Corona Days: Bright Spots

Some bright spots this week:

One of our neighbors have had a series of Westie dogs over the years, and their current dog is a white one they call Ramsey.  They need some temporary help walking him (she broke a small bone in her foot and he is supposed to be staying indoors for health reasons), so asked us if one of the kids could do it.  Boo eagerly volunteered, so now he is walking a dog twice a day and happy as a clam.  He is absolutely transformed around that animal, and it makes me wish we lived in a bigger rural space so we could have an outside dog (Piglet and I are both allergic), but I'm also mindful of my own limitations with pets, so I'm grateful that Boo can have this opportunity to look after Ramsey and serve our neighbors. 

I also made what I would consider to be a peak quarantine meal yesterday.

I had a few random ingredients bought by mistake at the corner store by Boo, an extra tube of crescent roll dough, as well as shortages of things we use a lot of in this house (bread and croutons). 

So we had leftover beef roast from the weekend, carrots from three absolutely GIGANTIC carrots my husband bought at a local produce stall, salad with homemade croutons (I may never go back to buying them!), baked brie with jam, and fresh warm bread from the bread maker (because who are we kidding here?  I already told you how things go around here.  Plus: involuntary homeschooling). 

In addition, the weather has cooled significantly to British-worthy, and I'm loving it.  Longtime readers will know my feelings about hot weather, and I never welcome its return to the city, for it means months of misery for me.  I was feeling tetchy and out of sorts when the temps and humidity began climbing last week, despite forecaster's predictions of a cooler-than-usual April and May, so it was a great relief to me when the chilly breezes swept through. 

I pulled my new Doocot off the blocking mats (i.e. the top of my dryer) yesterday and took some photographs of it this morning.  (I didn't end up wearing it today, because it wasn't quite cool enough for a midweight wool sweater, but might have a chance this weekend!)  I'll share the full photos in the next Yarn Along post; today you get a weird sneaky peak photo of my hand, courtesy of Birdie.

 

Our local corner store has stayed reasonably well-stocked for its size, and I'm ever so grateful to them for keeping their doors open, and to having things that many of the bigger stores have been out of since late February or early March (i.e. flour and lemon juice and some root vegetables of normal size, instead of the bitty seed crop I'm seeing elsewhere.  Photo above for scale.  I wear gloves when I cut onions).  There is a local stall market not far from my husband's chambers that has also stayed extremely well stocked, and is currently keeping us in meat, dairy, and veg, for which I am incredibly grateful.  Keeping a household of six in food plus everything else is a job under the best of circumstances, which these are not.

Speaking of not, Tuesday night, I noticed that the fridge was hardly cold at all, and the food inside tepid.  The freezer was still running, and stuff was still frozen, but it all just seemed off somehow.  I turned the thermostat down as far it would go on both fridge and freezer, but in the morning everything was still tepid, even more so.  I wasn't sure if we could even get a repairman to come look at it, and it isn't cold enough to put stuff outside any more.  (In any case, the closure of restaurants has forced all the garbage-feeding pests up into the residential areas, so I wouldn't dare leave anything out back anyway.  My husband saw what he thought was a possum the size of a large cat the other day, running nochalantly down our street.  I said it was probably a rat, given our previous experience with the water/sewer pipe replacement). 

In any case, I decided to see if I could figure out the problem myself.  So I googled a few DIY fridge fixes, and set about getting the fridge away from the veryveryveryvery tight space between the wall and counter.  (I do this every year or so to clean behind and under, but man.  It is a Job).  Vacuumed the vent at the back and underneath, and then emptied the freezer to get at the access panel for the compressor fan, which two sites suggested might be the culprit.  The kids helped ferry tools and cover the cold stuff with blankets to keep it from defrosting too quickly, while I unscrewed the panel and took a look.  There was a fair bit of frost and ice on the copper coils  and aluminum bits, which began to thaw almost immediately, so I brushed away what I could and pulled off the rest with my fingers (gently!) into a bowl.  Cleaned and dried the whole thing, plus the inside of the freezer itself, turned it back on, and voila!  The fan worked fine.  Put everything back together, and it all seems tickety-boo now.  I'm feeling rather Hoss about the whole thing myself. 

Boo's birthday cake from the weekend.  He turned 10!!

I could share more, but I'll leave it there for now.  These are strange days, to be sure, full of stress, uncertainty, and anxiety, but there are some moments of sweetness, which I try to keep on my tongue to balance out the bitter.

Watchful Waiting: Holy Saturday

From Holy Week and Pascha published by Holy Transfiguration Monastery

Hindsight is easy.  It is easy to look back on events and say, "Oh, of course," or to have a better understanding of the whole course of things than when you are in the midst of them.  I keep thinking about how Saturday is a day of waiting, that day between death and resurrection. 

On the day of crucifixion, all those years ago, the disciples and women with them retired to an upper room to wait out the Sabbath and remainder of the Passover holiday, unable to even properly bury the man they called Messiah.  Their grief must have been intense, for they did not know what waited them the following day. 

All they knew was the fathomless grief of the loss of the man they had loved, and who had loved them like no other. And there was nothing to do but wait.  The Jewish laws regarding the Sabbath must be observed on pain of stoning, and they would have to wait to anoint the body on Sunday.

Little did they know that an empty tomb would await them on Sunday morning.

This morning, I remembered Lents past which were agonies of waiting, of seemingly endless Saturdays.  The year that Philip died, I was churched on Clean Monday (the first day of Lent).  I was still in the depths of my grief, and wondered whether we would ever have children, as my underlying fertility problems had made Philip's conception difficult.  I spent the Fast in a daze, and sleepwalked through that Holy Week. 

The Pascha service was chaotic at the monastery where my husband was attending seminary, with dozens of tired children and their exhausted parents. I spent most of the service joggling the restive youngest child of a friend with three children under four.  My husband and I took the Paschal flame to Philip's grave in the dark of the night, sheltering the flame from the wind.  There was still snow on the ground. 

Little did we know that we would welcome Piglet about nine months later. 

The year Birdie was a baby, she spent Lent in and out of the hospital with respiratory crisis after crisis, as we struggled to get to the bottom of what was ailing her.  I watched her fall further and further behind, my heart in my throat, wondering if she would ever walk or run or play like other kids.  I wasn't even sure it was a good idea to take her to any of the Holy Week or Pascha services, she was so fragile.  On Holy Saturday, for the first time, she was able to hold her head up by herself for a few minutes while propped in a Bumbo.  She was 8 months old at the time.  Bright Week landed her inpatient for a week in the hospital again, tubes and wires everywhere. 

Little did we know that she would not only walk and jump and run, but would be one of our most recklessly physical kids. 

This Lent has been marked by lockdowns and quarantine, virtual church and school, heroic health care and essential workers, economic uncertainty, and fear of a stealthy virus that snakes its way through our world, leaving death and destruction in its wake.  We don't yet know what comes next, as we wait on this long, seemingly endless Saturday.

But we do know what the disciples and Mary and the women did not know on that Sabbath long ago:

Sunday is coming. 

But today, we wait.

It's Friday...But Sunday's Comin'

There are many things I've missed in the past five weeks, and I have some sadness about that.  One of them is our school's reading fundraiser, which was held remotely during the second week and a half of lockdown.  Under normal circumstances, the 12 days of competitive reading in the grammar school would have kicked off with a story night, and the school days punctuated by fun book drawings, reading-related games, and culminate in the exuberant costumed Literature Day celebration.  Younger kids especially tend to make huge leaps in reading ability during this time, so it is exciting to see that fruit.

Each grade has varying levels of internal competitiveness, but Piglet's grade has always been insane, and Piglet's minute totals are always astonishing.  He looks forward to it all year, and starts plotting his strategy early.

This was his last year to participate competitively, and one thing I've enjoyed during this time in previous years was volunteering to be a mystery reader in his class.  I had picked out my book and story months ago, in anticipation: Tony Campolo's Tell Me a Story; I planned to read "It's Friday, but Sunday's Comin'.  It seemed the perfect thing to read in late March in the middle of Lent.

A little background as to why I like that story.  A couple of years ago, we spent a long October weekend in Minnesota for a family wedding on my Dutch side.  On the Sunday after the wedding, we all gathered in the back yard at my aunt and uncle's house and had a time of sharing and singing because that is what we do when we get together.  My uncle loves Campolo's book and read a couple of stories from it, including that one.  I wish I had an audio recording to share, because it was unforgettable: my taciturn Dutch uncle reading that story with such enthusiasm and emotion.  I still hear his voice in my head when I think of the title.

I wanted to share that story with Piglet's class, this is last year that I could do so as they will move into the upper school next year.  And perhaps there will be a way to catch all those things up in the fall, but somehow I doubt there will be the time. 

And so on this strangest of Holy Fridays, during these times of death and destruction, uncertainty and anxiety, as everything we knew before has washed away in the floods of the pandemic, I will say this:

It's Friday! 


But Sunday is coming.