Sunday pandemic baking = Corn muffins and pound cake.
It is Sunday. October. 25. I haven’t been here and hit publish since September 12. Which isn’t the same as not being here at all. There are several unpublished posts that hover in this space. Some barely started. Some just unfinished. Some that could likely stand alone. None of which I’m ready to let go of.
I’ve been watching ER. From my bed. At night, mostly, but sometimes, like today, on a weekend afternoon while I fold laundry.
I’ve been cooking and baking. Spending time in the kitchen, I’m finding, is a way to accomplish something. And not just something but something crucial. Preparing food to eat. To nourish us. To fill us with something real.
I have the time to plan the meals AND cook them. Most of the time I even clean up now. Another 15 minutes of doing before I am done and have to find something else to keep me busy.
I’ve been worrying.
Spending too much time on Twitter and nytimes.com.
Texting my sister hundreds of time each day.
Here we are on Day 226. There are nine days until Election Day. Nearly 60 million Americans have already voted. My plan is to vote on Election Day, a plan that I feel the need to defend for all of the people who have already cast their ballots. But my polling place is a five-minute walk away. Short of the end of the world between now and next Tuesday, I feel confident in my ability to fill in the circle for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The thing is, the end of the world is imaginable right now. And were it to really happen, what good would my vote do?
Or is that just my despair talking.
It’s Sunday. Almost 5 p.m. The laundry is finished. Dinner is nearly done. Dessert, too. The boys are watching football. Youngest is on a bike ride with a friend. Her sister upstairs, alone in their shared room, likely enjoying having the space to herself.
I am, as my mother would say, at loose ends.
On every episode of ER, pretty much without fail, someone’s heart is restarted. Or at least, an attempt is made by my favorite characters. Abby. Carter. Most of the time the patient recovers enough to make it to the scene break. Wheeled up to the OR or left for the next episode.
The ER of TV is its own microcosm of space and people. A closed and controlled environment, even in the chaos of each episode. My home is now a closed environment. Its own microcosm of space and people, supposedly a reflection of what we all should be doing. No one from outside our family of five has set foot in our house since March. Isn’t that the way it is supposed to be now, during this pandemic? We weren’t a destination household before March, but certainly the kids’ friends would come by. Family members visited. But I read in the news and know from examples of people I know that so many have not fully retreated to their homes, have not made the decisions to stay in as much as possible.
The blackberries I bought at the store yesterday are gone.
The sap stain on my daughter’s sweatshirt didn’t come out in the wash, despite OxiClean spray and powder added to the water.
I keep thinking I will make us more masks and relieve myself of the laundry a bit.
Today the White House chief of staff declared that we can’t get the virus under control so we shouldn’t try.
There is too much else that has happened in the world during the past six weeks that I can’t even try to “catch up.”
I’m just here to start over, I guess.
I stopped writing and publishing in this space, I think, because I felt misunderstood. Like I was portraying myself as more sad than I really was, at the time.
Irony abounds because now I really am sad and here I am again. Maybe I was just predicting my future self with my words in the moment. We are all under an enormous amount of pressure. I used to be confident in my writing voice. Now I’m not so sure. Now I find I’m trying to decide if this is my true voice or my pandemic voice or my self-conscious voice or something else altogether. Has my writing voice changed permanently since March, as we’ve all likely changed permanently?
I keep reading that we will never get “back to normal.” And maybe that is what is stopping me. I write and I question myself and more often than not I don’t hit publish, because nothing is normal. And then I hit a new level of anxiety and a new level of despair and feel a low low lowest level of disappointment in myself. What can I do? What am I hoping for? A solution? An answer? Normalcy?
I can create things out of words. I can create things out of food. I can find comfort in reruns and matching the socks on a regular basis instead of letting them build up in a laundry bin in the living room until they overflow and I have no choice but to nag or to just do it myself.
I keep getting up and walking away from the computer. The timer went off for the pound cake. Then for the corn muffins. Then I looked out the window and realized I hadn’t taken the rest of the clothes in from the line. That the laundry wasn’t all folded yet. That I am almost finished with Season 11, Carter’s departure. That it’s Sunday night and another week begins tomorrow.
It would be so easy to leave the realizations unmarked, to close the computer and leave another post unpublished.
Stay safe, everyone.