Periodical

I was walking one evening early in May, and an NPR news story that I was listening to on the web app opened with this intro: “A question you may be asking about periodical cicadas is why do they stay underground for 17 years?” 

First, a quick note to NPR. I wasn’t asking anything about periodical cicadas. Ignorance is bliss. Second, maybe some backtracking is necessary. Brood X, which is apparently one of the largest broods of underground-dwelling periodical cicadas, is coming up this year. I’ve lived here in Montgomery County, Maryland for over 20 years, so I remember the last visit from Brood X, and I can tell you that it doesn’t seem like 17 years have gone by but I know that they have, and not just because NPR says so. I was pregnant with my younger child in May of 2004, and he will be 17 on his next birthday. The math is correct. It all adds up. 

But NPR was asking the wrong question. The question is not why they remain underground for 17 years, but why they need to come up at all? It’s been 17 years since the last time I had to dodge cicadas, living and dead, and I didn’t miss them. Why not stay put, where it’s dark and cool and safe? Why bother at all with the unfriendly, unwelcoming world of humans? We’re up on the surface killing each other left and right. Cicadas, you're not safe here. We’re not even safe here. 

*****

My first Maryland cicada event was in 2004. As I mentioned, I was pregnant with my younger son (who is now almost 17, of course) and my older son was just a bit shy of his third birthday. We lived in a townhouse, in a neighborhood that was then about ten years old. Apparently, excavation and construction disrupt the underground lairs of the periodical cicadas, and newer neighborhoods see far fewer of the invaders. I remember seeing only a handful in our immediate neighborhood. My mother-in-law lived in Aspen Hill, a nearby but much older neighborhood; and my older son, who spent most days with her while I worked, was completely fascinated with the cicadas of Aspen Hill. He chased them, and played with them, and talked about them,  and lamented the lack of cicadas in his own backyard. Necessity is the mother of invention, though, and he remedied that lack by filling his little pockets with cicadas to bring home. 

I learned about the take-home cicadas the hard way (which is how I learn most things). I was doing laundry. As always, I checked my son’s pants pockets for pennies and rocks and Lego pieces and crumbs and all of the other little-boy things that he gathered and pocketed throughout his days, and instead of rocks and pennies, I got a fistful of crunchy dead cicadas. That was, of course, 17 years ago, but it was a lesson well learned. I still don’t reach blindly into anyone’s pants pockets when I’m doing laundry. 

A smarter person, of course, would have learned a different lesson altogether, which is that the bursting-at-the-seams pregnant lady shouldn’t have been doing the laundry in the first place. I never did learn how to use my pregnancy privileges. 

*****

Every March, the news is filled with stories about cherry blossoms--when they’ll start to blossom, when they’ll reach “peak bloom,” and when they’ll start to fade, not to return for another year. The whole thing comes and goes in about three weeks. 

Cicada forecasts, because this is a once-in-17-years phenomenon, started much earlier. The experts knew that the cicada emergence would happen sometime in May, but no one knew exactly when. It’s hard to predict exactly what nature will do, isn’t it? Cicadas and cherry blossoms don’t look at calendars. They don’t set reminders on their iPhones. They do what they do and we just wait. The first two weeks of May were colder than usual, and I guess the cicadas didn’t see any compelling reason to come out.  Too cold for outdoor brunches. I saw and read and heard almost daily predictions of cicada emergence and peak cicada activity, but nothing actually happened. 

Then one night, I went for a walk. It was 7:30 or so, with about an hour of daylight remaining and I heard what I thought sounded like a weird hedge trimmer. And then I happened to look down, and the sidewalk was alive with cicadas. They moved drunkenly, disoriented and confused, newly up from underground and struggling to acclimate themselves to daylight. 

Live cicadas congregating on the sidewalk or in the grass or on my backyard fence (they love my backyard fence) are not all that dreadful to behold. I don’t particularly like them, and I really hate when one of them flies toward me, but they’re mostly pretty sedentary. They don’t swirl around en masse like the proverbial swarm of locusts. When they fly, it’s a short-haul trip from one comfortable roost to the next. They sit around; and more often than not, the birds get to them before they even sense the imminent danger. Nothing that lives underground for 17 years and then emerges into the bright May sunlight is prepared for the only-the-strong-survive struggle of life above ground, I guess. 

The cicadas that manage to escape the birds aren’t long for this world. They come up, they see what’s happening on the surface, they enjoy a few days of fence-sitting or tree-roosting, they mate and deposit eggs that will hatch into nymphs that will burrow underground and remain there for 17 years, and then they die in droves. And while the live cicadas aren’t completely horrible, the dead ones are revolting. And dead cicadas are everywhere. EVERYWHERE, I tell you. You can’t take a step outside in Silver Spring without landing on at least one, and usually more than one deceased cicada. A dead cicada underfoot is gut-wrenchingly repulsive. Step on one of these crunchy motherfuckers, crushing the hard exoskeleton, and then feel the squish as the milky white viscous guts spill out under your sneaker. Don’t even think about wearing flip-flops. 

As you walk amid the corpses, you can easily distinguish the long dead from their more recently deceased compatriots. The newly dead cicadas are mired in mucous-like translucent white innards. The ones that have been dead for a few hours or more are just flat wet shiny black stains on the sidewalk. Neither one is anything you want to look at but the former is definitely worse than the latter. 

*****

I went for a walk last night, and I inspected myself very carefully when I came in. So that’s two cicada precautions: Avoid flip-flops (and it really is perfect flip-flop weather) and be sure to do a very thorough cicada check when you come in from outside. Cicadas like to roost. They like vertical structures, like a fence post or a tree trunk or a wall, and a human body standing around and minding its own business is just as good a spot as a wall or a tree or my very popular (among cicadas) wooden backyard fence. 

*****

The cicada invasion will be short-lived. According to my cursory internet research, which is the only kind of research I do, they’ll all be gone in four to six weeks. I don’t remember that the 2004 emergence lasted that long, but I wasn’t taking notes, so I can’t say for sure. I didn’t keep records. I don’t have a Power BI dashboard. Anyway, I won’t miss seeing them or stepping on them or plucking them off my t-shirts, but I’ll miss the sound. 

Yes, they’re not pretty to look at and they’re disgusting to touch, even through half an inch of sneaker sole, when dead, but they sound lovely. Some people don’t like the sound. It’s a steady and incessant drone and I can understand why people might find it bothersome. But I find it soothing.

*****

I can’t possibly be the first person to observe that the cicada emergence, at least here in Maryland, coincided almost exactly with the CDC announcement that fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks outside. That day happened to be the two-week mark following my second shot, meaning that I was fully vaccinated, and I shed my mask and went on my way rejoicing. I think that the (unmasked) walk that I was writing about happened the very next day. THE VERY NEXT DAY! That’s right, just as we reached milepost 1 of the home stretch toward the end of the plague, the pestilence began. I know my Old Testament (right now, I live in it). God promised that he wouldn’t send another flood, but He didn’t take fire or famine off the table, did He? Maybe we should buckle up. 

*****

You know, I think that NPR needs to shut its big fat piehole for a while. Just after I finished writing most of this, I was out walking again and dodging cicada carcasses, when I heard yet another NPR cicada story. This time, after the obligatory discussion of culinary uses for cicadas (why?), the reporter casually noted that we’re just getting started with these little motherfuckers, and that the coming few days will bring “billions” (his word! “billions!”) more cicadas up from under the ground where they belong. Billions! I mean, there are cicadas everywhere right now, but if I had to hazard a guess on the current aboveground numbers, I’d have to guess no more than 10 million or so. Billions means that this cicada situation, already unpleasant, is about to get downright untenable. 

Nature is a beautiful, beautiful thing. But it’s disgusting right now, and I want no part of it. 

Weather undergound

Do you know how when you’re writing something and the words just come easily and the sentences flow naturally from the words, forming well-constructed paragraphs, each building on the next until you have a page or pages of sharp, funny, clear, insightful prose? 

No, I don’t either. I’m trying to write two different things at once and I can barely choke a word out of myself. 

Maybe it’s the weather. Today is the first summer-hot day of 2021. I always forget how much I love hot weather until it finally arrives. “90 degrees,” I think, when I see the forecast. “I’m so pasty, and my feet are a mess. I’m not ready for shorts and sandals.” But then a summery day dawns, bright but hazy and soft, and I feel like I can just melt into the day, like I don’t know where I end and the summery air begins. In front of a computer screen is no place to be today; no place to be at all. 

*****

But outside is no place to be either, not if you live in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, just above ground from the subterranean home of Brood X. Because when you’re outside, if you’re not dodging live cicadas, then you’re side-stepping dead ones. The dead ones are worse. That’s one of the things I’m writing about. Cicadas in general, not just dead ones, though I can tell you that I have plenty to say about dead cicadas. 

It’s Sunday now, another hazy soft summer day, though it’s not really summer yet, not officially. Memorial Day is still a week away. My son and I are watching “Field of Dreams,” and we’ll watch a real baseball game later today, Nationals vs. Orioles. Yes, I know that I’m supposed to be boycotting the Nationals because of the stupid, no-sense, no-reason handbags rule. But it’s summer now, or practically summer. My fighting spirit evaporates in the summer, like morning dew on the grass on a hot day. 

*****

That was short-lived. I’m sitting through a Zoom class for swimming officials (time to recertify) and I’m wearing a sweater. The temperature dropped 25 degrees overnight, and a blazing bright Sunday gave way to a rainy, cool, Seattle-like Monday. The Nationals beat the Orioles yesterday, but the Capitals went down in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs last night, for the third straight year. Hockey season is over, but spring is not giving way to summer just yet. Not without a fight. 

All I ever wanted

I thought I had a beach house reserved, but it turns out that I don't. Having given up on the idea of Ireland once again (next year!) I decided that we should go to the beach this summer. Unfortunately for me, everyone else who had to cancel their other travel plans also decided to go to the beach, to the same beach town where I want to go, at the same time that I want to go. For the last almost three months, I've been searching for an available rental for the second week in August; and for the last three months, I found nothing. Until last Thursday, when I found just the right place in just the right location for just the right price. And I quickly reserved it, and I signed the lease, and I sent a check for the security deposit, service fee, and half of the rent per the agency’s requirements. And I thought, having signed paperwork and mailed checks and whatnot, that the thing was in the bag and that all I had to do was mail the other half of the rent in July, and show up in August with my bicycle and beach umbrella and cooler in tow. 

But no. Because today, the rental agent emailed me that she was terribly sorry, but she had to cancel my reservation, because the owner just called her and told her that the house shouldn’t have been available for the week that I rented it. This would seem, wouldn’t it, a classic YP not MP (your problem not my problem)? See previous paragraph’s discussion of signed leases and mailed checks. 

I emailed her again later, because the whole thing just bothered me. A full five days had elapsed since I had reserved the house and confirmed my reservation, and it seemed unlikely that it would take that long for the owner to notice that the house was listed in error. Something seemed off. And I was right, as it turns out. When questioned, the agent freely admitted that the owner decided that she wanted the house back for a family friend, and so they cancelled my perfectly legitimate reservation to indulge the owner’s whim. 

Yes, I understand private property. She owns the place, so she can do what she wants. EXCEPT that if you don’t want to rent your house out, then don’t list it as available for rent. You don’t get to have it both ways. You don’t get to capriciously cancel a valid reservation because you changed your mind. You can change your mind BEFORE the listing rents, but not after. 

I don’t at all understand why the agency is allowing her to do this. In their place, I would drop her as a client. I’d drop her like hot garbage. I saw her name on the lease (which I signed and mailed and which is now in their hands and could even be used against me if her friend damages the place during the week that I reserved it for), but I don’t remember it now. I DO remember the name of the real estate agency. They are the ones I blame for this. They are the ones that I will not do business with again. 

Do you know what’s the worst part of this whole thing? Even worse than the disappointment of losing the perfect house in the perfect location with no stairs so my mother could join us for the week? It’s having crossed a task off my list, brushing the dust of a completed chore off my hands with a flourish, and then finding that I have to start over again. I was done, and now I’m not. Checks were written, paperwork was signed, envelopes were dropped in the mailbox at the post office that I drove to myself, and all for jolly well naught. That is the worst part. 

No, it’s not really the worst part. The worst part is that I really wanted to go and now I’m sad that maybe we can’t. I know that this is a first-world problem. And that some people, maybe most people, don’t have the money or the time to take any vacation at all. And I feel bad about this. But right this minute, I feel worse about my own stupid situation. I’m petty that way. I’m petty, and I’m not letting it go, either. It’s just one more battle, one more City Hall to fight. And I’ll probably lose, but I do hope that I can make the real estate people remember that they were in a fight. 

Sugar, spice, whatever

I watched a few minutes of “Rocky” one night last week. I’ve seen “Rocky” many times, and although I haven’t seen it start to finish in many years, I will always watch it for a little while when I come across it. I picked it up right at the scene in which Rocky tries to instruct young Marie, the street-corner-hanging, tight-jeans-wearing, tough little South Philly kid, on how to be a “nice” girl. 

Rocky’s heart is in the right place. Even with everything I know and believe now, which includes the firm conviction that a random neighborhood dude has absolutely no right to tell a young girl who is not his daughter how to dress or speak or behave, I know that he’s honestly concerned about Marie. In 1970s Philadelphia, foul-mouthed, late-night-wandering, careless young girls end up with a bad reputation, at the very least. 

When Rocky tells young Marie to watch her mouth, to try to act less trampy and more ladylike, and to avoid being seen with the neighborhood hooligans, he’s trying to protect her. He knows that a bad reputation, once earned, is almost impossible for a young girl to shed. He knows that a girl who wants a nice boyfriend and eventually a nice husband cannot be the type of girl who puts out, or who is even thought to put out, or who is thought to even think about putting out. He knows these things because he’s a man and he knows how he himself treats women of the right sort and women of the wrong sort. 

So yes, I suppose that Rocky’s heart is in the right place, and I love him for walking Marie home and making sure she gets safely inside. But I love Marie even more for telling Rocky to go fuck himself, just as she shuts the door in his face. At that age, I didn’t know how to handle the many men and boys in my neighborhood who all felt that it was their duty and their right to tell every girl how much or how sincerely we should smile, or how much or little makeup we should wear, or how we should walk or speak or laugh so as to be attractive to men but not too-attractive-if-you-know-what-I-mean and we did, thank you very much. I wish I’d known then that a polite but firm “fuck off” or variation thereof was the only reasonable response to such unsolicited instruction. 

*****

Did you think that this post was going to be about a movie? No, it’s actually about a book; Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land, a collection of essays about mid-20th century American girlhood 

I first read Caitlin Flanagan in 2006 or so. One of her Atlantic essays went viral (which at that time meant that people emailed it around to all of their friends, who emailed it to other friends). I read the essay, and then immediately went and bought the hardcover edition of To Hell With All That, Flanagan’s collection of essays on women and housekeeping and motherhood. 

The essay, of course, was the infamous “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” which earned Caitlin Flanagan a shit-ton of grief from working women and feminists. I just re-read that essay and I have to believe that most of the people who blasted it as a mean-spirited polemic against women in the workforce didn’t actually read it. Instead, they read the most inflammatory out-of-context quotes that circulated on the internet until everyone was sure that Caitlin Flanagan was a woman-hating Phyllis Schlafly wannabe. 

Having actually read “Serfdom,” I know that it is not at all an attack against women who work. Rather, it’s a criticism of women who take advantage of other women who work, by paying them low hourly under-the-table wages to serve as nannies and housekeepers. This is still a problem. Housekeepers and nannies, sometimes undocumented, sometimes legal, but almost always poor, are often underpaid, deprived of paid time off and medical benefits, and hired and paid without the paperwork that would make them eligible for Social Security and other government benefits. If they are hurt on the job, they’re not eligible for Worker’s Compensation. They don’t get paid holidays or voting leave or jury duty leave. If they’re undocumented, then they don’t even have any recourse if their employers fail to pay them. Caitlin Flanagan wasn’t attacking women who work in highly paid professions; she was pleading for fairness and equity for the women who do the work that makes it possible for professional and executive women to succeed. Things have changed since 2006, and I suspect that readers today would react differently to this essay than they did 15 years ago. Caitlin Flanagan was right. 

*****

A few years after I read To Hell with All That, another old Flanagan essay also made its rounds on the internet. “Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica” examined an apparent panic about an apparent oral sex craze among very young adolescents. I say “apparent” because Flanagan begins the essay by admitting that she had initially scoffed at rumors about middle school blow job parties, and because I had young children at the time so I wasn’t tuned in to teen and tween culture. The online discussion of this essay in 2010 or so, when I first heard about it, suggested that Flanagan herself was part of an hysterical pearl-clutching mob of middle-aged suburban ladies, aghast at the behavior of these young trollops. 

I kept meaning to read the essay for myself, but I never got around to it until just last week, when I read Girl Land, which includes a chapter based on “Are You There God?” And what do you know? Just as with “Serfdom,” the online haters had completely misrepresented the essay, and Flanagan’s point. That’s what you get when you read about what an author has written, rather than reading the author’s actual words. 

*****

But didn’t I say that I was going to write about a book? I think I did. Girl Land is about girlhood of a very different sort than Rocky’s young friend Marie and I lived through in inner-city Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s. Caitlin Flanagan’s girls are nicely brought-up upper middle class American girls, girls who are “cosseted,” “cherished,” “treasured,” “protected,” “sheltered,” “tended,” and “watched over” by their families. Flanagan and I are rough contemporaries. A Google search tells me that she was born in 1961, so she’s four years older than I am. And I get all of her cultural references, from Judy Blume to Patty Hearst. But I grew up in a working-class family, and so my experience of girlhood was very different from Caitlin Flanagan's.  

Working-class girls in Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s were definitely protected and watched very closely, but we were not cosseted, treasured, cherished, or indulged in any way. Nor were we sheltered. We knew exactly what could happen to girls who stepped out of line. Everyone we came in contact with all day long, from our teachers to our parents to our aunts and uncles to the random dude on the street took special pains to tell us, frequently, what could happen to bad girls, and we were expected to listen patiently to their well-meaning advice. And we had to accept, without complaining, that boys--even our younger brothers--could do what they wanted, go where they wanted, without fear. 

For the boys in our blue-collar Catholic neighborhood, things were pretty straightforward (definitely not easy, but straightforward). Life was more complicated for the girls. We had to watch ourselves, to make sure that boys understood the limits. But we weren’t to come across as standoffish or snooty. We had to act like ladies, but not like stuck-up prigs, because what did we think this was, the Main Line? We had to dress in a way that was feminine, but not prissy, but also definitely not slutty. We had to smile, but in exactly the right way. Too broad and open a smile might be taken as an invitation, and you don’t want to look like you’re asking for it, do you? Too stiff and formal a smile, and you might come across as prudish or stuck-up, and who do you think you are, Grace Kelly? (I grew up two miles and a million light years from Grace Kelly’s childhood home.) There was only one way for us to dress, speak, and act that would meet with adult approval. 

Here’s the easiest way to explain it. Picture if you will a big Venn diagram. The slutty girls occupied the circle on the left; and the girls who acted like nuns (or librarians, or old ladies, or lesbians), belonged on the right. The very, very small intersection between the two circles was where you needed to be. It wasn’t that hard to get into that little intersection. It wasn’t hard at all, in fact. The hard part was staying there. And once you were out, there was no getting back in. 

But that’s neither here nor there. I don’t fault Caitlin Flanagan for focusing on her own segment of upper middle-class white American girlhood. That’s her world; or at least, it was. Writers are supposed to write about what they know. I couldn’t have written Girl Land just as Caitlin Flanagan wrote it, but I understood and related to every word. The transition from girlhood to womanhood is universal.

*****

In the essay “Dating,” Flanagan writes about her high school near-rape experience. I say “her” high school near-rape experience, not “a” high school near-rape experience, because everyone I know had at least one. 

A few days ago, I was in the grocery store shopping for my old lady, and I heard Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy.” I hadn’t heard that song in a long time. I wondered how many other women my age (Class of 1983) hear that song and think of it as I do, as music to be held down to while a boy gropes you against your will. I don’t have hard data or anything, but I feel confident in my assertion that just about every girl who graduated from high school in the 1980s had at least one near-rape experience, with or without a soundtrack. Some women have a hard time getting over these experiences. Maybe they suffer in silence for years until their attacker is nominated to the Supreme Court, and then they speak out, upending their lives in the process. But most of us are completely cavalier, even lighthearted, about what we euphemistically describe as “bad experiences.” “Oh yeah,” we say, “I had a bad experience, too. I was at the movies/in a car/at the prom/at an after-prom party/on a beach trip/at an amusement park/going bowling/going rollerskating with my boyfriend/friend/friend’s older brother/older brother’s friend and he tried to attack me. And then we watched the rest of the movie, and we went home.” We didn’t talk about these things at the time. No one would have believed us; or if they did, it would have been our fault. It was always the girl’s fault. 

And as Girl Land makes clear, it wasn’t only working class girls who had “bad experiences.” Cosseted and treasured upper middle class girls had bad experiences, too. After I read “Dating,”  I thought about how I don’t know a single woman of any social class who wouldn’t recognize Flanagan’s wide-eyed naivete, going off for an afternoon at a secluded beach with a sweet, handsome, funny teenage boy; and then her growing panic as she realized that this adorable boy was about to try to rape her. We’re all women, and we all know that none of us, not even well brought-up upper middle class girls, cosseted and treasured and cherished and protected, are immune. 

*****

Girl Land, as Flanagan writes, is a place that girls must pass through on their way to womanhood. The journey is fraught and often perilous, and none of us, no matter where we’re from or what our families are like, gets out unscathed. And in some ways, it’s even harder now. My childhood was nothing like Caitlin Flanagan’s, but we had something in common, a great blessing that made adolescence much easier than it is for today’s girls. 

I didn’t spend my afternoons dreaming and reading and diary-writing in a pink and white bedroom filled with floral comforters and stuffed animals and posters, but I could still escape from the world and be myself for a few minutes without worrying about what the popular girls thought about my clothes and hair or about what the opinionated men and boys of the neighborhood thought about my deportment and my proper place on the Venn diagram. Girls today, immersed in social media for 24 hours a day, have no such respite. Girl Land was never an easy place to be, but it’s a minefield now. It’s a fucking minefield.

I am the mother of boys, but reading Girl Land made me want to take care of girls; to tell them that everything will be OK one day. And to let them know that sometimes, you need to close the front door on the judgers and the haters and the well-meaning neighborhood prize fighters. Sometimes, you need to tell them all to just fuck off. 

Mother's Day

OMG, I’m almost finished with a piece of writing that has been dogging me--DOGGING me, I tell you--for weeks, and it’s quite a relief. Watch this space! Coming soon! Don’t miss it!

But every silver lining has a heavy gray cloud because just when I thought that we were close to a resolution to the impasse that I mentioned last week, it turns out that not only do we not have a resolution but that some people appear to have dug in more firmly. I’m looking across no-man’s-land right now and I see sandbags. I see barbed wire. I see gun turrets. 

*****

It’s Friday now. We appear once again to have achieved a peace settlement or at least a cease-fire, so I can go about my business without a flak jacket or whatever the fuck else. 

I’m still very close to finishing the essay I’ve been writing; so close, in fact, that I can sit around her writing about writing it rather than actually writing it. It’s all part of the process. 

What I’m writing is an essay about Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land. Flanagan just published an essay on The Atlantic, about “Nomadland” (the movie) and she picked up something that I missed entirely because she’s Caitlin Flanagan and I’m not. Or rather, I did pick it up, but I didn’t quite get what I was seeing. Frances McDormand’s Fern and Linda May (played by herself) are living a very particular part of every young girl’s dream life; the part where we play house and pretend that we are mistresses of all we survey. The makeshift nature of a little girl’s playhouse is part of its charm, a feature and not a bug. Fern and Linda get to run their tiny mobile households all for themselves, just as they like them, with no demands from husbands or children and no neighborhood standards to live up to. As they sit together in their lawn chairs, Flanagan observes, Fern and Linda May are no longer beaten-down, overworked elderly blue-collar women. They are girls; little girls with their whole lives ahead of them, mistresses of all they survey.  

*****

Do you see why it takes me so damn long to finish anything? Last night, I re-read what I have so far, and I found a few easy edits that will make it all flow so much better. But why not write about revising rather than actually revising? 

*****

Now it's Sunday. Yesterday, we went to a cookout. I don’t really know the couple who hosted the party; they’re acquaintances rather than friends. They have a magazine-perfect house and deck and yard that I just slightly envied. So much room, I thought, and such nice outdoor furniture. It was unseasonably cold yesterday, but propane heaters threw warmth in every direction, and colorful flowers bloomed from planters and flower beds.

I don’t generally envy other people’s material wealth and possessions. I have enough. And later as I read Lauren Hough’s Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, I remembered that I have enough, even if I’d forgotten it for five minutes while I basked in the propane-generated outdoor warmth. 

Later, I did go back and revise my essay, and I’m this close. This close, I tell you. It’s 9:45 on Sunday morning and I just ate some eggs and fruit salad that I didn’t have to make, and I’m sitting on the couch, half-watching a “Hunger Games” marathon while reading and writing. I don’t know how appropriate “The Hunger Games” is as Mother’s Day programming, but I happen to love the movies (and the books) so I’m quite content. I have a whole day ahead of me when I don’t have to work or cook or clean or fight the power or adhere to anyone’s timetable. That’s all I want for Mother’s Day. 

Open House

I’m getting close to finishing the essay that I’ve been working on, on and off, for several weeks. I keep visiting it, like it’s an open house. I look around for a while, and I move a piece of furniture a bit to the left or the right. I stopped in yesterday and hung a whole bunch of pictures on the wall, and I was pleased with my work. It really popped, I thought. Lots of color and texture; lots of different shapes and images. Today, though, the light changed quite a bit, and what looked charming and eclectic and artistic yesterday looks like an explosion today. Cluttered. Disorganized. No unifying theme. Maybe I should just empty out the whole place, slap a coat of neutral paint (Swiss Coffee! Parchment! Eggshell! Sand!) paint on the walls, and start the hell over. 

That doesn’t make any sense, does it? Because why would I redecorate a house that I don’t own? I don’t know why I bother trying to get fancy with the metaphors. It seldom works. 

*****

My annual spring anxiety and panic is back to its pre-pandemic intensity so at least something is returning to normal. Yesterday on Twitter, I found that a certain right wing white supremacist Trumpy internet dope who is quite popular among the Tucker Carlson-watching public was trending because he was opining on the subject of anxiety as a mental illness, which it isn’t, according to the Trumpy trolling internet dope. Slow news day, I suppose. This is a person who is well known for talking directly out of his ass, so after a quick visit to see why the topic of anxiety was trending along with the internet dope’s name, I muted the whole thing and moved on. How’s that for mental health? 

Anxiety and its place in the DSM-IV aside, I am really just stalling. I did make some progress on the thing that I was writing, enough that I now feel compelled to finish it but not enough that I can easily do so in one sitting. So why not write about something else, even if “something else” means imaginary real estate and online dumbasses? What with the state of the housing market, the former might be the only kind or real estate available for purchase right now; and the latter? Well, they’re everywhere, so that’s an of-the-moment topic if I ever heard of one. 

I have some renovations to do. Sigh. 

Two shakes

Did I mention that I got my second COVID shot yesterday? Let me tell you, if you haven’t already heard, that the second Moderna shot is no joke. The shot itself didn’t hurt at all, and an hour afterward, I felt just fine. I continued with my work, and I got things done, until right around 5:30 PM, when I felt as though I’d been injected with a powerful sleeping serum. I went to bed at 9 PM, right in the middle of the hockey game, and I must have slept right through the bus running over me. When I woke up, I could not get out of bed. Eventually, I did get out of bed, but the fever, fatigue, and body aches were bad enough that I actually had to lean on something when I tried to stand up. 

I showered, got dressed, and got to work but I felt worse and not better as the day continued. I tapped out at 2:30, made my way to the couch and stayed there for the rest of the afternoon and early evening, drifting in and out of sleep. When I finally managed to drag myself off the couch to go to bed, I wondered if I really needed to brush my teeth and change into pajamas. “My clothes are comfortable enough to sleep in,” I thought, “and would it really be that big a deal if I skipped tooth brushing for one night? Are my teeth going to fall out?” I did finally brush my teeth, but it was hard. The toothbrush weighed 25 pounds. 26 with the toothpaste. 

No joke, I’m telling you. No joke. 

It's Saturday now, and I feel 80 percent better thanks in part to almost 12 hours in bed. I'm outside watching a baseball game. The temperature is cool and the breeze makes it almost chilly but the sunshine is lovely and we're outside, so we don't have to wear masks. Yes, I know that CDC guidance is no masks outdoors for fully vaccinated people and I’m not technically fully vaccinated because I just had the second shot two days ago. But we were sitting at least 15 feet away from the nearest other spectators, and I’m pretty sure that my immune system did the work of two weeks in one day yesterday. 

I came home from the game, and the house was empty. My husband and son were running errands, and my older son was at work, and the house felt messy to me. The house always feels messy to me. I looked around at the random things sitting on tables and counters, and the floors that needed to be vacuumed (in my mind) and the dryer that was full of clothes and the groceries that needed to be put away, and I took Sue Ann Nivens’ advice. I thought of my house as a clock. I started at midnight and I worked my way clockwise through 12 hours until the whole place was back in order. No one who saw the place before and after would really have noticed the difference, but I did. I do. And I was done in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. 

You kids aren't the only ones who love Betty White.
Here she is as Sue Ann Nivens, The Happy Homemaker,
in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, S4, E1, "The Lars Affair."

****

Later, I went for a walk. It was May 1, May Day, Derby Day, and the kind of still and peaceful warm May afternoon when as soon as the lawnmowers quiet, you can hear a conversation from across the street. Not that I was listening. It’s Sunday now and I am back to normal. With a little effort, a house recovers from disorder and with a little rest, a human body recovers, too. It’s going to be another beautiful balmy May day. It’s time to get moving.