It is the first week of Spring, and we are back in the Northern Hemisphere, in a fast-changing world that has been whittled down to a tiny house by a creek in a wooded Colorado canyon. We have family, a teething 9-month-old, and hours to find our routines and fresh air.

 

New Zealand is like Narnia now, and we’ve come back through the wardrobe and into a cold, torn-up and muddy landscape outside the windows as winter recedes. It is like no time has passed, and yet everything has changed. Sometimes at night, when I’ve put Jessie back to sleep for what feels like the 18th time, I’ll go through the photos from the last three months on my phone, under the covers, up until our last journey down the long, winding driveway from the shed where we spent the summer. Five days into this quarantine, I now marvel at the ease of movement in each photograph. How no matter how far away we traveled, there were cafes to stop at for a cappuccino and egg-and-bacon pie, or a pub by a lake where we’d sit at a shared table with strangers, holding onto cold pints, condensation running down the glass and over our fingers as Jessie mastered the army slither she still prefers over crawling, in the grass at our bare feet.

 

Two Wednesdays ago, we were at my parents’ house in California, and I had gone to a coffeehouse on the coast. The night before, at dinner at a Mexican restaurant with a friend, we had scoffed that all this talk of a pandemic was election-year stupidity. That next day, as I typed on my laptop at an outdoor table, as rain fell just beyond the patio, I watched someone carry two super-sized packages of toilet paper from a grocery store across the wet parking lot. The sight chilled me, and even though I could brush it off as Californians over-reacting, I still felt fear setting in. Each day after that has felt like a collapse of some part of my life that I have taken for granted, as we would watch the news from kitchen counters: going out to eat with friends; stopping at breweries and sitting shoulder to shoulder on bar stools watching live sports; visiting extended family so Jessie could flap her arms and yabber away at her cousins; stopping at public beaches, parks, the zoo. Going out to the movies. Sitting in a coffeehouse on the coast like I was doing that day, sharing space with strangers, not thinking about how many hands had touched the jug with creamer, with a dim awareness that a virus somewhere was spreading, but that it wasn’t near, and definitely wasn’t my problem. Spring blooms were everywhere. Citrus trees were heavy with fruit. Before we left my cousin’s house in California, where we spent our final afternoon, she gave us five lemons from the trees in their backyard.

 

We ate the last of the lemons this week, here in this little house on a creek in Colorado. The pandemic is here and it definitely is my, and everyone’s problem, as we make decisions about who we will be each day in the face of this new world we are in. There is fear. But there is kindness, appreciation, compassion, gratitude and a deep exhalation of surrender to this time as well. This morning I made breakfast while Jessie sat with her grandpa and watched morning sports commentary. I got to go for a long run along the river, eyes on the red canyon above. The day will be about making a long and possibly complicated dinner out of simple ingredients, giving Jessie a bath with bubbles, toys, in her mermaid swimsuit and sending clips to family. Jessie will be wrapped in a unicorn towel by her grandma and sung to. I will dress her in pajamas and read “Hush-a-bye Bear Cub.” Her dad will rock her and put her in her crib. Then we will all pile on the couch and watch Jeopardy and the season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Jessie will likely wake countless times in the night. But that is alright, because we can take turns napping all through the next day if we have to.

Someone sent me The Peace of Wild Things last night. It’s a Wendell Berry poem I had never heard before and it is perfect, I think, for this week we are all in. I also read this at 3 a.m., under the covers, after putting Jessie back to sleep for the countless time, then not being able to sleep myself.

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. 

I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

A month ago our world was so big. Now it is very, very small. There is nowhere to be right now but here, as we are, with each other.