws for the reading room. Almost a year. A friend tells me, ‘we’ve become different people’…another friend no longer contacts me. His mother died…alone in a desperate hospital in Queens, incubated, totally and utterly alone…death in Queens the day after Easter.
Stupid bats. Stupid lab. Stupid people. I email him when he first reaches out. Now, he no longer responds. He is wise, I think. What could we possibly talk about? The weather? Vaccines and the mask controversy? Nope. I remember our friendship and that’s enough for now. He lost everything and still had to go there to clean up, to organize, to say goodbye to a Mother no longer there.
My husband contracts Covid. My brother, his wife, the three kids..all contract it. Nobody dies, thank God. Me…? Nothing. Why? I don’t know.
I just keep reading books and watching the sunlight and thinking and thinking. The latest number is 524,000 dead. 524,000 dead.
I prepare our taxes to mail in since our advisor no longer takes in-person visits. ‘We didn’t go there…we can’t claim that…we didn’t pay that…’ He and I consider all the final machinations of 2020. ‘Nope…Covid’.
A year ago I drove to work on a cold March Friday…over the Ford Street Bridge, angled right onto West Main…over the swirling river, past the huge ancient auditorium, then the overpass under which lies the magnificent Public Market; a crown jewel in the heart of the city. I turned into the mammoth parking lot, before I entered the looming cavern of the city’s largest elementary school…1,200 students and many staff members…completely unaware.
Had I known, I would have put more enthusiasm into those final classes. Had I known his brother would die, I would have sent another text.
The sun is thin and gold today. It’s only 28 degrees but people are out and about. I hear a few children walk by the house and the creak of the floorboards overhead. Everything is changed and not everything is changed. Sunday naps…March sunlight…Easter in a few weeks…
690 Saint Paul 