An ordinary day

Hah!  you are thinking...what's that, anymore?  The strangeness of these pandemic days has been going on long enough so that the aberrant has become nearly normal.  People complain of the closeness of living indoors and the often empty spaces between us outdoors, but I think some are settling in more than they realize to work and school at home, and home as the place where all the things that drew us outward, and often separated us, now come to rest.*

Imagination makes it happen easier for some...personal and family games take over organized sports, walks and bike rides instead of crowd-gathering.  There is time to read and listen, talk among instead of at each other, observe and wonder.  The space between us lets us breathe a little, even in confinement.  I love the way those fewer cars still on the road (less than a quarter what they were in this bustling town) seem to keep more distance from one another.

Today finding myself with no more steps to climb, no more loads to unload, little to do except hang some art, I had to sit for a while to reorient myself to the new ordinary.  My new living space has been, as I wrote to my friend Pam, a mental as well as spatial challenge.  I am not unhappy about the latter; I have come to see that what I am fits just as well in this small space as it did in the larger, and frankly, I kind of enjoyed the task of fitting things just so.  It's crowded in here, yes, but I have managed to bring along what I am...at least what I am now...and am content with that.  It's just that it's harder to make peace with what I have left behind.

Anyway, eventually I made myself some lunch, and afterward felt like taking a walk.  Last night's wind and rain had stopped, leaving branches and twigs strewn across everything, but the sun was out and it was getting hot and muggy.  I had a card to mail (only a week or so late...sorry, E. and J.), so I headed toward the post office in town, cutting through the arboretum.

I'm also loving, I might add, the way Instagram has heated up with photographs of people's wanderings, lots of flowers, wonderful inside and outside visions of corners we might otherwise take for granted.  All the while I was buried under bundles, they kept me cheerful, those pictures of a flowering world going on without regard to the viral net we are caught in.

Along the way, some strollers met me...a couple my age with a dog who seemed not to keep up with even its owners' slow pace, two men with two children each talking across one of the entrances to the park, regulation feet apart, and a man in mask and gloves who was so closely monitoring the campus gardeners I thought at first he was one of them.

At the Post Office, I spotted a friend just leaving it, and after I'd called out to him three or four times (I think he must be getting deafer than I am), he turned around and we chatted (regulation distance) for a few minutes.  He seemed to look much older than the last time I saw him...his face lined, his hair nearly to his shoulders, a little droop in his posture.  Goodness, I thought, he's five years behind me...I wonder what I look like these days.  Is it ordinary age or the unraveling of the ordinary that does this to us?  {Or is it just that nobody can manage to get a haircut?}

But it was good to catch up for a minute, and then go on our ways, promising (as we always seem to, even in ordinary times) to get together when things settle down.

On the way back home, I dawdled along the arboretum's paths.   My favorite flower, the iris, is showing off its elegant variety everywhere.  (And our visual irises, given time, are focused on them.)

Even the roses, in this heat and rain, unfold from what only a few days ago were very tight buds.

At home, I put some pots of herbs by the door, and sat down again to think...what next?  what ordinary task can I resume now?

It didn't take long to find a pile of ironing to see to, a shirt sleeve to sew, a favorite book to unearth and begin again [Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's The Nature of Passion].

But I'd barely opened it when the urge to write about this finally ordinary day overtook me and here I am, at the window where the newly installed umbrella sways in the returning wind, and the sun slides to the west to avoid as long as it can the returning gray.

On the radio, the jazz station is playing something smooth, and out my window a blue bird lights on the favorite perch of all the birds, the lamppost.

In a while, I will make another batch of egg salad,  heat up some asparagus soup for supper,  and settle into a movie, or the book.  The ordinary, however trite, makes me quite happy right now.

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* I am not, be assured, discounting the price paid by those whose jobs are disappearing, whose homes are under siege from hardship, who are working or living at risk, unsafe where they are or with whom they reside, while others feel only discomfort.  This ordinary day of mine rests on a lot of gratitude and worry for others.