300 days of isolation! Crazy, no? Still, we are safe.
This morning -- a gray, misty, cold, icy morning once again...
... with a late breakfast...
... I kept thinking about a passage from a book I read a long long time ago. I was 12 then and mostly liked the romance books that I picked up at the very tiny Young Adult section of the New York Public Library. But, we were soon to return to Poland and so I actually purchased this one book, a nonfiction story (written by Marie Killilea) about raising a daughter with a disability. That part -- about caring for a disabled child -- was powerful enough, but something else in her narrative really made an impression on me: the author presented a beautiful depiction of family life. Every day stuff. I was enthralled.
There was one little snippet from that book that came back to me today: it's where she describes the time after the departure of her older adopted daughter. It was a simple scene: the girl, young woman really, had left to live elsewhere (with her new husband I think). The house was suddenly very empty. Marie writes how she takes out the leaf from the dining table, no longer needed now that the family is that much smaller. And this just proved to be the wrong thing to do: the physical act of accommodating in this way the shrunken family unravels her completely.
Because I am remembering so vividly this passage from the book, I do not put away stuff that is here, at the farmhouse for the pleasure of the kids. I'll do it -- I'll tidy up spaces, perhaps redecorate their play space, put away the books they have been demanding all December long, but not today. Not the first day of an empty house.
Still, the farmhouse is small and the telltale signs of the kids' presence are everywhere. And each time I see a flash of one item or the next -- the rose on Snowdrop's placemat, the soup pot filled by Sparrow with plastic veggies, the markers used just yesterday by the little girl -- the feeling of sudden loss washes over me.
But, I'm busy. For one thing, I have a Zoom party with my Polish friends, all properly horrified at the news from this side of the ocean.
And then later, toward evening, Ed and I do a ski run. No rush today, just a nice easy glide through the prairie and into the forest.
And so the day passes. Will all my winter days be equally slow, equally without new ideas? To avoid a slide into the feeling of sameness, where each day is just like the next or the one before it, I made a list of projects. Looking at it now, I'm thinking few of the items are any fun. They sound like the laborious stuff that I should have been attending to all along, except that I had this excuse: the kids.
Perhaps tomorrow's job will be to come up with a better list!
