Dirty Laundry

Back on Day Ten of the pandemic, I wrote my blog post as a long poem, which ended with this: 

The worries of the world hang

like a neighbor's drying laundry,

within view but without coming

into our own sunny yard

yet. Spain is storing bodies in ice rinks,

funerals are forbidden.

But my children know none of this,

just that when they lift their hands

slowly out of the bubbly water

a film of rainbow rises up

with their hands, and if they arch their hands

back down, they can make their own

hemispheres reflecting light.

I think back to that feeling of distance, that sense of foreboding, that sense that things were going to get bad here but they hadn't, yet. To continue the laundry metaphor, it now feels like that neighbor in the poem has gone crazy and is throwing their dirty laundry at my house and it's falling all over the yard and piling higher and higher around us. We are in the heart of it, and cases still haven't peaked yet. 

And yet, it's less than a week before Taiya and William go back to school in person, and the Delta variant is everywhere, and the hospitals all around us are full (I just saw a report that there are only 8 available ICU beds in the entire state, a number which will probably go down by the end of today), and there are serious concerns that this variant is worse for children than the previous ones were, and we know it's much more transmissible. 

I'm scared, really scared, but there are no good choices right now. Keep the kids home again? Taiya would be absolutely heartbroken. She has been such a good sport this whole time, but she needs to go back to school. Jeremy would probably lose his last shreds of sanity. William would be happy to stay home and watch YouTube videos all day, but my heart would perish with guilt for letting his brain rot on that nonsense. Find some magic outdoor school that requires masks? We can't afford that even if we could find one. As of now there is no mask mandate at their school, though the school board is meeting this week to decide what to do. I wrote to all the school board members, the superintendent, and the principal to share my opinion. So now it just it feels out of my hands, which is horribly uncomfortable in a state that is red in both politics and in severity of COVID. 

I've been finding new ways of coping with stress. Jeremy got me a spoon carving set for my birthday,

and I finished my first attempt at a spoon. I learned a lot, and I discovered spoon carving instructional videos on YouTube, which are remarkably soothing. So I'm excited to find more green wood and keep carving. Other ways of coping with stress that I'm falling back on are: rewatching Bridgerton, reading cheesy novels of all kinds, obsessively online shopping for the very best children's mask that I can afford to buy a bunch of, and obsessively planning going-back-to-school details: how to limit their exposure, how to decontaminate them at the end of each day, what the heck I'm going to make them for breakfast every day... 

I had a dream last night that Jeremy wanted to try telemarking (in real waking life he's not a skier and the one attempt I made to teach him ended badly) and he had a pair of skis on and was going to start down the mountain, and I tackled him to the snowy ground and spoke very intensely to him, saying "You don't have to do this, there's nothing you have to prove. This is a terrible idea, it's much harder than downhill skiing, which you can't even do, and this trail is way too narrow, and you could get really hurt..." and on and on like that. And then I woke up. Could this possibly suggest that I'm in the head space of trying desperately to protect my family? Hmmm, tough to interpret.