Right Here. Right Now. Breathe.

There are moments when anxiety squeezes my lungs, I blink to push away tears, and I focus on what is around me right now.  Life at this moment is scary with so many things unknown, but at the same time I deeply grateful to be where I am, at this moment, with my family, and hyper-aware of just how much privilege this moment holds.

At the beginning of March 2019 we turned on the heat in our house that we had been working on for almost a year. After living in the bus for seven months, followed by house sitting and couch surfing for the coldest of the winter, we made the decision to move out of our 30 foot school bus and into our house.  We had no kitchen and unfinished bathrooms. It was rustic at best, but warm. We camped out in a construction mess and for months as we finished bathrooms, built cabinets, added doors. In March of 2020, I am hyper-aware that warm water and hand-washing is a luxury, that having space (or money) to store essentials and minimize grocery runs isn't universal, and how integral a home is to a shelter-in-place order.

For the first time in a really, really long time I planned a week off from work for Spring Break.  I just wanted to be home.  We planned to finish kitchen shelves, plant seeds, explore close by hiking trails, go cross country skiing, and ice skating.  We listen to the news.  We check statistics and maps compulsively.  We talk about it constantly.  I make the conscious choice to stop looking as often, to let it dominate conversation, to tune out of social media and tune in to what was around me. I refuse to count the days. With growing worry of Covid-19 spreading through communities, I reexamine my list, and I mark off ice skating and pack up the skates for the season.

We build a fort.

We venture into the mountains a few more times, and then move the skis to the attic too.

 

In some ways, the household rhythm of spring break just stayed, or rather, each day defines it's own rhythm. I get up early, earlier than anyone else in the house, and go back to work, without leaving.  The kids get up hours later and check in with their distance learning.

We finish the kitchen shelves.

Adam builds the shelves I drew, and I finally unbox all those jars I filled last fall. 

We have accidental science lessons.

We notice that the sprouting sweet potatoes and morning glory look similar.
We wonder why.
We learn sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family. 

We run intentional experiments.

The percent moisture content of popcorn kernels, we calculate, is 11%.

We start logging daily how many eggs our chickens lay, so we can apply Ivory's current Mathia lessons, to a real world scenario at the end of the month.

We forget to participate in calls.  My conference calls and the kid's calls overlap.  There are tears and arguments and screaming.  There are days that feel failure, mornings that start all wrong (snow on April 15th? wtf?!?), and evenings where it feels like nothing happened at all.

We rock recess.

Sylvan's answered this day's writing prompt with:  School from home is boring.
We sit around and do nothing.  Ha - try Rollerskating Basketball at school?!?!?

We bake bread, tortillas, cake and have pie for breakfast.

The kids help me sew masks. 

We read:

As a family - A Young People's History of the United States adapted from Howard Zinn
Ivory - Re-reading All the Harry Potter Books by J.K. Rowling
Sylvan - Crenshaw by Katherine Lasky
Adam - Panic on Level 4 by Richard Preston
Heidi - Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Tightrope by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl DuWunn

We plant the first early food crops in our garden.

It takes me hours to transplant baby tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, tomatillos, and borage into larger pots.  We pot up the sprouted sweet potatoes.

These actions mark the passage of time. (I realize that I haven't been to the grocery store since before we planted the seeds.)

We think of creative ways to use our food completely and make a first, and then a second batch, of candied orange and grapefruit peels.

We spread hundreds of puzzle pieces across the floor and put them together.

The 1000 piece mushroom puzzle the kids and I got Adam for Christmas is completed.

We start the puzzle Sylvan got for his birthday.  We pull a out a box full of puzzles Adam impulse bought at a neighbor's yard sale years ago. 

We visit and revisit frogs at a city park.

I know that everyday life is fundamentally disrupted, that the gaps in our social systems are glaringly obvious, that people in our society that have been failed are likely to be failed worse. I recognize that there is huge inequity in who can self-isolate, who can isolate safely, who has help and resources, and even in the demographics of people that are dying.  I know that the number of people that are un-housed in Missoula is growing, that an unprecedented number of people have lost income, that the future is uncertain.  I watch groups of teenagers roam the neighborhood and worry.  I worry about what I see and am not seeing, about people I don't speak to, about those folks who are always invisible and still unseen.  There is a dichotomy to all these truths and my own.  After the last few years of an insane workload, work stress, never ending meetings, all while living in a bus, building a house, and trying to keep life somewhat normal for two kids - this disruption forced a chance for me to breathe.   I hold all these conflicting feelings, recognize that many realities are true simultaneously, and try not to feel guilt.