On being under the weather
and being over the weather, too
It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting with my feet up, looking out our back windows, watching it sleet in the backyard. The Adirondack chairs over by the tree line have sunken a bit in the snow, and the bird feeders directly in front of my view are empty. I watch the cylinders sliding side to side in the wind. One downy woodpecker is pecking at the mushy remains of suet in a hanging cage as fat raindrops splat rhythmically on the ground.
“Do you want to read the next chapter?” I call out to my spouse Janyce as she walks through the kitchen behind me. I am listening for the timer on the oven, picturing the tofu squares getting crispy. I plan to add them to ginger, tamari, and tahini coated soba noodles. This view of my yard has made me dream up this dish for a cold rainy Sunday, full of gingery spice and crunch from the cabbage but still earthy with mushrooms, tamari and garlic in each chewy bite.
“Done with waiting. Winter week eight,” says Janyce, as she reads the first few lines. She has since come to sit beside me where I have my feet resting on the ottoman. Our dog comes running out from the bedroom and bounds up to join us at the window, suddenly aware that she was all alone in the bed while the rest of her pack was hanging out in the living room. The oven buzzer sounds out a high-pitched alert.
“Oh wow, twenty five minutes have gone by already? There’s the timer,” says Janyce, as she folds the short end of the jacket inside the page to mark our place, then closing the book. I get up to pull the tofu squares out of the oven and find them to be perfectly browned and glistening from the oil.
“Do you want a drink first?” she says, following me.
“Yes. I’ll just mix this all together and leave it here. We can eat it at room temperature,” I say.
Back at the window again, Janyce hands me a glass of butter bourbon. She sits in the straight back chair beside me holding her own drink in her one good hand, the cube clinking against the side of the glass. We’re both quiet, staring out the window, listening to the playlist on the stereo.
“Oh I like this one,” I say.
“This is one of my favorites,” she says, turning it louder.
The ghostly piano and slow trumpet trills create the perfect soundtrack for this wintry afternoon.
“I can’t drink this,” I say, holding my arm outstretched toward her with the glass in my hand. “It’s like drinking a cold plate of waffles with syrup. yuck.”
“That’s totally unnecessary,” says Janyce. “I happen to like it.”
“Can you make me something else?” I say.
I haven’t been feeling like writing lately, preferring instead to blot out the dread I feel from so much daily cruelty by watching mindless reruns of television shows on my computer screen. Some nights it’s the three of us in bed way too early: Janyce with her British crime show on her screen and earbuds in her ears, the dog squished as close as she can get in between, and me on the other side with my own laptop and a BBC version of a Jane Austen film, or something else I have watched over and over throughout the years.
I’m getting tired of hiding out, and yet— every time we both decide to get in action, one of us gets sick. I had two respiratory illnesses in a row. One with a lingering cough that lasted for weeks and just recently, I got something again. This time it was all sinus and sneezing, and it took a feverish night of sweating for it to finally retreat. And just this past week, Janyce slipped on the ice on her walk into the office and broke her wrist.
I can’t really say that these setbacks are anything more than dumb luck. Or are they? I know so many people who are also absorbing the constant shock waves with their body while trying to conduct business as usual. Many of my friends are not sleeping. For at least half of us in this country, nothing is great here. And for sure it is not getting greater.
One of my favorite writers wrote recently that we need to take each other’s (and our own) grief seriously. The body always speaks the truth even when you are trying not to listen. Still another writer says that the only way to counter fear and anxiety is with beauty and awe. I believe that. I try to keep that in mind every day when we’re out walking our dog in the snow on the rail trail. I remind myself to notice the evergreens adorned with white, glinting in the sun. I remember to marvel at the red tail hawk perched on the tip of a tall tree in the median, majestic and still, even as we zip by on the slushy highway, our car filled with dirty boots and bags of groceries. This weather too will pass and we’ll be back to it. Back to working in our community, back to making art and noticing beauty, supporting our friends and family, back to protesting with others.
“How’s this,” says Janyce, handing me a new glass with a little bit of cognac.
“Much better,” I say. “Oh, I like this one too. Who is the artist?”
“HNNY and the track is called Kindness,” she says.
And on that note, I’ll leave you with a poem.
Kindness By Yusef Komunyakaa When deeds splay before us precious as gold & unused chances stripped from the whine-bone, we know the moment kindheartedness walks in. Each praise be echoes us back as the years uncount themselves, eating salt. Though blood first shaped us on the climbing wheel, the human mind lit by the savanna’s ice star & thistle rose, your knowing gaze enters a room & opens the day, saying we were made for fun. Even the bedazzled brute knows when sunlight falls through leaves across honed knives on the table. If we can see it push shadows aside, growing closer, are we less broken? A barometer, temperature gauge, a ruler in minus fractions & pedigrees, a thingmajig, a probe with an all-seeing eye, what do we need to measure kindness, every unheld breath, every unkind leapyear? Sometimes a sober voice is enough to calm the waters & drive away the false witnesses, saying, Look, here are the broken treaties Beauty brought to us earthbound sentinels.