Labor cost management

 The hollowed-out pumpkins on our side porch turned from plump grinning orbs to melted, mold speckled blobs that even the squirrels stopped gnawing.

For a month we passed them, my husband and I, each of us considering who would finally put their squashed carcasses to rest on the compost pile and when.

I, of course, was holding out hope for him.

Rationalizing that since I'd already put away all the other decorations, the least he could do was shovel the last of the Halloween gore off the steps.

He has all the shovels ... somewhere. 

This isn't the first year the great pumpkin stand-off has happened. The neighbors make a joke of it when I finally break down and use my triple bag dog-poo collection technique on the pumpkin matter one evening just before dark.

I laugh, despite myself. 

My angst has nothing to do with keeping up with the Joneses. 

Their porch has long ago been swept of frightful things. It's just the solitary work of such disappearances that makes me dig into The Contract.

Where is it written that his once-in-a-while tasks earn more credit?

The special things ... the snaking of a drain, the patching of walls, the caretaking of a pool counts more than the endless piles of laundry, and dishes, and dust bunnies.

Of course, his artfully made fence and his painstaking patio will earn him praise and adulation. It puffs him up.

While I deflate a little more each time someone registers a complaint with the missing sweatshirts department: "Did you check the laundry? Pretty sure it's in the dryer as we speak."

Not a lot of glory in folding socks, but here we are. Calculating value based on the complexities of unpaid labor. Accepting only gen-u-ine gratitude as currency. 

The cycle continues through winter and the holidays pile on.

The tree will be here soon. 

We will take a night to bedazzle it with selections from the glitter-encrusted collection of the family history museum, which lives mostly uncategorized in a series of boxes stashed in an attic over the garage. 

In the course of an hour, the thing will seem like an old family member come to visit. Even its shape will be familiar: compact and trim, but not too tall. 

For that golden hour, the family will be together without much distraction. We won't bicker about which movie will play on in the background (tradition calls for Elf).

Our own workshop will be abuzz with light strand lassoing, ornament installation, and model train engineering. The only snipping we experience will produce paper snowflakes. 

We won't even argue our petty grievances until it's time to place the star at the top of the tree.

Three rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and it's decided. 

By the time the children dare nestled all snug in their beds, the room will be festooned.

And if there is any question of who will put away all this holiday joy ... I'm seriously thinking of just leaving it up until next year. 

Family movie night

My son just got braces. The top ones right now, but more will follow. They really do look like tiny train tracks wrapping around teeth.

I don't tell him, I think so.

Something about them has made me see him entirely differently. He's not a baby anymore. 

I don't mention that either, though I think it every time he asks if he can eat something. Not that he cares much about my approval or whether his sister called "dibs," he's concerned about any contraindications with his new appliances.

When maturity hits fast, it hits hard. 

He was just in the living room. Not quite sitting on the edge of the couch. Perching more like. Ready to fly.

He looks so much like a distant cousin of that little string-bean boy who used to swoop around this very room, fanning the air with the pleather-y wings of a homemade bat costume while his too-large, star-badged sneakers slapped the floor with an odd little echo.

But this boy child has filled out and finally grown into his shoes. The echo now sounds like an earthquake.

The television was on, and things on its screen were exploding in slow motion. A woman in a short skirt and form-fitting armor jetted through the sky, straight upwards.

There was no trace of an invisible plane.

He jumped from the couch toward the ceiling, swinging a foam sword from an entirely separate franchise. His unbridled enthusiasm betrayed his deepening voice-over Wonder Woman and her value in the pantheon of Super-Heroes.

To watch him watch her, you'd get the idea they were somehow in this together.

He landed with a thud on the pale green rug in the center of our triumvirate of couches just as the Diana's broad blade, glinting emerald, bloodlessly vanquished their enemy.

The screen turned dark and momentarily silent.

He crowed his approval with a din of whoops and hollers that could raise the ceiling and a father's left eyebrow.

The one that he uses for joking.

Good had prevailed, and only the long shadow of Hollywood would leave us in this interminable pause, unable to believe what we've just witnessed.

Roll. Credits.

I drag my heels back from the place on the sofa where they've entwined with a throw blanket, one of many still being used as capes, or cloaks, or Skold Saueskinns, or what-have-you.

It makes a sound like the scratch of a record player's needle being pulled back on vinyl by an imaginary DJ, only softer. I do it again to make sure. 

My son takes the blanket I've tossed aside and drapes it over his head. In the folding, he's made a hooded, plushy cape that dusts the floor as he goes about baking freezer-section apple turnovers.

He makes a pastry for himself and one for his sister, delivering hers upstairs when it's ready. 

He returns and eats his light and flaky triangle of apple pie filling with a fork.

And when he brushes his teeth afterward, it will be the fifth and final time of the day.

His sister counted. She couldn't believe it either.

Q non-anon

We have been quarantined.

Officially.

Well, one of us has, anyway.

The one who is currently stationed in his room, playing video games and texting his mother every so often to request snacks be placed outside of his doorway. The other three-quarters of the inhabitants here are just sitting around in various television-appointed rooms, wearing masks and fighting each other on the sets' warring volumes as we consume re-runs of shows no 13-year-old would ever want to watch.

Because that would be mean if somehow the nasal, deadpan voice of Bob Belcher wafted up through the floors, and that would be cruel. The possibility exists (though remote) that the maniacal laughter of any one of the cartoon Belchers could pierce some momentary silence in his never-ending game of Minecraft and cause a revolt.

 

So we'll watch "Murder She Wrote" or some old movies from the 70s ... but not the ones where Rebel forces take on the Empire.

You know, just in case.

Because while he is sequestered in his little corner of the house, we three are allowed out into the world, where we are still limiting our interactions with other humans, keeping our distance and trying not to breathe in or out even with three layers of fabric stretched ear-to-ear.

It's a complicated equation, but it was spelled out quite calmly and compassionately by a lovely woman from the local Department of Health. 

It all boils down to which of us are contacts of a positive, and which of us are contacts of the contact of the positive, not to mention which entities of civil society have determined what their policies will be moving forward into the unknown.

There's even a whole dance about who should get tested and when. You know, since test kits are still scarce. 

Asymptomatic? Maybe you'll find out you have the virus. Maybe you won't find out you have the virus. Maybe you won't have the virus?

The order of operations isn't as important as the fact that it's out there continually breeding.

Every day in the past seven months is a new adventure in not knowing but taking as few chances as possible. 

Either way, you'll need to follow the simple instructions of mask-wearing, limiting time indoors with people outside your so-called bubble, and keeping even small gatherings properly masked, socially distanced, and entirely outdoors.

None of which is 100 percent effective, evidently.

After all, running around the neighborhood, wearing two masks each with your two best buds, staying outside as you collect candy from the end of driveways seemed to be at the lowest end of the risk scale.

Especially for a kid who has barely left the house since April. 

Did we really need to let the kid leave the chair in front of the video game console - a piece of furniture he's virtually lived in for seven months - to go and do what, in any other time in history (barring 1918, of course) would be a harmless kid-thing to do?

But here we are checking temperatures obsessively, waiting for a list of vague symptoms to appear, and hoping we get to Sunday without any of them visiting. 

Who knew we could liven things up by taking a trip to a drive-in testing site to get an answer one way or another? Even with the uncomfortable swab, the kid decided it was worth it if only to leave his room for the better part of 20 minutes.

Another Whopper while we wait

This Halloween came and went with a grand total of seven properly masked and socially distant trick-or-treaters. 

They dropped by one at a time throughout the night and waited at the bottom of our front porch steps as I sent fist-fulls of miniature candy bars down a 12-foot long chute.

When you live in a small town … in a house with a long driveway … the lack of costumed revelers doesn't seem especially novel for circumstances. But rigging up new technology for the conveyance of complementary confections was a welcome distraction.

Of course, as usual, I'd bought too much candy.

I'd mindlessly drop a package into the shopping cart here and there for weeks beforehand. Stashing them all over the house.

And for weeks, I had been dipping into the bags I'd hidden from the kids as I waited for my morning coffee to brew or as I tidied the kitchen or flitted through the house doing other chores. I'd even carefully hidden the wrappers at the bottom of the trashcan where no one would ever paw through and be the wiser.

Not that the children would care. They prefer the sugar-coated rubber products that make your mouth turn inside itself from the sourness. 

I'd bought the large hybrid bags with nuts and nougat and new formulations of old favorites expressly because they were nobody's favorites, and hidden them away to make doubly sure the candy wouldn't magically disappear during the new hybrid school days. 

And now ... as Election Day came and went, and with it the realization that an immediate tidal wave of repudiation would not wash this president out to sea. But as vote counts started to show a fuller picture as the week wore on, I understood the real horror of my situation.

No one was eating ALL THIS CANDY except for me.

Every time I walked past the bowl, I'd swipe a Snickers or a 100 Grand or four. I'd leave the Whoppers and the Butterfingers for dead. Of course, I'd wait until no one was watching, then I'd pop an entire unwrapped miniature bar into my mouth, dispensing entirely with the decorum of dispatching a confection with multiple and delicate bites.

As I watched the news breathlessly announce nothing with verifiable facts, I mindlessly crammed one sweet after another into my anxious mouth.

Had it not been the nuts cemented together by nougat, I might not have bothered to chew. And there is very little hyperbole in the idea that by the announcement of a winner, I will have eaten the same approximate weight in candy as the largest of our two cats.

It occurs to me as the week wears on, and I sift through what remains of Halloween's spoils, finding my favorites have grown scarce, that we're all just waiting to see if the winner of the election will actually win the election.

And yet nothing I do from now the bowl is empty will stop me from devouring each and every individually-wrapped candy, no matter how repellant.

"I mean … really … who would buy all these WHOPPERS if they weren't mixed in with the Almond Joys?"

A moment to savor

"So … do we have to vote for the local races at our usual polling place on November 3?"

My husband is trying to wrap his head around the nuances of early voting as I follow Google Maps to the address of the only early voting location in the county. 

"No. It's just the same as voting at the church. They will give us our local ballot."

When we arrive, the line snaked around the corner and down the block.

For a moment, as we slowed to search for a parking space, I considered turning around and going home.

"There's still time," the lethargic voice in my head whispered. "We could come back tomorrow … or the next day … or the day after that."

But the Panic voice had been cutting into my thoughts all day: "What if we miss Election Day? What if we get locked down and lose our opportunity to vote?"

"They'd never do that," contended my husband. "They'd wait until the elections were over to impose another shelter in place order."

My Panic voice wasn't talking about a blanketed end to voting; it was personal.

"I mean, what if WE have to quarantine? Our school closed this week because of one case, and authorities are still tracing those contacts. Will election officials give Absentee Ballots to the people county health places into isolation now that it's past the deadline?"

Pragmatic voice might have chimed in to say that Emergency Ballots exist for just such occasions, but Panic voice couldn't stop circling the brain.

Panic voice doesn't have an ounce of Pragmatic voice's patience. Not that one could blame her, especially now that it seems Pragmatic Voice has been wrong about so much lately.

Instead, I slid into the nearest empty spot and parked. My Voice of Reason was nothing but reassuring as I stepped away from the car and started walking. "If you go home now, you'll just have a line of dirty dishes cluttering the counter."

The night was clear and temperate. A slight breeze met us as we arrived at the end of the queue; the wait was about two persons wide and more than a hundred deep as we stood, wearing masks, at twice our arms-length apart from the next carload of voters.

I tried to estimate time by dividing the distance we moved across sidewalk slabs by the number of people head of us.

We were quieter than usual. Both of us are trying to avoid speaking about the news and its hourly astonishments just in case a poll watcher might overhear and mistake the conversation as campaigning.

Instead, we played Name That Building (wrong answers only) and What's For Dinner (alternatively known as What Restaurants Are Open On Wednesdays)? We marveled at the city's lighting theatrics against the night sky. 

When we realized the lady with a badge was waving us through the glass doors and into the final stretch, it was tempting to turn to the people behind us and tell them to go on ahead.

As if they had a handful of items while we were in the process of buying everything in the store.

At this moment, it didn't seem like a chore as much as a moment to savor. 

They ask my name and find me on the tablet. I sign my name with all the precision an electric pen will allow. A ticket appears, and then a ballot slides out of a printer. I darken four circles with a fine-tipped felt pen, and, when I am ready, a man points me toward the scanner. I feed my ballot to the machine and wait until the screen blinks. SUCCESS!

I am back outside before I know what's happened.

But it's just me and the lady who had been behind me in line. 

Our husbands are still inside.

We laugh at the coincidence.

"Something tells me they are reading the directions on this one."