My husband and I are visiting his parents

and like always when we visit them, I get caught up in their family stories. My mother-in-law musing about sleeping upstairs in the house built by her father, the cracks in the roof exposing the sky, waking up with a dust of snow on her face. The family origin story of my father-in-law-- his grandfather's crossing from Denmark on a ship that sank, the week on a lifeboat, a daring rescue, the eventual settling in America and the birth of twenty-two children (My husband's grandfather was number 12.) 

I love these stories. The little tidbits and back-matter. The plant in the corner that came from a clipping of a plant grown by my father-in-law's mother. How when my mother-in-law talks about going upstairs in her childhood home, she means climbing a ladder. (I've been part of their family for thirty two years and I just now learned that detail.)  

My husband and I share our own stories with his parents, updates on our daughter's wedding and our son and his girlfriend's van-life cross country trip. Which, okay, seem a little trivial contrasted against the life and death of a ship going down, a childhood spent in abject poverty, but the grandparents, of course, are always happy to hear any stories about the grandchildren. 

For a few days, life slows down. Meals. A list of handyman jobs for my husband to do around his parents' house. Side note: they keep the heat on 75, and my husband and I are sweating up a storm and laughing about it, but after a while, we just decide to go with the flow, channel the word COZY. We can't stay very long and we'll soon be back to what we have now been told is our very cold house. 

65 degrees, my father-in-law had exclaimed. Is that what you keep your heat on?  

Meanwhile, against my better judgment I sneak peeks at the news on my phone. Stories about the new Supreme Court Justice nomination. Stories about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The stories make my head hurt. Did I mention how hot it is in this house?  

Oh, here's a story about the chickens the great grandmother kept, how she loved them so much she would cry every Sunday dinner when the family ate one. The frogs and turtles my mother-in-law's older brothers caught because some days, what else was there to eat? 

Our daughter has chosen a wedding dress. Our son and his girlfriend found themselves in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Did you know, he texts me, that anyone can march in the parade if they want to? We share the pictures with the grandparents. The lovely dress. Our son draped in colorful plastic beads.  

Cynic Aroma Caulk

If you do the Wordle each morning, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't, Wordle's a game where you get six chances to guess a five-letter word. Pretty much everyone I know is doing it lately. My husband, our grown kids, old friends, new friends. It's rare that so many people in my life are on the same page. 

Is it the brain teaser aspect of it that we love? Or the competition? Or maybe it's that perfect blend of challenge and tension, followed by the joyful burst of adrenaline upon completion. We can always use another moment of joy. 

This morning, for example. Off for a walk with the dog, and I notice that someone has cleaned nearly all of the books out of my Little Free Library. Maybe there's an innocent explanation, but several streets over, I find another library emptied out too, and this one with the door left banged open.

What if they needed those books for something important? my husband, god love him, asks me. 

Like what? I say. I'm picturing the culprits roaming the neighborhood in search of little free libraries to snatch from so they can sell the goods on eBay. I want to be the kind of person who gives people the benefit of the doubt, and not the kind who writes a strongly worded petty letter, demands to see the manager, whines about the service. 

Maybe it's because I'm getting older. Getting older, I've heard, and the world inevitably shrinks. We get caught up in the silly drama. Forget our better selves. Giver

or 

Taker

Maker or … I can’t think of a five-letter word for the opposite of make. 

Oh, duh! Break. 

Back from my walk and I restock my library. I shouldn't have used the word inevitable when I was talking back there about the world shrinking as we age. It’s only inevitable if you say the word, and I don't. Won't. Something else-- I have a ton of extra books. 

I drive them over to my neighbor's and fill the empty space.  

Moving rocks around my yard

is like revising a piece of writing. Or rather, I guess I should say, revising a piece of writing is like moving rocks around my yard. I don't know how to talk about the writing process except by comparing it to some other activity, otherwise it sounds like this: I wrote a thing. I took it apart. I put it back together. Let me tell you about the rocks instead.

What happened was we moved into our new-old house and there was a koi pond in the backyard and we didn't want a koi pond in the backyard. Like all of the projects in our new-old house, taking out the koi pond ended up being a much bigger deal than I would've imagined at the start of-- let's call it the "Envisioning Stage." 

What I envisioned was not a koi pond but an herb garden. I thought it would take an afternoon, maybe two, to give away the fish, drain the water, empty out the rocks, fill the hole up with dirt and plant herbs. If it's not obvious yet, I was a ding dong. 

The actual process was longer and messier and possibly caused long term damage to my shoulder joints. It was the rocks that nearly did me in. My initial plan was to move them out of the way slightly, just enough to get at the rubber liner underneath. Cut away the lining and nudge the rocks back into the hole. 

But the hole went down so deep and there were so many layers of rocks. Some were more like boulders. Some were the size of gravel. Some was sand. Lots of sand. And where the hell was the liner? Several days into the project, without realizing it, I'd created a precarious wall of rocks just outside the mucky former koi pond, and there I was in the center, still digging in the mud. 

To avoid an avalanche on myself, I started moving the rocks into the driveway, first just to get them out of the way, but later, in an attempt to see what I had. How many rocks were there? What were their various sizes and shapes? A few of the rocks were interesting. Maybe I'd want to keep them for some future gardening project? Cut to: I lost myself in a several-weeks-long digression of rock organization. 

Winter came. 

The hole filled up with rain and froze, the rocks still piled up in the driveway. I was sick of looking at them. In spring I thought I might be ready to try again, but the weather was sucky. It rained a lot. Or I'd have to work. On a rare, free, weather-cooperating day, I'd climb into the hole and chuck out a rock or two, but my heart wasn't really in it. The project was starting to seem stupid. 

And then we had a global pandemic, and I needed something to think about besides the global pandemic. Why not finish digging up the remainder of the damn rocks? Cut out the liner and shove everything back in once and for all. It took a good month in which I swore a lot and pinched my fingers and scraped my legs and tried to ignore the disturbing-sounding pops and creaks emanating from my shoulder joints. 

When I was finished, a friend from work brought me herb clippings from her garden, and we stood awkwardly facing each other while properly socially distant in my driveway. The garden surprised me by taking off on its own, the small clippings rooting and spreading out to fill the space and beyond. Sometimes I sit out on the patio and try to remember the hole, the rocks-- all of that raw hard work, but truthfully, it's kind of a blurry memory, thank God. 

Anyway, this is the long way of saying that I'm halfway (who am I kidding? I'm not anywhere near halfway! Haha!) into the revision of a writing project, and all I can see in front of me are the rocks, but whatever. 

If moving rocks has taught me anything, it's that if I keep digging through them and flinging them around, eventually I'll end up with a lovely herb garden. 

The end. 

(Before)

(This is where I am now) 

(The future)

My son's girlfriend made me fleece pajama pants

and I love them. They're cozy and perfectly fitted and she added pockets in the front and carefully stitched my name across one. Truth be told I haven't taken these pants off except to go to work and lucky me, the library was closed for two days due to a snowstorm, so I was able to get even more wear out of them. I am all about comfort these days. It's cold out there. (See: snowstorm), 

and mostly we're stuck inside. Even the dog doesn't want to do our three-times-per-day walks. I wish she had told me this before I spent fifteen minutes bundling us both up, me in my layers of outwear and the dog in her sporty jacket, but three steps out the door, and she was glaring up me like, Immediately No.

Ah well, it is warm inside, and for several days, there's lovely company, my son and his girlfriend who are presently van-life-ing across the country, stopping for a visit with us along the way. The first night I complimented my son's pajama pants and barely an hour later, I was presented with a pair of my own. She's MYOG-ing for you, my son explained.

MYOG, if you're not up on the lingo, means Make Your Own Gear. In addition to clothing, his girlfriend makes bags of various sizes, intricately sewn and handy for carrying whatever you might need on cross-country trips. I love this for them, the sewing, the cross-country-traveling, but I realize lately, I am happy to stay where I am. Maybe this is a GOT 

(Getting Older Thing) or maybe I'm just more content with simple pleasures, curling up on the couch to read books and doing the Wordle in competition with my husband each morning, (Okay, it's NOT a competition. We just each do the Wordle and then gloat at each other when one of us solves the puzzle faster), binge-watching Netflix shows and making more dinners at home. Oh, and here's something fun:

friends of ours sent us a gift box subscription to a drink of the month club, where you get all of the elements to stir up a drink and the first box came and it looked like an elaborate chemistry experiment, complete with vials and adorable little spritzer bottles. Why do I feel like we are all fiddling while Rome burns, people dying from the virus, the crazy conspiracy theories and threats of book bannings, and what ridiculous privilege I have to burrow away in my warm house, 

wearing my lovingly made homemade flannel pajamas and snuggling up with my finicky dog. Some days, most days I don't see how to balance it, the wider world with my inner one and how lucky I have been and how can I possibly give back, and my only answer seems to be: 

It is February and I am here. My husband stirs up the drink concoctions, and we clink glasses with our son and his girlfriend before they continue on their way. 

WMTA (We miss them already.) 

I don't know the people who live across the street

or the people who live behind me, although I do notice them sometimes, letting their dogs out, puttering around in their yards, someone's child shrieking in play, but if I did run into any of these people, say, at the grocery store, I wouldn't recognize them as neighbors, 

which I never thought about before until the other day when I read this disturbing story in the news about people in Ukraine preparing for war--not soldiers, but just regular people trying to live their lives--and this came down to stuff I'd also never thought about, like, what should we do if the water gets turned off suddenly and do we have a way to heat our home and what about cooking, charging our phones, dealing with injuries, medicine... 

The story went on, with comments from other places where people had gone through similar horrifying experiences, and then someone wrote, Forget about all of that-- the heating sources and food and medicine-- your first order of business is Find your community, 

the actual human beings who live around you, because when the shit hits the fan and communication goes down and the power snaps off, those are the people you're going to have to depend on for help. Those are the people you will help in return. So, okay, maybe I'm in trouble, 

only knowing the immediate neighbors on each side of me, but not the people who live in the houses across the street or in the houses behind me, their backyards touching mine but obscured by fences, even with all of the dog walking I do, the long meanderings up and down streets, the dog snuffling out the free dog treats-- where is the actual human connection? I don't know, except here's something: 

one morning, early in the pandemic, I was out on my front porch, pajama-clad and with my coffee, the only person awake as far as I could tell, when suddenly walking down the center of the street were three deer, one of them huge and with the antlers, just ambling along, before traipsing off into someone's yard to graze on the hostas, so strange and out of place, I wondered if I'd just seen what I'd just seen, 

so I stepped off my porch, holding my coffee, and ambled into the street myself, noticing at that same moment a human person drifting toward me in their pajamas too and also a coffee drinker. We walked toward each other, and even with the ever-present virus on our minds, and silly in our pajamas, we clinked our coffee cups and said hello. 

My weather app says it's snowing but it's not snowing

Weird, because when I click on the radar, a blue blob hovers over my house. 

Outside my house, in reality, still, no snow. Someone's fallen down on the job. The weather person, the radar man, the sky. Five years ago I joined a crowd of 500,000 people in the DC streets, so many of us you couldn’t see where we began or ended, the group I was with holding hands so we wouldn’t lose ourselves. I have never been a part of something so massive, for one brief moment 

the bodies around me lifting my feet off the ground, the swell of voices, my heart. I thought something transformative had happened, but when it was over, we unclasped hands and went our separate ways. Driving home we ate at a quiet hotel restaurant, our pink knitted hats tucked away in our small suitcases and the world kept turning, snowing 

when the weather app said it was snowing, or not, and no apologies either way. Who is in charge of this place? Not me that's for sure, but once I was a person who packed a knitted hat, took to the road. Look. In the time it took me to write these random thoughts, snow has started to fall. Outside 

the world, finally, rightly, catching up with the radar. 

Thursday

Another day, another mask-less patron at the library explaining to me why masks don't work. I'm sitting at the desk, nodding how I always do during one of these confrontations. The patron has just come out of the bathroom and has just washed his hands. I know this because when he comes up to the desk, shaking his wet hands, he announces:

"I just washed my hands." 

"Good to know," I say, nodding. 

"People used to make fun of me for being a germaphobe," he says. 

"You were ahead of the trend," I say, nodding. 

"Exactly." He smiles and touches his bare face with his freshly washed hands and launches into a rant on the worthlessness of masks. Something something microbe particles. Something something Dr. Fauci, and I keep nodding.

I glance over at my co-worker. She is nodding politely too, while at the same time doodling up a storm. She's a big time doodler. 

 

"I had covid." The patron says. "January 2020. It wasn't a big deal and now I'm completely fine." 

"Wow," I say, "you're so lucky." I'm sorta messing with the guy now and I'm not proud of it. It's the situation. How absurdist it is. Nearly two years into a global pandemic and here we are. The signs on the door to the library that say PLEASE WEAR A MASK. The maskless patrons parked out at the computers, one of them presently coughing up a lung. 

I'm going to catch this. It's a miracle I haven't already. This week alone three people I know have gotten sick. I send them soup. I should be a paid spokesperson for this soup company. Paging SPOONFUL OF COMFORT people: let me be your official influencer in Columbus Ohio. Meanwhile, I am second-guessing every one of my sniffles, every twinge of throat scratchiness, every sneeze. 

I take a home test. It's negative. But can I be... positive that it's negative? I read all the health articles in the news. They range from: We're All Going to Get This! to Try Not to Get This! I wonder if I should be more afraid. But the truth is I am long past being afraid. This is the world now. 

"Forget masks." The patron is still going on. "You want to know what the secret is?" He leans over my desk. 

I scoot my chair back and nod. 

"Nutricicles."

The laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it, and then I apologize. "Good to know," I tell him. He walks off, and I reflexively reach for my hand sanitizer. "What the hell is a nutricicle?" I whisper to my doodling co-worker. 

"No idea," she says. She's finished with her doodle. She holds up the picture, and we both laugh into our masks. 

                                        --artwork by Emma Root