We have just finished a dinner of crispy bacon and asparagus risotto. Sofia and Virginia are sitting across the table from each other, chatting and laughing about quarantine memes. I look at the dusk and the Leyland cypresses behind our house dripping with beads of mist, and say, “I’m going to take a walk.”
“Yeah, let’s play on the slide!” Luke calls to Mark and Diana, as he runs out the back door, and then comes back almost immediately saying,“It’s too wet,” tossing his coat on the ground.
“You guys can come with me,” I say. It won’t be the meditative walk I had imagined, but they need nature and fresh air too. They are already on the front walk with winter coats and shoes on when I say, “You have to agree you won’t fight.”
Yeah, yeah, they grunt as they toss back and forth Luke’s new black and blue basketball. It is the only one of three that has arrived. After we saw people shooting hoops and playing tennis at the park, I thought basketballs might cheer them up.
Luke and Diana take turns bouncing the new ball and Mark, 11, walks beside me so close that I ask him, “Can I hold your hand?” His expression, a mix of embarrassment and disgust, seems to say, “How could you ask me that in public?”
Cherry blossom petals cling to the sidewalks like confetti after a storm has broken up an outdoor party. “I wonder why Italy has more smells,” Mark says. “Like the ocean, the flowers, the food.”
For a flash I see all of us walking along the curve of Mondello Bay at dusk with Mark’s Italian grandfather, aunt, uncle and cousin. Kids play tag while adults in bathing suits play cards and eat dinner on tables set in the sand. Across the street, restaurants and gelaterias with outdoor tables bubble and sing with people, tanned and dressed up, talking and laughing.
Sicily August 2019, and I am flooded with gratitude for that trip, rare and expensive, as if it were the best thing we ever did. A paradise that I will never be able to get back to.
“Maybe we noticed scents more because it was all so new,” I said, remembering the fuchsia bougainvillea cascading over crumbling walls, stands selling fried risotto balls stuffed with ragu, and the ever-present sweet sting of sea droplets tumbling in the hot air.
The entrance to the beach, where we used to stop for gelato, is now patrolled by carabinieri, cordoned off and deserted as if warships were arriving. Enrico’s Italian family are by themselves, in apartments around Milan — grandparents separated from grandchildren, grown children separated from parents. Knowing that when they come out, the world will be forever changed.
“There are plenty of smells here,” I tell Mark, even as I too have become dulled to the place where I live, as if it were some cardboard map that I traverse to get from one point to the next. “I smell the rain right now, for example, when it touches the cement, the earth.”
Mark agrees, and I think about how at this time in our normal life, we would have been spinning in a frenetic routine. It’s Tuesday night around 7, and Diana and I would have just gotten home from her swim lesson. Mark and Luke, who would have walked home on their own from swim team practice, would be playing or fighting, bags of wet swimsuits strewn on the floor along with backpacks, coats, and tennis shoes. Maybe Sofia would still be at rehearsal, Virginia blasting trap music from the portable speaker, and it would be my turn to make a quick dinner, spend 30 minutes of one-on-one time with whoever’s turn it was, and make sure everyone was bathed and in bed by 8:30, ready to wake up for school the next day.
There is a softness now, in this life. A softness that lets me be permeated with sadness. Like mist filling the night.
At the empty park, the kids take turns shooting hoops, and then play with tennis balls abandoned along the edges of the court, so soaked with rain they must be flushed of germs. The balls make tiny splashes when the kids throw them against the cinderblock wall, and they make waves when rolling away, like little motor boats.
It’s almost dark when we begin the walk home. They start fighting over who gets the ball. I get that sick feeling in my stomach, and the stress starts rising again. I try to remember the principle of acceptance.
They are fighting, I say to myself, as they shove each other, sulk and hang back, hurl insults and bicker.
Acceptance doesn’t seem to be working until one moment, when I see them as children again, not fellow humans obstructing my peace.
Luke, so strong-willed and disrupting, yet only nine years old. Half my size, his frame so slight, under his red hooded Land’s End coat.
His brother Mark, on the crest of adolescence, in between a child and a teen, not sure of who he is.
And Diana, who stops like a figure in an A. A. Milne storybook, to look up at a magnolia.
In the dark, the street lamps light up the grass in a nearby yard, and every blade looks like a spindle of green glass, transparent and shimmering.
At the busy intersection, empty of cars that normally pile up, the stoplights spill neon red toward us on the wet blacktop. Then the light turns green, but nothing changes, except for the color on the shiny black streets.
‘Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.’
The week of distance learning is over. I can feel the heat dissolving that had filled my chest as if the job were pushing a train up a too-narrow track.
Saturday I wake, not to the alarm clock, but to the sound of hands raking through legos. Water jerks through the pipes under the kitchen floor, the first load of laundry is getting clean. Onions sizzle in hot oil as I drop handfuls of chopped carrots and celery into the pan.
The familiar rhythm of our weekend lulls me into thinking that everything is OK.
But this weekend, a refrigerated semi-truck is backed up to a hospital in Queens to hold all the dead bodies.
Ancient holy sites in Jerusalem, like the church where they say Jesus was buried and resurrected are shuttered, the first time since the Plague of 1349.
In India hundreds of thousands of destitute migrant workers leave locked-down cities in a historic exodus. Without trains, they must walk back to their villages, some hundreds of miles away.
After lunch my husband and daughters help the little ones with their Italian homework. Then steam hisses from the espresso maker signaling the end of quiet time. Feet thunder down the basement stairs to play Rocket League and Death Run.
This is familiar music, but I know it’s a lie. A veneer over a disaster of biblical proportions.
My mom and her seamstress friend are sewing surgical masks for hospitals who don’t have enough
Even bandanas and scarves are better than nothing, says the CDC to protect against the attacking virus Over 50 doctors in Italy have died In New York City nurses are wearing garbage bags
Like firefighters climbing up the burning twin tower black smoke pouring from a massive gash They make wills, find guardians for their children Not knowing whether they’ll come back down
“They’re saying that this crisis is going to be the end of America being the richest, most powerful country in the world,” my daughter Virginia tells me.
“I know.”
“It’s like ‘nothing gold can stay,'” she says. “Do you know that poem?”
She shows it to me on her MacBook Pro.
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost, 1874-1963
And we talk about empires rising and falling, good and evil, and if what we always thought was ever true.
The late afternoon sun casts a golden glow in the sunroom where I sit watching the kids at the table, bent over scratch art boards that have just arrived in the mail from my mom in Ohio. Sixteen-year-old Virginia is sitting with her laptop, scrolling and listening to The Weeknd, and Sofia, 18, is soaking porcini mushrooms at the counter for dinner.
My husband has just come home from his work at a psychiatric hospital (still considered an essential employee), cheerful and jokey, tickling and teasing the kids. He’ll drink the espresso I prepared for him, check email, and then head off to his second job at a clinic where he now sees patients via Zoom.
It’s the third day of distance learning at our public schools, and my new job is running this home school. I want to feel satisfied after a good day’s work, but I don’t. My chest is heavy with a pulsing heat and a gloom has settled in.
It should be easier by now. Why don’t I have a better handle on this? I hear about how hard distance learning is for teachers — struggling to learn how to teach online, constantly responding to questions from students, trying to take care of their own children at the same time. We have so much — a whole house and a yard, an at-home parent, a secure income — that it’s hard to feel compassion for myself.
I thought we were doing well when my first grader, Diana, who is often the last to get my help with schoolwork, was seated at the table — dressed, fed, teeth brushed — at 8:50 a.m. drafting her A to Z book. She was writing three facts about ‘C is for Caring’ while her 11-year-old brother Mark snarked about each one. “I guess you want to do a lot of jobs today!” I told him, as I kept writing points next to his name.
“Is this how you spell ‘example’?” Diana asks.
“It has two Ms,” her 9-year-old brother Luke tells her while doing his morning chore of emptying the dishwasher. She erases and rewrites “example” with two Ms.
Crash! A glass shatters and Luke freezes, his hand still poised over the shelf. “It’s OK, it happens to everyone,” I say as I get the dustpan. One of the teens floats by and heads into the basement for a class conference call, and I get the vague feeling that neither are getting enough sleep these days, but it seems like a quaint concern from the past when I worried about parties, where they were, and what they were doing with their friends.
Upstairs Diana tries to finish the ‘D is for Drawing’ page of her A to Z book on her shaggy rug, while I try to log into Microsoft Teams to find out what else she is supposed to be doing, but realize her username and password are not saved on my computer.
“Crunch, crunch. Yum!” she began her page ‘A is for Apple Picking’ on Tuesday when we first started this project. Because I’ve been writing these days, it felt natural to help her try the strategy of hooking the reader with sound words, as her teacher suggested in her daily Powerpoint.
Luke is supposed to be brushing his teeth and starting school too, but he keeps going into Diana’s room and messing with her toys and criticizing her homework. She whines and cries repeatedly, and I start threatening to send anyone who can’t stay in their own area to an outdoor study space.
Finally he starts brushing his teeth, but when I hear him tell her to write, “You can draw many things” for a supporting fact, a suggestion that seems idiotic and passive-aggressive, I blow up. “I don’t need your help,” I tell him, and realizing I have to follow through on my threat, send him to study on the porch.
I feel bad when tears come to his eyes, but I can’t accommodate everyone, and I am beginning to question whether I can accommodate anyone. Every morning Diana looks at me smiling and says, “School!” and I feel like every day I disappoint her with my repeated failures to make logins work, to have the time to spend with her, to get her set up on a computer.
I know that you as parents want to support your child in every way that you can at home. But the reality is, learning will be very different in the coming days and weeks, and that is perfectly okay. It really is.
Our elementary school principal
Today I finally get into her first grade Microsoft Team and find in the Class Files folder a ‘Would You Rather’ YouTube video check-in from her assistant teacher. She is so excited to see his name, so I click play and head downstairs to get the boys settled.
I drag an old table from the garage to the porch and pull a chair in front of it. It actually looks kind-of inviting, with a view over the flowering peach tree in the garden and the neighborhood houses across the street. “Get your coat on and come out, Luke!”
Yesterday I had set up a child account for him with parental controls on my husband’s laptop, but every time he would log in, it would list about 15 random utilities that he was not authorized to use, and every time I had to enter the administrator name and password he would duck his head under the table, a sign that he appreciates the privilege he once tried to steal by guessing our passwords.
He plops down grumpily on the porch swing in his coat and shoes. I tell him he can log on now, and he brightens for a moment, and pulls the computer on his lap. The mesmerized look on his face doesn’t assure me, but he says, “I just have to go to Teams, Mama.”
I’m still dizzy trying to move around in the Office 365 platform the school district is using for virtual classrooms, but he does seem to know where to find his assignments, which are also coming in from his specials teachers — make a video puppet show, code a new game, design an American Revolution persuasive poster.
I go inside and check on Mark. As a sixth grader, he might be the most independent, but the amount of information and channels and teachers and schedules he is dealing with is overwhelming. He often walks around in circles saying, “I don’t know what to do. Can you help me?”
After a relatively disastrous first day, we had sat down together for over an hour in the evening to try to understand the expectations of each teacher — English, Math, Geography, Science and Spanish — reading through the team newsletter and various emails and following links leading to PowerPoints, PDFs, Office 365 Teams, Clever, YouTube, and the online grading system.
“What do you have to do today, Mark?” I ask, coming in from the porch. He tells me that he has nothing to do. “Thursday…” I say looking at his agenda, “you have a live lesson with Ms. T at 9:30. That’s in 5 minutes!”
He finds his Period 1 Team window and clicks on a Join button and miraculously, his teacher appears. Other kids are joining in as video squares begin piling on top of each other — some with faces, some just black screens with a name.
Once I see that he and his classmates are involved in a discussion with the teacher about how to copy, transfer, fill out and turn in digital reading logs and other assignments — a process that will take almost an hour — I go upstairs to check on Diana, then to Luke on the porch, then back to Mark, out, up and down, making rounds among the three kids, responding to cries for help, conflicts between siblings, or that dazed look when someone has fallen down an internet rabbit hole. I kind-of feel useful, but I also have the sensation that nothing is getting accomplished.
Diana, who has scarcely used a computer until this week, spends 20 minutes typing, “I would rather eat pasta, swim at the beach, and bake cookies,” but when it all disappears, I am so tense that I yank the computer towards me, retype her words in half a minute, and don’t give her a chance to even click “Post.”
By 10:30 a.m., Mark looks bleary-eyed, Diana has watched four math videos and collapsed beside her A to Z book pages, and Luke has spent most of his time tweaking a video game he already designed in his digital communications class, so I say, “OK, everyone outside!”
I dig my hands into an open bag of Virginia pines mulch, and toss handfuls into the flower bed as if I were bailing myself out of a flood with buckets. The kids argue and whine, but eventually I hear bikes and scooters being dragged up the gravel driveway, and then the sound of laughter and calling from around the block.
About 20 minutes later, when I am pulling up wild Queen Anne’s lace around the daylilies, Diana’s face appears, and she says, “My head hurts.” Not sure if it’s an excuse to go inside, I tell her to lie down on the porch swing. Ten minutes later I find her on the living room couch sucking her thumb. Her forehead feels a little hot, and I remember how she had a tummy ache last night, and wonder — could these be symptoms of the virus?
I ask Virginia, who is tending to several pots and pans on the stove while checking her phone and playing Jhené Aiko on her laptop, if she could also set the table because Diana doesn’t feel well. She doesn’t seem happy but starts getting out the cloth napkins, and asks “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and go outside to clean up the rake, shovel, and bucket of weeds, thinking what will happen if she is sick, who else will get it, who we have infected, how will I be able to take care of everyone.
When I check the thermometer under her tongue, it only reads 98.4 degrees. Diana gets up and eats all of her sister’s new healthy vegan-style cooking — green lentil pasta with basil pesto and a side of sautéed broccoli — and then jumps down and starts doing a puzzle on the floor. Filled with caloric energy, Mark climbs on the couch grabbing onto the curtains, and Luke throws Diana’s shoe in the litterbox, and she begins crying.
“Sofia, can you enforce the dishes rule?” I ask, as I get up and say, “C’mon guys, outside in 10, 9…”
“Why are you lying on the ground?” Diana asks, when she finds me on my back in my winter coat on the brick circle in our front yard next to the yellow and red tulips. The boys, after digging up dandelions in the driveway as jobs, had started shooting each other with the hose, calling each other genitalia, and wailing, so I sent everyone in for an early quiet time.
“It feels good to have the sun on my face and the earth under me,” I tell her. Diana lies down next to me for a while, her head in the crook of my arm. If someone walks by and sees me, I figure they will understand. In a time when everything is weird, nothing is weird.
We are saturated with sunlight, and the world looks blue when we open our eyes, and we go in to lie down in our beds. I read the paper from cover to cover as I do every day now and then take a nap.
When I get up, I will make coffee for me and my husband and the kids will bound down the stairs like a herd of bisons to open the package of scratch art that has just arrived from their grandmother in Ohio. When they get up and wander towards screens, I will notice my journal on a pile of magazines.
I will start writing about this day, and my journal, like a therapist listening to my angst, receives everything without judgment. And I begin to feel better.
Before the schools were closed, I used to spend my mornings writing in a quiet room. Now my laptop is used to log into Microsoft Teams where one-inch squares represent my children’s classes, and I feel like a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse on a desolate prairie who is beginning to lose it.
But another thing has changed. Before I was too scared to share my writing. Now I need to share to survive. Here, ease has sprouted from difficulty. From scarcity, a bewildering abundance.
The day before the start of distance learning the middle school principal told parents in a Zoom video conference our faces at the top of the screen like squares in a quilt border
You are not expected to be your child’s teacher. The most important thing is grace. We need to give ourselves grace, our children grace, and the world grace.
And I wanted to cry for her kindness, her forgiveness, her grace but my camera was on
We are supposed to order take-out from our favorite restaurants to keep them in business
But now some of the only comforts are cooking at home and saving money
Plus, it feels like putting a band-aid on a hemorrhage — all the restaurants with no one inside
On Sunday my family picks up a $56 lunch from Bandit Taco “Were they happy?” I ask my son when they come back with a paper bag of beef bowls, pork burritos, and soft-corn tacos
“The guy was smiling the whole time,” he said, “and someone came in after us and got an order for $74.”
My fish tacos with shredded purple cabbage and slivers of lime radish tasted better than they ever have
Painting with Words 