Sheltered-in-Place
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.
— Robert Burns, “My Heart’s in the Highlands”
With time as slippery as the olive oil I smear on our skillet,
I begin preparations for the fourth or fifth or possibly twelfth
weekly sheltered-in-place omelet for DeeGee and me. Tonight,
we’re settling down to dinner and Episode 7, Season One
of A Place to Call Home, an Australian Downton Abbey
in which Sister Sarah Adams returns to New South Wales
after nursing Republican Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War,
marrying her Jewish lover, converting to his faith, and spending
two years in a concentration camp at Ravensbrück. But so far,
Sister Adams (why is a Jewish nurse called Sister?) has discovered
home to be anything but where her heart is.
By now, we have finished our omelet. Sister Adams is pretending
to renounce her faith so her Catholic mother can die peacefully
as I leave our living room and repair to the garage. At this time,
allow me to explain that, with COVID-19 raging,
we store our non-perishable items in the garage a few days,
which explains why I retrieve a bag of cashews from the garage floor
before sprinkling my nightly nut dose into an orange measuring cup,
grabbing a beer, and returning to our dimly lit room, where
Sister Adams is being comforted by George Bligh, a rich sheep farmer
she met on her ocean voyage from Europe to Australia.
Sister Adams is crying, George Bligh is comforting,
and suddenly, after glancing down at my remaining nuts,
I am screaming at the surviving army of large, black ants
hiking up Mount Cashew.
Like Sister Adams, there was a time my heart was not at home,
a time I could fit all of my belongings into a 1973 Ford Pinto
parked in Nashville. One Saturday night,
I put on my cowboy hat, walked down Broadway,
and sneaked into the Ryman.
Out in the West Texas town of El Paso
I fell in love with a Mexican girl.
Night-time would find me in Rosa’s cantina;
Music would play and Felina would whirl, sang Marty Robbins
as drops from someone’s beverage in the balcony
hit my hat like heartbeats. But I was not in love.
In all likelihood, I would never meet Felina.
I would never whirl with her or anyone.
Tonight, I run out the door and into our yard screaming
(not so much over the surviving ants as those who didn’t).
I fling the homeless ants and unsuspecting cashews
beneath our holly tree, where DeeGee sometimes leaves
uneaten cat food for squirrels, raccoons, and possums.
Entering the house, measuring cup in hand, I think
there’s no place I’d rather be sheltered-in-place in
than here, where our next episode is about to begin.
Mark Williams lives in Evansville, Indiana. His poems have appeared in “The Hudson Review,” “The Southern Review,” “Rattle,” “Nimrod,” “New Ohio Review,” and “The American Journal of Poetry.” His fiction has appeared in “Indiana Review” and the anthologies, “The Boom Project: Voices of a Generation” and “American Fiction.”
