Filling the Days

We’ve been self-isolating for nearly five full months now. We feel blessed to be here, away from the congestion of the city. Away from people pressing close, masked or unmasked. Away from elevators and crowded lobbies.

Less comforting, though, we’re away from doctors, too. Away from hospitals, now overrun with the desperately ill. We must skip our routine medical procedures and hope we can coast until there is a vaccine.

Meanwhile, we occupy ourselves. There’s laundry, of course. Cooking. Vacuuming the endless drifts of dog hair that tangle with siftings of mud from our mud hole, formerly known as the stock tank. Mud, left alone for a while, turns into a fine grit, as effective as sandpaper in removing a floor’s finish.

My skills as a homemaker have always been suspect and they have not improved with use. Lately, in corners of this old house that we can’t reach, I’ve noticed the knitting of small spiders. And yesterday I walked into a long strand of webbing that had appeared overnight between the pantry and kitchen chair. Its maker was not in sight.

I prefer spiders where I can see them. Two nights ago, I shared the bathroom with a wolf spider three inches in diameter. Since she arrived, there have been fewer dirt daubers crawling forlornly up the window panes. She doesn’t leave carcasses around, either, for me to clean up.

Although household chores consume a lot of time, there remain hours in the day that must be filled. Both of us are working on books slated for publication in spring, 2021.

And yet we stare out the window as territorial negotiations proceed on a bird feeder between the squirrel and the female cardinal.

Other birds show great interest in something on the branches of a rose or azalea bush or underneath in the mulchy soil.

Bumblebees worry the Turk’s Cap.

Wow! A family of nine cardinals has arrived and are fluttering around the sunflower seeds on a platform, right outside my window. All wear shades of gray and russet and some are clearly juveniles. And full of prunes as people used to say.

Some days I make Summer Pudding—jewel-colored berries stewed with sugar, then poured into a bowl lined with (preferably) stale bread and weighted down for a few hours. And, of course, there is the vegetable garden to check.

And, of course, there is the vegetable garden to check.

At the moment, our five raised boxes are producing without enthusiasm. We see tiny tomatoes and tiny peppers; minute zucchini (two, each less than an inch in length, one of which has already been nibbled on); a sorry assortment of herbs. I say this as though it were the fault of the plants instead of the novice gardener.

Early in the day, when it’s less hot, I walk our dog through the woods to the mud hole. Actually, I try to walk her away from the mud hole, but she’s off leash and makes her own choices.

The mud bears many similarities to black paint, so the hour after the walk finds me struggling to wash her in the shower. Good exercise, you know.

For us, nominally retired as we are, these summer days of COVID and animal strivings can provide a kind of tranquility.

If only.

If only our income holds up; if only teachers and students stay safe next month; if only small business owners don’t go broke; if only the promised vaccines work and people get vaccinated; if only the new national police force (cobbled together because the military refused) doesn’t become the enforcer of a new dictatorship. (See William L. Shirer, The Rise of the Third Reich.)

If only we could risk the results of ignoring the news.