More than arm's length

My sister and I haven't been the best of friends.

Maybe it's because we have everything in common, including an all-to-familiar impatience for one another.

As children, we shared and argued over our parents; we clashed over the values of attentions paid and spent; we even argued over an invisible white line drawn down the center of a small, pink bedroom we at one tIme shared in their ranch-style home. 

My sister, who diligently and dutifully works at a grocery store, still lives in that same house with our 80-year-old Dad.

They care for each other, as well as a nutty little Corgi, who, as they both will tell you, "isn't wrapped too tight."

I know I don't have to tell you how terrifying it is when the phone rings these days.

Not the least bit because of the mouthy little dog barking in the background.

We all have someone out in the world we have to put at an even further distance.

For all the years, I have put words in this space under a byline; my sister has proudly directed the people she meets in her checkout line to read them.

I'm not at all proud to admit that it embarrassed me.

Me, the introvert writer, realizing that she was the intrepid reporter of the family all along.

We have both connected with so many people over the years, one item at a time. But she has done it with genuine curiosity and candor.

She knows you all. She asks what you do and what you think about your car. She asks if you have any pets.

She loves hearing your stories and sharing how the lady ahead of you got forty pounds of shrimp! Can you imagine? That's going to be some party.

She knows more than most how much we're willing to tell strangers. 

I wonder if you know how much she cares about your families? How she worries about your coping mechanism in whatever ails you; a determination she's made by the grocery-to-alcohol ratio you load into your cart. She's heard your sorrows and worries, and she gives you the advise people like me are always telling folks to keep to themselves.

I have tiptoed around myself, often trying to be someone else, while she just puts herself forward, which is different than putting herself first.

She is who she is: a tiny mensch with opinions she's entitled to share.

And while some of us have been unkind to her, some of you have been amazing.

You have shared with her more than just simple answers about paper or plastic in monotone. You have sent her flowers and cards when she's been injured or ill. You have passed along praise to her bosses when she's just been herself, doing the work the way she thinks it should be done … not just because someone is paying her to do it.

You know what she's doing, and you are grateful.

And lately, even those of you who may not have noticed her as you shop in a panic, share a few squirts of hand sanitizer from your stash when her store's supply chain hasn't been able to provide.

She is so grateful, she calls me up and tells me all about it. For that, I am grateful, too, because I am looking forward to being closer than arms' length.

Gym class of the apocalypse

"When do we start," she asked as I raise my wrist to the heavens.

She doesn't look happy. Not that I expect glee.

Running is not exactly her "thing." And coaching isn't really mine.

"Just waiting for a satellite," I tell her, holding my breath as I wait for the hollow bar graph in my watch face to fill its tallest column.

We walk slowly and quietly until the GPS' alarm bleats into readiness.

It is her first official day of social distance learning, and my daughter has agreed to go for a run with me to fulfill the novel do-it-herself gym class.

She had set the parameters to which I have agreed: No more than two miles of flat, lonesome landscape. She doesn't want to run into anyone she knows.

Social distancing, she's often complained during her blossoming teen years, has already become the adolescent superpower she resents most of all.

Of course, she's dressed as if invisibility were her hidden strength. All in black, with a neat ponytail that swings like a clock's pendulum in time with the pumping of her arms.

She is happy the State Authorities have advised folks to keep a respectable, I'm-not-with-this-person-distance between themselves and, say, their mother, who happens to be dressed head-to-toe in an alarming array of neon-bright colors.

The watch makes its connection, and we start to run. She lopes ahead like a dancer. Her stride is graceful and even, each foot landing softly on its toes.

I struggle to keep up with her.

"You have to pace yourself," I say with the same level of tension that creeps into my voice as when I'm sitting in the passenger seat of my own car, pressing the imaginary brake, telling the student driver to slow down.

Her reddening cheeks and steely expression in these moments are the reasons why I appreciate and long for the return of professional education.

Eventually, we find a rhythm that works for us: it includes intervals of walking and gratuitous swearing.

I always start that ball rolling when temperatures threaten to boil over:

"Whose %#>£* idea was this anyway?"

"It was your %#>£* idea, genius. ... and look over there ... that up ahead looks like a %{*~!~*~!^{!€ HILL.

I thought I had made myself clear: NO. %{*~!~*~!^{!€ #<%^ $&:€¥ HILLS!"

The truth is, I didn't plan to end the run on a hill, but here we were, looking at a steady climb.

"Relax, I know the trick: we're going to shorten our stride and take tiny steps. Pretend you are climbing upstairs. Don't exert extra effort, just breathe."

There may have been a string of choice words following us up that hill, but we finished strong.

Even she had to admit that she loved how the run felt after it was over.

"Like you accomplished something?"

"Yeah, but more like how it lit up my Snapchat."

"That's how running hooks you."

"Same time tomorrow?"

"Same time tomorrow. Now, hit the showers!"

One hand, wash other

I don't want to seem too obvious. I linger a little too long in the cosmetics aisle. I snatch a box of mascara from its display hook, pretending to read the ingredients. I scan the nearby shelves for my true desire. 

Hand. Sanitizer.

I mill around a bit longer and meander through the inventory. I take a leisurely stroll through Seasonal and consider buying so Easter' s-Coming Confections. 

I drop a box of sugary-pink marshmallow bunnies into the basket I've slung over the crook of my elbow ... the very one I TRY to sneeze into when the urge strikes.

Its outer cellophane crackles against my shopping-list camouflage - a greeting card, a bottle of hand soap, and a box of toothpaste. 

I rethink.

Better not tempt fate, I decide as I return the candy to the shelf, and tip the container neatly back into position.

I wonder if anyone noticed?

I take another lap of the store. I grab some sanitizing cloths from the detergent aisle and land in front of the hand soaps, which have a different home than either bar soaps or body washes. I read the labels fruitlessly. 

Where would they be?

No one has asked me if I'm finding everything I need. But then again, the store seems empty of people as well as its usual stock of anti-microbial potions. 

I hike through the baby aisle, past the digestives, and into incontinence. I traipse through the vitamins, the cold remedies, and foot care. At long last, I find First Aid. 

Among the cotton balls and the bandages, I see a single box of antibacterial scrub – the kind you'd use to prep for surgery or clean an open wound.

It's not what I want.

But it's close, and for a moment, I consider it until something catches my eye in the shadows as if it had been hidden. I reach back and find a little spray bottle. "24-hour Hand Sanitizer" its label claims in a no-nonsense font.

Two ounces … Ten dollars. "Sold," I say to myself, furtively slipping the bottle under the other items in the basket.

I think about the lady at the checkout in the last store and her persistent dry cough. 

Did I look worried or relieved as I pressed my card into the machine at her prompting? She didn't have to take my cash or give me change. 

Something tells me I'm not fooling anyone.

At least if the emoji eye roll texts I've gotten from my children are any indication. 

I panic a little watching a woman on YouTube who is using paint instead of soap to demonstrate how most people miss vast areas of their hands when they wash them.

Up until that moment, I had been satisfied just to hear the water run from a faucet AFTER hearing the flush of a toilet.

I have failed as a mother, I think, as I forward the video link to both kids.

Immediately, my phone lights up: "I KNOW how to wash my HANDS, MOM - JEEEEEZE!"

AND I might suggest you NOT try to wipe away smudges on my face by LICKING YOUR FINGER. That's just gross!

Green-faced emoji heads start to blink on my screen before I shut it down and slip it back into my pocket.

"Ingrates," I murmur to myself as I make a final lap of the store, thinking a moisturizer to combat the dry and scaly skin all this increased handwashing has wrought will round out my panic-caused purchases quite nicely.

Until I read the label and realize that the hand cream has probiotics to counteract all the antibiotic destruction, all this hand washing may cause. …

And I feel the back of my throat start to itch. 

Stocking feet

At the neighbors, standing in their kitchen wearing my best woolen socks, I couldn't take my gaze from the baseboards.

The sparkling white of the elegant, curved moldings looked freshly painted. It reflected off the dark hardwood floor as if it were a stately birch gazing into a deep pool of still water.

There was not a spec of dirt or a smudge of grime anywhere.

"A person could eat off these floors," I may have said a little too loudly as I carried a plate to the dining table.

Cloth napkins and jute placemats, of course.

On the spur of the moment, our neighbors had invited us to dinner.

Nothing fancy, they said. Just a one-pot meal with friends. "Just bring yourselves."

Despite the spontaneous invitation, their house was at its company-is-coming best. And their meal – unlike most of ours – didn't come from combining three separate packets using the directions printed on the one box.

This is usually the time when a person, overhearing me describe the less-than-magazine-layout-ready condition of our place, would try to insert the soothing balm of messy homes somehow equating to fuller lives being lived.

Or how busy schedules don't make for fancy and opportune meals.

And anyway … who has the time?

"People who put feeding their families above playing just one more game of Words with Friends?"

I'm not envious. Though I can't say, I'm entirely comfortable mentally comparing this home from the one we've haphazardly made next door.

My kids - having been roused from their rooms, where they might have taken whatever foodstuffs they'd scrounged on their own - sat awkwardly at an unfamiliar table. Their elbows in limbo, realizing the corners of arms, don't belong on tabletops but not knowing how to suspend them for comfort. Can they sustain them sans support for the duration of dinner through dessert? I could tell from the way they held themselves akimbo that was the biggest question on their limb quivering minds.

They had already taken only small portions as protection against having to feign genuine affection rather than modest appreciation.

I feel a surge of love as I look over at my kids, who are trying earnestly to fit in, as if they haven't just come from alien territory next door, where their pet dust bunnies have pet dust bunnies.

I was not blessed with the so-called "nesting gene," according to pretty much anyone who has ever come to my house unannounced. Any deadline has a direct correlation to the amount of time we allot to the work required to meet said deadline. Why is it that we say such things are nesting impulses? I have never experienced a hormonal shift that made me predisposed to clean up after my husband … or the kids … each of whom will usually trail mud through the kitchen the moment I've mopped.

I'm just the only one who will get sick of looking at the piles of dishes and laundry on a semi-regular basis.

Sure … I might have to be a different person altogether to manage a house as if it were a well-oiled machine. But I can't say it's not inspiring to know the picture-perfect can exist in the same space that includes kids, and dogs, and neighbors who may need reminding to remove their shoes.

Singled out

No one in our house will feel the pinch like I will. That delicate friction between film and fingers to break the static.

The dreaded plastic shopping bag, rendered this day verboten by state law, holds a complicated place in my heart ... and my home.

They spill out from under the sink. Jammed into open-ended crocheted sleeves that look like dolls or balled up and stuffed into the emptied husks of tissue boxes, the loopy ends of handles jut through a transparent gasket for ease and access. Always at the ready for a second and final use.

I use them as liners for bathroom trash, Receptacles for clumped cat litter, and Sequestration for soggy swimsuits and sweaty gym clothes.

I'd be lying if I told you I was entirely on board with the planned obsolescence of these inglorious gossamer garbage bags, as I have tended to think of them ever since a store clerk first asked me to make the decision: paper or plastic?

I head for this stash of bags whenever I have to scoop up a cat's regurgitated hairball or a freshly disemboweled rodent.

The thin film of protection comforts me as I clean up even the most grizzly of messes.

It's selfish to worry about what will

happen when my stockpile of store bags becomes depleted in a year or two ... or five.

Of course, we consumers will adapt.

If we can't retrain ourselves to use produce or bread bags, we'll just buy them new by the roll.

You can even purchase a bag of bags in regular or scented varieties. Top shelf, aisle seven, right above kitchen-sized trash bags.

I don't want to be the acid rain on the save the environment parade. But here I stand anyway.

Unable to think of my new, reusable plastic totes, and the trendy market bags that I will buy on impulse at the checkout, as anything else but a clever and stylish way to hide the fact that the myriad problems we have with waste hinge on something else.

I think back to my 70s-era childhood and the emotional message of The Keep America Beautiful ads starring Espera Oscar de Corti, better known by his stage name, Iron Eye Cody. Dressed as a Native American, the actor shed a single tear, and roadside litter became a problem we tackled as a nation.

Though it never occurred to us then that the unsightly trash we have cleaning up for at least two generations was only a symptom of the more significant disease that kept growing: overconsumption.

As I look at all the things I'm putting in my bag, I see all the pretty products in their double-wrapped plastics or encased in foam and peeking out of glassine windows. Plain is the likelihood that each component (if not the product itself) will inevitably make their way from our single-stream recycling containers to the belly of a whale in the open sea.

Yet somehow, the green-lidded can at the edge of my curb helps me feel better about my flippant purchases through the magic of wishful recycling.

But all is not lost. We are finally recognizing the problems with excess and the speed at which their effects are barreling toward us. We appreciate them in a new and terrifying meaning of "at a glacial pace."

A change in thinking is something we can all do.

Not to single anyone out, but ...

Husband! I'm looking at you right now. You can save the day and my ungloved hand by scooping up whatever the cat dragged in with a fully compostable banana peel your son left on the kitchen counter.