The calls have come. Soon I’ll be officially non-essential. My hand on their sharp shoulder blades, their paper-thin arms and aching fingers now has a different kind of potential. I become threat instead of tenderness, harm instead of relief. I’ll sit at home like their sons and daughters and watch the world try to wrap itself in a thing called safety while the dying carry on their work without us.
The cursed location. One place sold gyros. This one sold chicken. There was something in bowls in between. You’d think the late-night imbibers would gravitate to the cheap, greasy fix, but nothing has stuck. Maybe it will have to become a bar, like everything else on the block. Maybe that’s as far as our imagination goes around here.
Yesterday, my body finally burrowed out from beneath a cold and I emerged into a flurry. The grocery store was full of urgent shoppers. The park bustled with people “working from home” or no longer working. We fed on the medicine of blue sky and blossoms not knowing what will come next.
Outside, the clematis is sheltered from last night’s surprise snow (what a loss! We could have been panicking about that too!) but the new magnolia blooms look cold in their soggy white hats.
Inside, everything I read, listen to and talk about rides on medicinal-scented waves of homemade disinfectant. My husband alternately snores and coughs from where he sleeps in my office. The cat purrs loudly beside me. She’s been fed and her belly has been generously rubbed.
The snow doesn’t last and the flowers recover. I forget this (over and over) and have to repeat it (over and over). The snow doesn’t last and the flowers recover.
I leaned against the lap of this tree for a while and asked for a story. I couldn’t hear one. Families passed by in both directions all in animated conversation. Another crowded day at the park.
The stress will pass but this morning I am all buzz and scatter. I expect there will be waves of this as well as waves of calm and wide.
Tracy Burkholder 
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