A week or so ago, my front porch downspout, a fickle friend…responded to the call of the wild, shook free from shackled moorings, sailed with wild abandon toward Blaydon Loop, and settled quietly in a stranger’s front yard. New home, new beginnings…alas, no.

Through various postings on social media, the delinquent downspout was promptly retrieved, scolded and reassigned to post, promising under duress to behave.

Yesterday, wanderlust struck again and assisted by winds of 80 miles an hour, made a farewell speech and set sail again, permanently resettling on distant shores, I know not where.

I have a stash of downspouts in the garage; a collection of other criminals recaptured but never claimed by owners. I never wanted my downspout anyway as they are given to open seas, New York winds, the vagaries of the Lake and the promise of dangerous adventure…

The corner of Thurston and Chili Avenue speeds up just a little each day around 3:30pm or so. The sun shines brilliantly at the intersection where small groups gather. The afternoon’s drug sales are about to begin.

I glance over in their general direction. I am sitting in the relative safety of my car. I look over and around them. They look over and around me. What separates us is far more than skin color, ethnicity, class, vocation and a tightly secure door. These men were born under an endless sky and into a thousand lifetimes different from mine. No amount of good fencing will ever make us good neighbors because we are all suddenly very fragile at the corner where our two worlds meet; for a moment at the traffic light, stalled on the sunny corner of Thurston and Chili Avenue…

I’ve gotten used to the bend in the road. The car knows the way now…first a left, then a right, then a left and another left and the car and I leave the development together. It is exactly a year since we closed on this house and began making it our home. We concluded everything in the middle of a snow storm. The attorney made it on time; a journey of more than seventy miles north. I drove a mere ten miles in city traffic and was forty-five minutes late. It’s all about the snow and the swaying and the roads and the direction of the winds. Our attorney waited patiently at the large table along with the attorney from the construction company. We all met eventually and smiled and signed copious sheets of paper and it was done.

I climbed a mountain of snow in the parking lot. We drove home in the wet snow, searching for ghosts along the roads and watching for large unfettered animals in the fields.

The walls have had a year to settle. There are one or two wall seams between sink and plaster which suddenly stretched. The house breathes evenly now and I feel it in the air. She held her breath for at least eight months; afraid to believe she could stand in all of her newness. Around November, she exhaled slowly, slowly…then suddenly during the eleventh month, gasped, gave a slight burp and settled for good. Now and only now, I notice a slight crack in the garage floor, a small nail pop in the wall…nothing really, just a quiet message from the house. We three are in this experience together. Now I can paint and place nails and act with more intention and more permanently.

There is a new car in the garage; we’ve lived through a full bill cycle and the vagaries of Rochester Gas and Electric along with the realization of how cheap and plentiful water is in this state, this city by Lake Ontario.

Our new neighbor, a retired navy man disappeared during the winter but I suspect he will be back soon; chatting quietly with Eli on the front lawn as the two plot their summer yard shenanigans. I look out the morning room windows at the rotting pumpkins in the backyard. I hope they will spring magically into a pumpkin patch this autumn. A neighbor asked me if I gardened and I said no. I am willing to try my hand and that counts for something. I will make the land my own. I will make the house proud.

I turn to the front of the house and watch two men plotting together. They stand with weapons ready; a hoe and a rake. Two men contra mundum. The wind chimes bang up against the freshly painted porch post and I hear the other streets blossoming…

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…

I am waiting for the installation of new tires at Mavis. It’s been two long hours now. I’ve watched two episodes of ‘Inside Edition’. I am now officially less intelligent than I was upon entering this place.

I have talked to other trapped customers as we struggle together in this weird bubble. I have checked all of my accounts. I have watched the ribbons of traffic go by; stream after stream with the colors ebbing and flowing, intermixed with the rapidly approaching evening and the off again, on again rain. Having checked out the weather report for the next ten days, I now feel prepared. I continue to stare out the window.

The head of the maintenance shop told me that my tires are en route from Greece; the local suburb, not the foreign country, although at this point I am beginning to wonder.

I look back at the interior of the waiting room with the faded lights, the worn seating and the linoleum floor. I may soon begin redecorating. There is not enough flow. We are as removed from ‘Feng shui’ as we could possibly be. There is no ‘here’ here. Trapped.

Mid morning…urgent email from downtown. ‘The system shows that you are missing attendance days. Please fix this by 1pm!’ I look at the clock. It is 11:30am. Not going to happen. There are no fewer than forty students listed…students with random names, random levels, random dates. There is a neat chart included in the email with all the attendance codes I can use.

These are my choices: P-present, in person, P-async-remote, P-sync-remote, A-unexcused-absent-in person, A-unexcused-remote, A-excused-absent-remote, A-excused-absent-in person, A-alt-alternative special, T-tardy-excused remote, T-tardy-excused-in person, T-unex-unexcused remote, T-unex-tardy-unexcused in person. I look at the ceiling.

If there were a gun held to my head, I would not have an answer to this mess. I dig around for a bit, finding a different chart where I am informed all of this can be fixed. I click on the link and wait. Nothing. What was to be clicked, remains grey and un-clickable.

I send off a polite email informing downtown that I am unable to change anything on the chart. Silence.

I send one more polite email indicating that this correction is highly unlikely to happen today, and certainly not by 1pm. The chart remains grey and un-clickable. Silence.

Much later in the day, an email arrives from downtown thanking me for attending to this matter and for fixing the problem. Everything is now in order and in the system.

I look back up at the ceiling.

Toward the end of last week, I instructed a class of pent up wiggly six year old first graders. I taught them ‘opera style’.

Almost all of my lesson was done in scale form or in an arpeggio for emphasis. My voice rang out continually in ‘warm up’ mode. Occasionally there came bellowing out of my throat a full blown tune, along with the intermittent ‘Mama Mia!’ and ‘Bravissimo!’

Surprisingly, I accomplished quite a lot. The students were a perfect combination of terrified, amused, puzzled, irritated and amused all over again. At one point, one of the boys looked up at the ceiling and screeched.

All in all, an afternoon well spent. March madness indeed…

I dreamt last night. You came into the room, wearing your purple checked shirt. It was you, all bent over and smiling and pleasant, just as you always were. We chatted and went somewhere and you adjusted your glasses as you always do.

I feel the fabric of that cotton shirt, the buttons and the fold in the collar; the slight fraying along the wrist.

I heard that death is a terrible thing and no one should have to go through it. But of course…of course, well…and therein lies the tension.

I was not to have had that experience and here I find myself; smoothing and folding the checked material of purple cotton in the early days of March; listening to the honking of a lone goose outside the window; hearing the tapping of a distant shovel on a snow laden driveway…

Blow, if ye must March gales, for we are finished with thee. Winter’s contract is complete. It is signed in grey and sealed in exhaustion.

Our eyes turn toward the greening of the fields as faint strains of ‘O, Danny Boy’ birthe liltingly and trippingly over rutted, frozen potato mounds, raw earth and twisted fence lines.

You threw us famine and we are cooking up thick, crunchy potato cakes. We are done with thee. Go then; smell the black sod and the snapping hot oil.

Blow, if ye must, but shamrock fog shall soon carry thee away…

One of my students in kindergarten announced today in the middle of the lesson that his mother was white. I said, ‘My Mom is white too’. Everyone looked at me. He continued. “My Dad is white too’. ‘Well now, my Dad is white as well’ I responded. Silence. The child looked at me, appearing to be slightly amazed at this marvelous coincidence.

But then he trumped me. “My Dad is in jail’. ‘Oh’ I said. There the similarity ended and we returned to doing what we had been doing before. Just a quick snapshot at the many random and poignant conversations which happen daily at school…