When we lived side by side with Covid…

Pandemic thoughts: how is it possible to have seven…(7)…yes, seven different sizes of zip lock bags in seven separate boxes? On one shelf? In one kitchen pantry?

Seven.

Methinks my husband is to blame…

As I look down and see my husband’s white sock covered with spilled coffee grounds…and as I look up and see him holding the coffee filter somewhat askew…and as I witness more wet grounds on the kitchen floor and wall by the garbage bin, I say the only thing I can say…

‘Step away from the kitchen, sir…step AWAY from my kitchen…’

Listening by the gravesite to his ‘Fugue for a Party’…performed brilliantly at Princeton University Chapel by our family friend Daniel Fortune.

The cemetery is greening and quiet. The organ is blazing. A bird flutters and chirps.

All will be well…

The seasons are in that strange colliding space now…with the first tentative sounds of crickets, new born and desperate…trying out the colder air, chirping weakly at the windows.

The windows…oh, the dearest hope filled celebration. The windows are…open. At long last, the air moves freely once again in the house. The last autumnal vestiges of cinnamon are swirling around and out, replaced with rose, sage, iced strawberry.

The sun shone longer today and I went shopping and bought flower seeds and came home to find my husband on the porch. A tremendously good sign.

Suddenly, the low mournful sound of a single goose wafts through the screen door. He is lost. The northerly winged crowds flew by without him…days earlier. I hear him and then he’s gone; headed toward the lake possibly.

It’s already dark. I don’t know.

I do know I have new seeds and cans of almond spray paint for a door wreath…and I have crickets and mud and open windows…

Summation of my week: overheard in a Kindergarten class…’I’ve got shark nails’. (Sharp). With a third grader…’Could we have a salami in Rochester?’ (Tsunami).

One of my second grade cherubs wrote me a note, ‘Dear Teacher…I want to try to do my best because I want to be god’. (Good).

A very tall order indeed. Things to think about on a grey late winter afternoon…

I leaned through the open car door window and said to Lolly girl who was grinning and waving from her car seat, ‘Girl! We’re in the middle of a pandemic. What do you think?’

She leaned back, all curly locks shaking in every direction and screechy laughed. She pointed at me directly and continued to suck on her single soggy French fry.

It’s good to be a mere 15 months old…

I’m on hold…breathlessly awaiting the long promised connection to a live person who can possibly connect me to another live person who will set up a delivery time for a large item which has been siting in Buffalo for a week now.

Normally, I hate being subjected to inane ‘on hold Muzak’…trapped by a slaughtered version of a Beatles song, a well watered down/cleaned up version of a Rod Stewart tune (sans lyrics) or an attempt to aggressively ‘bee bop’ a sacred hymn like Amazing Grace into a road trip kind of a sing-a-long.

Today, I’m pleasantly surprised at hearing the gorgeous tones of a Chopin prelude playing liltingly on my phone…minor key, slow movement…European angst with dark chords…gathering clouds…and then it occurs to me this might not be good. The invasion of Poland. The funeral march. Death.

I’m going to be on hold for eternity…

It is not snow. It is powdered sugar.

We are living on top of a very large doughnut.

Received as a text on my phone early this morning: ‘Good morning, Mark. Adam and I stopped by and dried out the rear lot camera and checked the other two. Please let us know if you have any further difficulty…Charles’.

I do not know Mark. I do not know Adam or Charles.

I am unclear as to what a rear lot camera might be.

I may have further difficulties, but I suspect Charles will not be able to help me. I hope these three men had a successful day.

This afternoon…the little one coughed, raised his hand and when called on said simply, ‘Miss, I have a hair ball!’

My response…’I can’t take care of that right now’…

Back to work.

Can’t make this stuff up…