April 5, 2020
There are a lot of days, when, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, I feel that I am measuring out my life in coffee spoons. Wake up when I wake up, check the time, try to go back to sleep if it's before 6:30, go ahead and get up if it's after that, get out of bed and put on my robe and my slippers while grabbing my phone & my water bottle & my Apple watch, come downstairs, turn up the heat, let out the dog, start the coffee, put out the dog's food and then let her back in, go to the bathroom, wash my face, tidy up the kitchen while I wait for the coffee to be ready, pour some coffee, sit down and drink some coffee while I read about the world or watch videos or read a book or work on my puzzle or play Candy Crush on my phone. Suddenly it is later, and Geoff is getting up, and we talk. Later still, the girls start moving around, and at some point they actually come downstairs. Most of the time, we are not eating together - or rather, Annabel and I might eat breakfast together, and Katie and Annabel might eat lunch together, and Geoff and Annabel and I might eat dinner together, and then later Katie gets something for herself. We all get up and different times and get hungry at different times, and supposedly last week was "spring break" anyway, so we didn't wake people up, and we didn't make people go to bed, and NOW WHAT, is what I feel a hundred times a day. I make lists and charts so that I can look back and see that yes, I did do something today, perhaps even something of value to me or someone else, and so now if I want to sit and read or watch a show or listen to music, it's ok, I haven't done nothing today, I did these things, see them on my list? I did those things.
Tomorrow we begin a new variation on our new normal - spring break is over, and for an hour each weekday I now have to be available to my students for a scheduled "office hour," and it is insane how constrained I feel, knowing that I have a specific place I have to be for one hour every week day, considering that I haven't had anywhere I had to be, ever, for almost three weeks now. I miss my students, and I will be excited to get to see them (if I get to see them) or exchange emails with them or even just know that they are reading or responding to my messages to them.
May 15, 2020
The secret, it appears - and this is not really a surprise - is to stay busy. A rainy day filled with baking and cooking and sewing and talking and a strawberry margarita at the end of the day, when the sun is starting to peek out from behind the dark clouds that spawned a thunderstorm earlier in the day - is a day when things feel okay. It's almost like a Friday on a long-anticipated three day weekend after weeks of too-busy, when I am doing exactly what I want to do with my free time, instead of like day 60-something in a long line of days that are too much the same to feel normal. Today I drank coffee and attended a (Zoom) staff meeting and helped my daughter with a school assignment and finished a dress I was sewing for her. I made cookies from a recipe I've been eyeing for several days, and had a (Zoom) chat with a student, and made a video to share with students. I made a Hello Fresh dinner while listening to music and singing along and sometimes dancing in the kitchen, and watched the rain come down. Right now the sky is bright and it looks like the kind of sky that has a rainbow hiding in it somewhere. I haven't found the rainbow yet, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
I have found myself thinking, lately, about how our generation hasn't had to live through a time period like this, when how we live each day is constricted by a dangerous, unusual situation that we can't predict the end of. We have been lucky. Surely the people who lived through WWII experienced something in some ways similar - not knowing when or if they would be able to resume "normal" life. Just because we don't know when this will end doesn't mean that it won't.
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