Settle For a Slowdown

This year, March came in like a lion and went out not like a lamb, but rather like a tiger or a dragon or some other wild beast we shouldn't get close to.  Soon after my first grade twins started bringing home worksheets about lions and lambs and the passing of winter into spring, the rapid spread of COVID-19 caused schools in our state to abruptly close.  Adults were cautioned to keep 6 feet between ourselves and others, and then...we were told it would be safer to work from home and to limit our outings, and to wear gloves and masks as a way of keeping ourselves (and one another) safe.  

I don't know what kind of an animal this past winter was.  It was so shocking, so dumbfounding.  In fact, part of me still feels that what we are living through, the world over, is a lingering form of social winter.  You know...a blank or a dash in the soul where you feel separated and barren and cold and isolated.  Tears and hugs alike are scarce, if only simply because it's just too cold to venture outside.  In the grocery store, I pause...retreat...move quickly past my fellow shoppers; most of us wear masks.  If we smile at one another, nobody can tell, so we walk along pushing carts heaped with provisions, each in our own solitary orbit, doing our best not to collide.  When I come home, I take off this most current fashion accessory, and maybe in my own imagination, gloves, and wash my hands as fastidiously as a surgeon or a raccoon.  Then, I perform this strange, new ritual of disinfecting my groceries and then rearranging them in the cabinets, grouping together like objects and lining up various cans and boxes.  It's as though I am searching for my friends somewhere in there.  And then, on the rare occasion my kids and I walk the neighborhood or the track, I breathe in the fresh, heartwarming scent of wild violet and hyacinth, but with all the warnings about social distancing, all the ways that we have been made wary of one another's proximity, I feel like an interloper.  I wave wordlessly at families out on their lawn.  Not long ago, I would've stopped and spoken, tried to make new friends.  Apart from my family, I feel far from everyone and everything, but I do look forward to the future when we'll get the green light to greet one another, to hug, and to eat and speak and laugh together, up close. 

This is a poem by Charles McKay that I was forced to pick apart in a Harlem Renaissance class at some point during the entire, embarrassing 12-year expanse that was my college career.  At first, I was unsure whether I could "analyze" it in the way the professor was looking for, because, well, obviously I am not African American.   However, I don't believe this has ever been a poem simply about the changing of the seasons, and certainly it lends nothing to the stance some might stake against social stratification; there's far too much writing on the anticipated feelings of relief, refuge, peace, and respite that come with the end of winter.  I take this as a poem of hope, and the determination to outlast one's hardships.  It's perfect for people the world over who, right now, are waiting and praying for a dark period to pass.  

After the Winter
BY CLAUDE MCKAY
Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
     And against the morning’s white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
     Have sheltered for the night,
We’ll turn our faces southward, love,
     Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire the shafted grove
     And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill
     Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
     And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
     Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
     And ferns that never fade.
Source: Claude McKay: Complete Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2004)

As for myself, I have had a very rough time of all this quarantine business.  I need others, and I like to know that they might just need me, too.  Save for my kids' bickering and too-loud voice volumes that regularly grate on my nerves, I am trying to just outlast all of this.  As for myself, I need to do a better job at just settling for this slowdown.  After all, here it is, happening to us all whether **I** have a say-so in it or not.  I am going to give myself permission to just embrace the change and continue to try and love and enrich and help the ones I MUST be around every day, without choice.  I have needed to slow down, to draw in a deep breath, reflect on some things, set myself upright again, like how you might witness a kayak effortlessly do it.  All this togetherness really HAS been good for the kids and I!.  I need to do better, though, about not snapping or snipping at them, and instead just get right down on their levels or hold them on my lap and truly get to know each one as the individual little person that they are.  My hopes are that my friends are choosing to do the same thing and put their own twists on the day-to-day difficulties, disappointments, personal triumphs, and victories.  <3 <3