31 Notes from July

It is 10 am on the last Friday of June, and I have just come in from outside, having spent an hour playing with the dog and inspecting my tomatoes and cucumbers

It's July 2020 and the world is still sick

“It’s too late for the masks,” the customer says. “I wish people would understand that”

We didn’t know as much then as we know now, and part of me is strangely grateful

Inside again, I write, I nap (why not?),/ I wash the summer berries/ who await their fate

I have found refuge in what is for me the strangest of places--Klondike, one of those video games where you build a world, burnish its perfection

Sometimes when I’m feeling delusions of grandeur, I imagine that I am working for the military

 Of everything, it’s the lack of an end date that gets to me. We’re in darkness

One breath in the wrong place at the wrong time

When the sun set and fireworks started booming in her neighborhood, we hustled to her back porch and saw a sky filled with bursts of light

This summer, there’s more than just the typical measure of parental gut-wrench that comes with watching your kid leave the nest

I miss the Marc’s check-out clerk with three nose rings,/ bitten nails, sardonic asides./ Miss the librarian whose voice is soft as my mother’s was

I cannot help but wonder…how do people manage when they live alone? Who dispenses meds in carefully regulated doses

Stupid, stupid, stupid, Covid. I close my eyes and pretend I’m in Spain

We distract ourselves with theme dinners—ideas like only red-and-white foods, or foods that all start with the letter P as in pandemic

One thing to tell you. Home school sucks

Scrolling through these headlines - coronavirus, tornadoes, hornets, locusts, a fascist in the white house, the relative calm of my personal life has never taken on such a sinister edge

So much was being quantified or condensed into scrolling headlines. So much was unquantifiable or unspeakable

Millions of us, trapped in our houses tuned into our televisions, were caught watching, and before we could stop watching, we became complicit in an act of brutality that ended in murder

The world seems to have gone crazy, I said

Maybe I will try to do some reading once I calm down

Yes, I wear a mask when I’m near other people. Yes, I social distance to the best of my ability. Yes, I wash my hands

Now, I’m a lightning rod in a graveyard/ My footsteps/ My breaths/ Too loud for my ears 

Tired of YouTube, my bored/ daughter draws over and over/ stick figures with straw hair 

We had not expected to be news-junkies on our honeymoon

Remember the hush at the beginning of all this?/ We were stunned at the depth and reach of  it

All I can control is myself

We talk about what we can see out our windows, how our plans have changed, what worries us most, what we’re having for supper

Let's assume we spend our days doing what we should

Maybe someday, before we die—of Covid-19, or cancer, or racism, or a badly failed state, or living too long among humans—we’ll find our way home

Join me, let’s hold hands & fly,/ balance on a stone as two robins flutter

We’ve taken a sentence or two or some lines from each blog post in July to create a quilt, a cento, a mini-collage, a fringe of whose story is this? We hope it’s ours, in the same way that holding hands can help (although we can’t do that now).