Dog days

The dog's ears casually rise to attention as I move through the house.

She furtively glances my way without shifting from her place in the sunny patch of the rug.

She follows me with her eyes through the kitchen, to the living room, into the bedroom, and back. She listens as I close a cabinet and open the refrigerator. She yawns and stretches as I pace the floor.

Just as she has me trained to be quiet while I gather up the things that might send her into a tizzy, I have trained her -- by poor follow-through -- to have low expectations despite all indications point to a sure thing.

The leash.

Some running shoes.

An overripe bag of kitchen trash.

All of these things, in the past, have meant an opportunity for great fun: A low-key tour of the block maybe, or perhaps a three-mile jog; even an informal bounce or two around the garbage cans in the backyard. Of course, these things I am gathering could mean nothing: a tidying, a false alarm, an abandonment of sorts.

But now the whole world has changed, and she's not the only one who is unsure if it's for the better.

The car keys haven't left their hook in a while. The leash sits all in a tangle in a basket by the door. It seems as useful as any necktie right about now.

She scoots out with me for a run. We just go to the back yard, where I can clock a mile in five laps of the property. No matter how many times I circle, she's given up within the first four. She'll sit in the middle of the grass and watch me circle.

I go off course long enough to let her back into the house, where she can keep pace with the ones logging on to their virtual classrooms.

With her humans always around, she has fewer places just to lay by herself, a pursuit she apparently had mastered during the day when we had gone to work.

Now she's always on the job.

The sunny spots are all occupied by others. And, more alarmingly, there are so many dis-embodied voices traveling through a seemingly endless number of different-sized screens, it's hard to know if there's a need to bark at an intruder or bark because they're just not petting her.

One dog barks in the background on Zoom, and the whole dilemma starts again. Did her people get another dog? Does it live in that metal clamshell thing they keep tap, tap, tapping on?

These are the questions I've imagined pulsing through her canine thoughts before she abandons them to bark at a squirrel that's brazen enough to scurry past the window.

The last remaining annoyance that hasn't turned itself inside out.

Her humans are all over the place when they haven't sequestered in their separate corners.

Doors slam. Voices get angry. They get sad. They go silent. But there is laughter, too. And it can be cleansing and healing as it rolls over all of the rough patches.

Like a hand, rubbing her belly or scratching behind her ears or whenever she wants.

Slow on the curves

"Let go," the teenager instructed as we rounded the corner.

For a moment, I didn't register that she was talking to me. Her eyes hadn't left the road as she steered the car along the winding country road.

Everything was going as smoothly as possible in our beat-up, old family station wagon. Her hands were firmly planted at "9 and 3"... a clock that had shifted an hour in the years since my parents had taught me.

And yet, one of my hands was gripping the seat while the other was curled painfully around that hinged handle on the roof of the car that seemingly has no other use than to appease a mother's inner panic.

"You are bracing. Again!"

I had to admit, seeing my hand gripping the odd suitcase handle above the door frame was a surprise.

Pandemic times notwithstanding, I had the sense I was finally getting a better handle on being chauffeured around the county by my newly permitted daughter than I used to.

She'd gone past the tricky intersection where local

tradition dictates that all drivers must stop except the ones turning left from the East.

"Why is that" she wondered.

And as per usual, I had many words but no solid answer. 

"Some places are just that way ... Take the traffic circle at the end of the road here for example. It's the only one I know of where the cars inside of the roundabout don't have the right of way. I think it has to do with the circle's proximity to the railroad crossing, and how no one wants there to be a backup that leaves a car waiting on train tracks. But who really knows?"

Of course, here in the car – the radio off for safety and concentration's sake – she has to heed my words, even when they don't seem to go anywhere.

More to the point, she has to admit when she doesn't understand something.

"I need you to talk me through this traffic circle coming up. Is that stop sign for me? Which is harder again, a left turn or a right?"

And who would have thought the tough part would be getting up to speed? Literally. Certainly not me.

She's even surprised herself. Gaining exponentially in skill and confidence in the few months she's been practicing. Navigating to school, and making her way smoothly through circles and spelling out Y turns in parking lots as if she'd been driving in cursive.

She's even agreed to practice operating the standard transmission sedan I insisted on buying as our new family vehicle, back when driving from one place to another seemed more necessary than just novel.

Even that learning curve is flattening out. 

As we drive around today, she even praises my almost impressive lack of parental flinch.

After all, it had been more than a few minutes since I'd given her any instruction, necessary or otherwise. We'd already covered which car had the right-of-way at any given intersection and why other parents giving their kids cars outright has absolutely no effect on me.

Yes, we've come to this cliff, and needless to say, we're not planning on jumping off of it.

Good eggs and ham

I hate my face. It looks like an egg. I hate the up-angled foreshortening and the extra skin apparent when I look down. 

When did that happen?

Maybe I should have applied something bronzing to counteract the pallor. Or at least fill in the tiny lines between my eyes that look so much deeper these days than just skin level. 

Or maybe dip myself in some colorful dye like we used to do with eggs before we'd scatter them around the house for the kids to find ... or not find as our noses would lead the detective work some weeks later. 

Even more so, perhaps, I hate the crackling, tinny sound of my voice as it completes its circuit through the air and into a microphone and back out of the speakers of the technical clamshell that's open on my bed.

I can think of another space that's as comfortable, or private, or lacking a buildup of clutter. 

But I miss the social part of keeping a physical distance. And apparently, I miss it enough to brave all vanity and meet friends and family in the only room that can hold us all - a video chat room.

But here we are ... some of us sitting at our dining room tables; others sitting at our home office desks; and me, leaning up against an armchair pillow, trying to stay within a shadow.

We are talking about, of all things, how to celebrate Easter with our close family. 

And while I marvel at the age we live in where those among us with means and privilege can stay virtually connected while remaining -- for the most part -- isolated, I must also wonder how we will square ourselves with the reality that seems now, and for the foreseeable future, we are to remain distant relatives. 

We are long past the phase when we'd gather in the village square to meet a six-foot-tall Easter rabbit, who would lead a hundred teacup-sized neighbors in the annual hunt for candy-filled eggs. 

These past years the bunny tosses a few bags of jelly beans and rice-crisp eggs into a tote bag and hangs it from the knobs of their bedroom doors.

This year the bunny had to scramble at the last minute but had an anxiety attack at the grocery store and a moment of clarity. Hanging from the doorknob will be boxes of cereal and hand soaps that look like rocks. 

Must remind them the faux stones are not candy; and hot dogs, this year, we'll call ham.

Perhaps it will come up at dinner when we serve up this new tradition - of mystery meat via video chat. 

I can picture it now: we'll toast each other while reminding my dad to keep to some semblance of social distancing in front of the camera, so the rest of us can see more than his nose and forehead.

It will be horrible and wonderful, and everything we'd never imagined all wrapped up in one.

And maybe, if we're lucky, the bunny will find TP for our Easter Baskets.

Blessings and curses

It's noon on a weekday, and my husband and I glare at each other from our anchored locations on opposite couches.

He has the remote control and is binge-watching the kind of junk television that doesn't even whet my appetite.

It's one of the eleventy-billion made-for-streaming sci-fI crime romance comedies that is trying to stop the end of the world by reversing some ionic polarization in the molecular cortex.

Apparently, it's very popular.

I'm trying to read. But I can't get my mind to focus on any of the words' meanings as my eyes scan the typeface. I just hold the book and turn pages. They feel pulpy and rough to my hands, which are just as pulpy and rough from all the washing. I can't process any more things that seem new.

At least until I feel like I am winning the war against touching my face. Sure, I've advanced ground on that front, but I don't want to be smug. One sense of an itch in a moment of absent abandon could destroy all the urges I've repressed.

The kids are upstairs, in their separate rooms, doing schoolwork.

They aren't fighting as much, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Battling over the little things - like how long Tweedle Dee is taking in the bathroom or why did I let Tweedle Dum eat the last slice of toast - is what makes a family feel normal.

Having a kid wait patiently in the hallway as his older sibling hogs all the hot water is something no parent is entirely ready to accept as anything but an altered reality.

The saddest part is that it only took a pandemic and the fear of shared surfaces and soggy towels that have them agreeing to use the kids' bathroom instead of the master.

I don't care what we've all said in the past. We may want our New Normal to be brimming with kindness and human decency, but we have to be ready for the desperation, too.

We are distancing ourselves, too.

Six feet is an ominous length for the space between us.

It's hard to admit how lucky we are in this suspended unknown. We have a house and a sanitized digital tether to the outside.

Though I worry a certain Big-cat collectors' crime documentary making the rounds is just another insidious pathogen, we didn't do enough to protect ourselves against.

My husband puts a drink on the table in front of me. It's sweet and weak, just the way I like them.

He searches the channels for a comedy. The kids appear from their rooms and settle in to watch comic actresses disassembling a male-centered spy-motif.

There is much laughter.

And then we'll watch guinea pigs save the world.

Why not?

Soon it will be midnight of that same weekday. The kids will be in bed; maybe they will be asleep when I crack open their doors to peek in.

But I won't chastise if I find their faces lit by the blueish glow of a computer screen. Nor will I call attention to any better use of time. I will let them wake when they want and work through it at their own pace.

This may be the new normal. But it assumes none of this is normal yet.