We are in that place again

where the virus cases are exploding and the hospitals are at their breaking point and long gone are the days when we would say We're all in this together and Let's flatten the curve. There is no curve. What we have now is a line zooming straight up. At the Starbucks at the end of my street the line 

of cars waiting in the drive thru stretches out into the road and blocks traffic. Blocks me, on my way in to work and I find myself screaming one afternoon through the windshield at the car in front of me who won't move. MOVE, I scream at him. MOVE. Strangely, it helps, the screaming. That, and yoga. Stretches in front of the TV, a ten minute meditation, the happy yoga girl in front of her brick wall and carefully posed plant, her soothing voice telling me to breathe. 

I want to bubble wrap my adult children.

At the library people burst inside frantically looking for covid home testing kits. Sometimes the kits are in. Sometimes they are out. When they are out, I offer to call the county library system to see if they have any. A woman stands in front of my desk, hack-coughing. I'm vaxxed, she tells me. And boostered. Maybe this is a cold? 

Sure, I tell her. It's probably a cold. And all the while I am inching my chair back, internally screaming MOVE. GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME. But on the outside, I smile. I breathe. I tell the woman where she can find a test and she thanks me, more profusely, probably, than I deserve. 

Seriously, though, about the bubble wrap. Do they make it in the size of your adult children? My son and his girlfriend currently #van-life-ing across the country. My daughter and her fiancé braving public transportation and the crowded store where my daughter works, never mind the crazy pro-birther people sporadically picketing outside the building next door, the pizza restaurant which these deluded zealots fervently believe is a front for a child sex ring and so a co-worker has to escort my daughter to her bus stop. 

There is not enough bubble wrap in the world for this kind of world, but on the bright side, I snagged some of those hard-to-find covid tests before we ran out at the library. And as of today, anyway, I can still move. I can scream. I can smile. I can breathe.

Brunching while pandemic-ing

A few weeks ago friends invited my husband and me out to brunch. This would be outdoor patio dining, of course, they assured us. 

We're all aware that Covid cases are rising so alarmingly in our area that the mayor had to issue another indoor mask mandate. The hospitals are at capacity again, and everyone I know worries they might become one of the vaccinated breakthrough cases, even though this is supposed to be fairly rare. 

Still, we can almost pretend the world is normal when we're brunching on an outdoor patio. An engagement party at one table. At another, they're celebrating someone's birthday. While I sip my mimosa and eat my eggs benedict, I tell the story of the Starbucks at the end of my street and how I want to go on record that there's going to be a Showdown there any moment. 

The place is a freaking powder keg. 

Every day you can hear the car horns honking. An occasional shout from a rolled down window. It's the poorly designed drive-thru lane, how the cars back up onto my street and into the intersection. This was a major topic of conversation on our neighborhood facebook page even before the pandemic. How could they put a Starbucks there??!! Why do people want to buy overpriced coffee anyway??!! Why don't we support our local coffee shops??!! 

But mid-pandemic the irritation has turned into rage. The perfect storm of bad traffic and the fraying of society's last nerve. Add the caffeine addicts who NEED THEIR COFFEE NOW, and I'm surprised there hasn't already been a serious altercation. 

It occurs to me that this Starbucks has been my way of measuring the real time collapse and adaptation of the world over the past year and a half. During the initial lockdown, the drive-thru stayed open, a beacon of normalcy in the first scary days. But then, in winter, at the height of the crisis, the store was closed. Too many workers sick to keep things running. 

Which brings us to now, where it's very much open and popular, and yet... possibly about to capture the moment we all tip over the edge into some new kind of dystopian nightmare? 

I finished drinking my mimosa and ordered a cup of coffee. I have to tell you that this brunch was the best brunch I have ever experienced in my life. Not the food (although it was tasty) and not the company (although it was lovely) but the exquisite ordinary-ness of it, the kind of thing I lived most of my adult life totally taking for granted.  

Home, and I walked the dog past the Starbucks. There was the usual long line, the cars desperately trying to squeeze their way in, the irritated honks. But also something so comforting and beautiful about the people sitting on the sunny patio. A man tapping away on his laptop. A table of laughing teenagers. A mom pushing by with a baby carriage. The chirpy voice of the Starbucks barista in the drive-thru window saying, 

Have a nice day! 

The other night my daughter saw a weird bird

She was letting out the dogs. And there it was under the eaves on the back porch. A red bird, just sitting there, she said, looking down at her in a creepy way. 

It must be that cardinal, I told her. We'd seen him around the yard and this was a cold night, ten degrees. Maybe the bird was trying to get out of the cold? Was it safe for birds to be outside on a night like this? My husband immediately went into research mode. 

He set out sunflowers seeds and found a small box and put tissues inside of it and hung it up on the back porch where the bird had been. And then we all forgot about it. A few weeks went by and now we have a box nailed up under the porch eaves. A year from now it will probably still be there and one day we'll look up and think, wait, why is there a box nailed up under the porch eaves? 

It's easy to get used to strange things. 

This year of all years. My husband bopping around the house in his pajamas all day, our grown daughter living at home again. The masks and social distancing signs. Zoom holiday gatherings and virtual festivals. Sometimes I have the feeling that we're living in a simulation. 

Or maybe we're trapped in a weirdo offshoot of a multiverse. How can any of this be real? 

We're tired and we want it to be over. When it IS over, we'll pretend it never happened. We'll eat out at restaurants again and invite people into our homes, barefaced. We'll push our carts through the grocery store aisles in any direction we choose. 

I took the dogs out the other night. It was dark and cold. Something rustled above me and I looked up. There was the red bird, only a foot away from my head. It was frozen. Eyes black and staring right at me. I can't adequately describe how unsettling it was. It didn't look real. How still it was. How close. 

What world do we live in now?