Today: A Flower
The idea came to me as I walked two big dogs up into the hills above Eugene, OR, and came face to face with a supernova of forsythia. I was dog and housesitting for two dogs and a cat in the middle of the growing coronavirus pandemic. One of the dogs spent most of his evenings chewing the pads of his paws to a wet, angry, mess of raw. The other spent his time lodged as far under his owners’ bed as he could get, which was about half way (impressive). A third animal, a cat, endured my affection while howling at me with an angry smoker’s rasp. A fourth animal, me, curled up on the sofa each night trying to avoid my Facebook feed.
We weren’t doing all that well.
My impulses in situations like these are not terribly helpful. I grew up in Iowa, which is close enough to Kansas to put us smack dab in the middle of tornado country. Meteorology was developed enough even when I was a kid for TV announcers to be able to tell us, days in advance, to expect deadly weather: “the finger of God,” as they say. Most of the time, this wasn’t an all-day event. We could expect sunny weather, potentially and thunderously and briefly interrupted. So you could life a life for 23 hours of the day and only really need to batten the hatches for 60 minutes or so.
Except for me. On tornado days, I disappeared into the grim world I constructed inside myself: a world already strewn with debris and heartbreak. I did what little I could to prepare, which consisted of gathering my sleeping bag, pillow, flashlight, and a big book to put over my head. I placed them all in our basement bathroom and then I waited, limply, to die. I obsessively watched The Weather Channel for the slightest blip on our local radar. No one could convince me to go outside. No one could convince me to do anything but hide from the sun and wait for the inevitable.
I didn’t understand these impulses to get on with life. I mean, didn’t people get it? Shit was going down. So if I could get away with it, I stayed in. As in, inside myself. I rewatched familiar movies, reread old books, did everything I could think of to spend time without really participating in it. It was quite a complicated and painful dance, really.
Did it help? I don’t know. I needed comfort, I suppose? I needed to subtract myself from the business of living. It felt like everyone was asking me to step on an escalator, when I desperately didn’t want to go where we were all headed. As if it could be possible to just stop the end of the day from arriving somehow. The monster at the end of our book. Or just excise the span of time I had to endure before the monster had come and gone already.
There’s privilege to that kind of response, I realize. I lived in a home into which I could retreat. I grew up with a family which, if with puzzlement and occasionally outright exasperation, tolerated my disappearing acts on tornado days.
But did it help? Not really. Those days were so long, agonizingly so. Nor did I really feel any better being holed up by myself. It was just all I could think of to do.
So the current moment is, as you might imagine, a bit challenging for me. And there we were in that house, we four animals all dealing with our stress, chewing over ourselves, isolating, needing connection but resisting it. And the cosmic irony: we’re told now to basically be me as a kid. Stay in, read books, avoid being out in the world. This should’ve helped, but it didn’t. It’s not like I liked doing that as a kid. It’s not as though it was fun. To be told to bunker down as a solution? To wait for what would happen next? Yeah, it was enough to drive me under the bed with the dog.
Except for the walks. These are two big dogs, and they need (deserve, I dare say) two decent walks a day. Even in the midst of my own private mindfuck, I felt duty-bound to make sure they got them. So no matter the state of things in Italy or Iran, no matter the news story I’d just read about exponential transmission or the inevitable overwhelm of our hospitals and underwhelm of our leaders’ response, I would offer the dogs a treat to sit while I slipped harnesses around their bodies and picked up my end of the leash. Much of these walks were a grim sort of plodding. I knew they needed it and so I was making sure they got it (I was pretty sure I needed it, too). But it was like medicine, you know?
Except sometimes. I don’t know why. They would lead me around a turn of the trail and damn if I wouldn’t be ocularly accosted by some stupid-beautiful bush in exquisite flower. Like the buds had just exploded sunshine all over the place. I would stop in my tracks and be accosted myself by the simple and effective, if obvious, thought: “That flower is pretty.” And it was. Nothing could change that — not the people dying the next state or continent over. Not the sense of some dim shroud drawing over us and the fear that we would never kick it off again. I was up and on my feet, drawing air into these lungs, with these dogs I think of as my friends, and here we were and it was spring. I felt that fact in those moments like I briefly became the reincarnation of e.e. cummings, like I could sing you a whole bubble of sonnets on the snarky, sassy, sexy audaciousness of spring come again.
I still had to go home. We’ll all still have to go home again and in some small way face what’s coming. In fact, to be good to one another right now, those of us lucky enough to have homes must go there and stay, in a kind of impression of my terrified weather avoidance as a kid. We’re all quite literally in it — inside our spaces — for the long haul. I’m still chewing on my paws all the time, too. I’m still crammed half under the bed. I would likely howl at anyone who came close enough to try and touch me, except that can’t happen for a little while (pray for your single friends).
But I guess the moment I confronted the forsythia, I touched something that I didn’t have access to as a kid — a realization and a certainty, something that is solid enough that you can briefly put all your weight on it while brief enough that it can’t quite make you forget entirely, which is okay and good actually, because we need to remember all of it. I guess I’m saying that there’s more, and that this more is available to us all I think, even now, if we can find a way to be here today, here right now, and connect with it. Connect with each other, even from six and more feet apart. So I’m going to try and do that. I’m going to try and do that and then share it here, and I’m asking a bunch of friends to share, too. (You’re welcome to join — leave a comment if you’d like to.)
The intent is to pay attention to and then share the stories and observations that exist within the space of transmission and trajectory, peak and curve: moments and realizations, hilarity and loss and boredom. The aim is to be together even in this time apart: to share the shape of our lives lived at a distance. To urge each other, no matter the predictions, to keep living them.
