Memories.

I’m marking time today in a different way. It is a slow slog. Every hour is a new normal after twenty-two years of the same halls, the same corners and the same processes. The Coronavirus has dropped a smart bomb into my solid set of systems, my ways of being, our places of buying and eating and roads on which we drive. It’s a great reduction and we are in the sauce…for now.

Usually my internal nature, my culture, my surroundings…these forces look and reach outward, forward, upward…comfortable in their very movement, their continual movement. Even in the stillness of quieter days there has been that motion and the push of even more movement.

It’s all sort of dribbling off and grinding down and sideways into nothing…right now.

‘Maybe there will be an extension, a waiver, a check…remote learning…something’. Someone whispers on the porch.

My neighborhood is very quiet. Very still. The porch chimes clang wildly in the March wind.

Today it shall be my cupboards, then…all of my cupboards will be cleaned.

And then…I will look for something else…something else to relieve my mind.

By fate, flaw or fancy, I make my home on an incline in the rocky soil of New York; land where tone and dialect change on a dime. From the tortured ‘o’ of a Brooklyn coffee to the unbearable nasal of the Buffalo twang buried in snow and on to the flat sound of Rochester; language brushed even by open fields, hunters and the power of the Genesee flowing North for goodness sake!

I sing the true laborer out on the greasy roads, brunted up against frost bitten winds and the line man, swinging on the wires…graciously allowing me time to read about distant shores and other days…for I am a true dreamer.

By hour, by genetics I remember Daddy polishing my scuffed Mary Janes on a Saturday evening for church in the morning. The lineman in the cold strings lines and props poles and slugs down scalding coffee and thick beef sandwiches as Daddy listens to the wind and polishes back and forth; first with a cloth, then with a thickly bristled brush and I dream of heated shores and other lives somewhere else.

I sense it is all somewhere else; far from the roots of my soul…

In bold letters…the ‘OFFICE OF ACCOUTABILITY’…misspelled words splashed across the neatly nauseating power point we are viewing in our staff meeting.

I pity the cog man newly appointed and required to school us in all the new terms. Ridiculous twists and phrases…such as ‘previous methodology’, ‘newly re-identified designation’, ‘different filters’ and ‘percent gap reduction’. Save us all.

Save the tentative first grader approaching me regularly with a carefully placed kiss on my right cheek and a murmured, ‘I love you’…one English phrase she masters and likes to practice very, very quietly. Unkempt, shabby, shy and given to lengthy procrastination in the cloak room; unable to manage her coat, boots, hat, mittens, book bag…

I present to you the child through the looking glass…as I keep my heart out of sight…

Winter can be rife with trickery. Deep belief that life this side of Heaven lasts forever proves false; lies and subterfuge. This brief moment in the sun would not last the drive’s duration as I bumped along River Road.

I passed over a number of potholes filled haphazardly as though the department of transportation saw them, hesitated and then rallying around for a brief moment, made a weak effort. I give those potholes about a week before they sink; disappearing.

Some fields were freshly turned over, glazing like melted caramel in the tricky sun. They will turn white and butter-creamy cold again before long. The weather is all smoke and mirrors this year.

I observed a hawk sitting in the field on a mound of dirt facing west; feathers moving gently in the wind. He’s watching the slight of hand; the falsehood of the climate and season.

I drove on and then suddenly on the right side of the road, there was a bright green overstuffed couch with one missing cushion. Tricks and lies. The furniture truck must have stopped on a whim and the driver and partner clambered out and sat down in the middle of the field to watch for more tomfoolery.

It’s all out there today amidst sun and flora and fauna and falderals.

I’m driving slowly this winter…

In the end, we realized that the system was purely data hungry. Research had gone from being helpful, a tool…to an entity to be worshipped. More details, more schedules, more numbers, more charts…it was a sacrificial system…a blood lust with minimal return.

Everyone scrambled to print, share, produce, file. Then the lull…then the stream of requests and emails flowed again; brand new, all agog with novelty as if we had never traversed this path before.

Then silence.

After awhile, we divided amongst ourselves…those choosing to fight to change the system went one way. Those choosing to work outside the system…under the radar, through the side door, hand held heavily on the delete button; we went another way.

But could those blasted test scores ever inch upward?

This was the never ending hymn, sung out wherever we were forced to listen…

Funny Valentine: betwixt and between…Janus and green…the shadows of winter bend long.

But as long as violins sound in snow…as long as pink candles in windows do glow…as long as dear Cupid still stretches his bow…the moon she will shine over water and wine…and all will be fine…betwixt me and twixt mine…while shadows bend deeply and low…

I was caught up in the aesthetics of the matter, not the practicality. He could not eat his breakfast…so graciously wrapped, carried and presented to him in his wood shop, on a delicate plate no less. He could not eat his breakfast because his hands were covered in grease.

The thought of providing napkins for him slid through my mind as shilly shally and flim flam.

This is why he builds, and I build differently…

Ground Hog Day…and what of it, really? I mean…really.

Old Man Winter, Lady Snow, Lord Wind and Sister Lake Effect toyed with us and found us wanting. They headed west to the political scene in Iowa, making mischief and they sat down in the middle of the plains for high tea.

They wobbled, adjusted and commented. ‘Pass the frost, please’ and ‘How delicious; layered permafrost with a gropple topping’.

I am bored and so is Phil, our regional rodent…no snow, no shadow, no sun.

Heading north today…toward the city, toward the lake, toward Spring…

Snow has fallen and gone away again.

I look at the pine needles and the damp…having forgotten how pleasant it is to walk around late at night in the country, in the moonlit cold.

I am looking forward to going back to the city…

Another February lies before us, preparing to stretch and unfold gently in the night hours…

Welcome February…the shortest month, rich with reds and pinks, rose petals and white lace with strawberry dipped chocolates…midnight wine goblets in heated restaurants…murmured chatter as we glance out the frosted glass.

Knowing, feeling that despite the most bitter of March gusts around time’s corner, February is winter’s farewell tip of the hat, the ice-wink…and the grand Cupid exit…