(one of our seventeen daily corona walks)
this week i definitely hit a wall with the quarantine. like most people i’ve been cleaning and cooking and cleaning and cooking and feeling like i am running underwater and not getting anywhere. last week i was distracted by passover and easter and lucy’s tenth birthday (she said it was her BEST birthday ever, which has really made me rethink these elaborate, themed parties i threw pre-corona: a dutch one in honor of her birth country with wooden shoes to paint and pannekoken [pancakes] and loads of dutch candy to eat and vases of tulips everywhere; a fairy one where i made glittery tulle fairy skirts and wands and a bazillion tissue paper flowers and decorated every tree in the backyard; a farm one that we had to move to the front driveway because we had a BLIZZARD and the snow didn’t stick to the cement, but it DID to the grass - the pig wouldn’t come out of his pen into the snow so he just stayed put on the drive. they were super fun, but maybe a little over the top… CLEARLY i needed to throw my extra energy into something and probably should have gone back to work sooner. anyway, this year we just had a long, lazy breakfast, zoom calls with family and friends, a neighborhood walk, a long, lazy dinner and finally cupcake baking… so much simpler and she LOVED it… something to ponder.)
(a table full of dutch goodies…)
(lucy and her girlfriend licking frosting off the cupcakes)
(the trees all decorated with pink tissue paper flowers)
(lucy getting ready to blow out her candle)
(hats and bandanas for all the cowkids coming to celebrate with lucy)
(in front of the barn installed in the driveway - that bandana has been repurposed now as a corona mask)
after we got through the third celebration (easter brunch and the egg hunt), my cleaning compulsion kicked in and i scoured the house with the ferocity i apply when one of the kids has brought home lice (i’m not naming names, but that child has been nicknamed “licey”) or when my ceiling crashed down due to a leak and the repair included a dustbowl in my downstairs that rivaled the one that swept through the american prairies in the 1930’s. i enjoyed my clean home and felt calm for about thirty-five minutes until hank and my children mucked it up again despite my pleas for them to sit still with their shoes off and not touch or eat or play with anything so we could savor the unsticky counters and the floors void of paw prints or crumbs or random socks and the bathrooms smelling sweetly of clorox. (we may be the only household in boulder that appreciates toxic smells… six months ago we got ants in the mudroom and i sprayed them with raid. lucy came home, breathed in the fragrant pesticide and said, “oh mama, it smells so GOOD in here!”)
(what my living room looked like after the ceiling fell down)
maybe it was watching my boyfriend (govenor cuomo) on TV tell us that the re-entry to “normal” life will be carefully moderated and incremental and SLOW or maybe it was the official announcement that school is closed for the year in boulder or maybe it was the fact that i hadn’t been to the market in so long that we had to have beef jerky and cheese puffs and apples for dinner two nights in a row (i DO think that covers all the basic food groups though.) but on saturday i just stayed in bed until mid day reading (another amazing book, “educated” that you all have probably already read, but if you haven’t, you should!) my kids were with their dad so i bunkered down in my jammies until i finished the book (at which point i was faint with hunger and had to stagger downstairs and cobble together a snack like old mother hubbard.)
(completely compelling memoir)
(image - pictorem)
by sunday i needed to get OUT of boulder. i packed up hank and a picnic and picked up the kids (i HAD been to the market by then so i had real food.) i meant to take the scenic peak to peak highway to idaho springs because i thought we could use some pretty vistas and i’ve never been there. somehow we got going the opposite direction (my navigational skills have never been tip top) on the peak to peak and ended up in estes park instead. we couldn’t go into the park of course, but we drove up by the stanley hotel and there were two giant ELK right in the road. i have never seen those before… they are HUGE and look like some sort of prehistoric horse donkey. i wasn’t even sure what they were, but theo googled them and they were definitely elk. they didn’t have any horns so they must have been ladies. we decided to park in a naturey area to eat our car picnic and saw several more. then we just drove around the town looking for them (if you spotted one you had to yell, “ELKO!”) i think we saw at least TWENTY! on the way back we drove through this cute town called lyons where one of lucy’s favorite teachers, ms. roskins, lives. we poked around there for a while looking for her (we were going to yell, “ROSKO” if we found her - we didn’t - she was probably safely inside social distancing.) it was pretty exciting seeing the elk and i don’t think we broke any quarantine rules because we didn’t get out of the car and we all felt a bit better after our adventure. but we haven’t gotten back into a regular routine.
(it’s hard to tell from this photo how BIG this guy was - it WAS a guy because he had little fuzzy antlers)
monday there was no “school” for some sort of holiday, even though there is never really school these days. i was well into another book “fleishman is in trouble” (i really recommend this one also and am desperate to discuss the ending with the girlfriend that lent it to me) and that morning all four of us stayed piled up in my bed reading until nearly eleven…hank wasn’t actually reading - he was just cuddled up snoring. i’m sure he could read if he tried, but these days he has to take advantage of any moment i am not dragging him out on a walk to rest up. anyway, we finally got so hungry we went downstairs for brunch like new yorkers in our twenties.
i am not sure what to make of these new habits. i know it is good for my kids to read and relax and snuggle, but we are getting into a weird, random schedule that has no framework. (even our grooming is getting questionable - the other day before we left for a walk lucy asked me, “should i brush my teeth?” not like should i brush my teeth because i just ate something sticky, but should i brush my teeth TODAY, AT ALL? somehow my children have come to think of teeth brushing as optional or occasional… for the record i DO still brush my own teeth several times a day! and theo has been wearing what i call his “comfort pants and hoodie” day after day… i have to tackle him and force him to strip just so i can wash them periodically. i myself have managed to wear my jams all day on more than one occasion… i DID change into clean ones before going to bed, but still…) i don’t think i’ve ever behaved this way before in my life, at least not for any amount of time that extended beyond a morning. i’m not sure i know who i am in corona. i go from bouts of complete laziness to meticulously and energetically cleaning and back again. maybe i once again need a job… i mean i DO have a job, but it’s primarily on hold right now. maybe all of this looseness and lack of structure is expanding me somehow that just hasn’t registered yet… but somehow i’ve got to pull myself together because i need to start planning my wedding to governor cuomo, which i think will happen next spring. the lion share of the planning will fall to me because he is so busy saving new york (and comforting the whole country) and also because he doesn’t know about it yet.
to get myself psyched up for this project, i wore PANTS two days in a row! i’ve been toggling between lulus and sweats and the occasional sundress when it was really warm for the last six weeks… it felt very productive (if a little confining) to put on some jeans. i started with the most important part of the event, my DRESS. since this is my second wedding i will wear pink, rather than white. my inspiration is gemma chan’s 2019 oscar dress, just with a little less volume so i can move around without tripping. that decision took a lot of energy… hopefully next week i will manage to get back in my pants and start thinking about the flowers and the food… maybe his mother will share her famous red sauce for one of the dishes? i will try very hard not to get it on my pretty pink dress.
