I started a puzzle. Okay, I poured it out into this pile and now I’m drinking tea and looking at the pile.
Here’s what I don’t need. I don’t need people telling me Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a pandemic. Now’s your chance. Shakespeare didn’t have Words with Friends. And he wrote King Lear because he needed the money. And he didn’t have his kids staring at him and saying when can I see my friends and I’ll be there in a sec hold up and could you hand me that water.
Pandemic motherhood rules are the same, you get to do everything feed everything clean everything but the rules are no more Costco pizza runs for the cheap feeling of a beach trip to Acapulco and no relief from the constant stress that everything and everyone you touch will kill you. My friend Linettey said I bought all this frozen food but I told them not to eat it because that’s the emergency food. What if there’s an EMERGENCY.
I am making a lot more pancakes than I used to. My living room looks like the cast of a tv college frathouse show is buried underneath it. We have been hiking and breathing fresh air, and sitting together with a movie on but all of us sort of looking sideways in the weird twilight of what happened.
I want to put a hammock up in the living room. Except not enough walls and hammocks are really hard to get out of. But the view is nice from here. It’s good to change the view. Contemplation morphs slowly on its own into humor with a new view.
I had to take the horses out to get exercise and my friend Kurt came because riding is naturally at least 6 feet apart and who wants to be closer to someone wearing chaps anyway, and there was no one out on the beautiful trail, the lush world that’s still out there rolling under our feet and Kurt declared to the human empty bird chirpy mountainy rivery sandy world “I love the virus! I’m gonna miss it when it’s gone.”
I’m feeling jealous of the people already dead like Carrie Fisher who don’t have to worry about this. Also it would’ve helped to hear her thoughts. So I’ll write some for her.
We are lucky to have friends on the phone. We are lucky to have feet under our legs that go where we want them to, even just to the bathroom. There is rain and a blue blue sky. I didn’t build this huge heart up over the years just to cough sputter and die before I get to the dessert of my life.
C’mon, guys. Stay with me. Make me laugh. Help me with this puzzle.
