Some Thursday in Spring

I stepped on the foot lever, and the lid of the kitchen garbage can sprang open. 

As if it were a gaping, unwashed mouth, a waft of sweet rot launched into the air. I squinted and turned my head despite being grateful for the reminder I still have a sense of smell. 

That's when I saw it.

The dish was nestled on top of a compacted pile of refuse and a brown speckled banana peel. It was in two pieces.

Probably the boy. He's growing so fast he can't calculate the amount of leeway he needs for his limbs when turning. I don't wonder why he didn't tell me.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It was one of the good plates: a handmade piece of art, collected over the course of this pandemic from a roadside vendor. 

A not-so-guilty fair-weather pleasure, I'd stop by the pottery cart every Thursday to inspect the wares. 

The potter was always putting out new crockery fresh from the kiln.

Maybe there would be gemstone-colored cups with wonky handles. Or platters with squiggly edges and round, cartoonish feet. I remember how my heart raced when I found a scarified white ramen bowl with an outer rim of bubbly brown. It reminded me of the marshmallows my kids had learned to caramelize to perfection after a summer spent almost entirely in our backyard.

I'd fold a bit of cash and tuck it into the honor box, cradling my choice like a trophy. By the time the stand sat down for winter, I'd collected a whole set of mismatched pieces. 

The prize I'd chosen that last day was going to drive me crazy, but I didn't care. I smiled at the little splotches of orange paint speckling the smoothly curved center of the bowl I held in my hand. It was just the right amount of pigment to make it appear as if the dishwasher had missed some of the saucy spots.

It occurs to me now - as I wait for a rodent to usher in our countdown to spring - that this chaos of tableware I've collected is liberating.

It's changed all the rules.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If one of these speckled egg designs cracks under the pressure of the piling plates or succumbs in any way to the machinations of a low performing kitchen appliance (that's best trick seems to be making the dishes get dirtier with washing) I will neither mourn its loss nor harbor resentment for the imperfection.

Or maybe I'll ignore the spots altogether. I won't even look, I'll just put the dishes away, telling myself I'll worry about them if and when we ever go back to entertaining guests.

Perhaps I'll run the dishwasher twice.

And as for this dish remnant I found in the trash? I have no heartbreak left for it. I'll just bid these shards farewell, and think about welcoming a new one, some Thursday in spring.

(s)Mitten

The living room was teeming with activity. 

We had come in from the cold and a somewhat impromptu inaugural party in the driveway complete with cake and the ritual mulching of Christmas trees. The mood was joyful as we warmed up by the light of a live television broadcast, and despite the chaos of competing sounds we were united as a family.

The husband was playing Risk quietly, not even shushing the room to hear the television; the daughter was riding imaginary waves on a balance board, clunking the plywood oval to the carpeted floor every so often; the son was adjusting the laces of new shoes, testing the tension and its relation to the hardwood-drag squeak. 

And I was giggling as I sat in my usual chair, virtually road-tripping with friends: 

Quick, what's your street address? I typed furiously into my phone. I hit Send without proofreading.

"Quik, Whot ist yur st aDdresS?"

A few dots later, a bubble appeared with the coordinates and a question mark.

"Good thing I am fluent in typo. ..."

I just giggled with the furious abandon of a squirrel with too many nuts and kept typing. Seconds later I sent my friend a screenshot of her Google Street Map address with Bernie Sanders sitting on a folding chair next to her mailbox.

More giggling as I typed in every address I could remember off-hand. More emailing off the hilarious results. 

It was delightful, casting myself (and all of my friends) into this magic of technology. 

And as it was nearing midnight on the first official day of a new administration, and I was finding that after taking a collective inhalation of relief, it seemed somewhat fitting that our first act of unity seemed to be dunking on the curmudgeonly senior senator from the Green Mountain state. 

There was something comforting about this moment, as the casually-dressed senator, his hands crossed and bundled in a pair of chunky mittens (handmade by a constituent of his in Essex Junction) started popping up in the strangest of places. 

Suddenly, Bernie was everywhere: He was riding The New York City Subway, sitting in art galleries, and even plunked down in the center of paintings. His likeness made its way to the landscapes of video games and television series. This new meme was pasted into old memes and added to map generators. 

It was nothing, but right now, at this moment, it was everything.

It occurred to me that this was the unity I hadn't expected. One that didn't rely on forgiveness or finger-pointing. 

Something silly and distracting as we gear up for the hard work ahead.

In so many unbelievable ways, this was the so-called 吐uture Democrats want.A future that includes recovery and revelry.

And one where the invective we've seen emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers for four long years start to sputter and fizzle out. 

We all know this winter will be harsh and unrelenting. But it just feels good right now to have Bernie and his mittens showing us how to dress for the storm.

A tale of two Houses

Our house overwhelms me at times, especially now during this pandemic. None of it seems new: My homebound kids still use every dish in the kitchen and toss into the hamper every stitch of clothing that's only momentarily touched their bodies. But the volume has definitely risen.

Their father, trying to be helpful recently, thanked me profusely in their presence, gushing with bravado about how I had wrestled more than my fair share of laundry and dishes from their precarious piles to some orderly assembly.

A well-meant, but still theatrical ingratiation meant to model thankfulness and reduce his guilty conscience for leaving me to figure out how to work such a miracle, especially now that the mechanical devices we normally employ both unceremoniously tendered their resignations on the morrow of their warranties' demise. 

I have to remind myself to take deep breaths. 

Guilt is a slippery emotion. I can see it in my daughter's eyes as she asks me a technical question about the task at hand, followed by an assertion that she intends to use this information to unburden me.

A few hours later, the promise unfulfilled, she looks at me in anger when I muse aloud about lip service.

She apologizes and is quickly forgiven. It's not fatal. 

Not like a different kind of lip-service is coming out of our other House.

The House of Representatives on Tuesday backed a resolution urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove President Donald Trump from office after he urged on a crowd of supporters to storm the Capitol building on January 6th and interfere with the ceremonial vote court that officially acknowledges Joe Biden as president-elect.

Pence rejected the call.

Rep. Elise Stefanik voted against the resolution, and then remarkably, calling for the sides to "unify."

“We must work together to unify at this challenging time for the American people," she said. "This political resolution sets a very dangerous Constitutional precedent and further divides our country. I believe we should focus on ensuring a safe transfer of power on January 20."

Stefanik was among the Republicans who, based on cherry-picked sentiment and no evidence, voted to challenge some states' electors after the presidential election. She sought to stop a mostly proforma vote count in Congress, presumably to appease Trump and the seditious mob that his party spent years priming. 

She continued to side with Trump's lies when Congress reconvened after the siege to complete their work of naming a successor to the defeated Trump.

But Stefanik is not asking for unity, she's demanding capitulation.

The peaceful transfer of power requires more than a hollow call for playing nice. It requires her and her cohorts to acknowledge the damage these lies - the ones she continues to peddle - have done to democracy and that continue to upend the peace. She must make amends.

Each day since she's could join with a bipartisan group of lawmakers to calm the madness. But it requires her to admit her actions were wrong and destructive. She must renounce them.

Rep. Elise Stefanik is on the wrong side of history. She is pushing a troubling agenda fueled by lies and divisiveness. And each day, in fact, each hour, as we learn more facts surrounding the insurrection in the nation's Capitol, we feel even more uncertain about the ground shift beneath us because these new revelations only hint at the bigger story unfolding.

There is no peace without justice, there is no justice without truth, and there will be no unity without an effort to repair the faith that is broken. 

Anything else is just lip service in support of a lie. 

Magic words

"Alexa, show me something that's funny."

My husband's jaw drops as he sits motionless to my left. For the past 45 minutes, we’ve been in a silent struggle, each of us determined NOT to be the deciding voice in the entertainment-viewing event of the evening.

Both of us … just sitting on the couch, scrolling through the doom of our phones and intermittently asking each other to choose something neither of us will hate.

It’s a tall order.

"That's not how it works. You have to give more information."

I don't care to give her more information than I suspect she's already gleaned from our random conversations around any one of our houseful of electronic devices.

Having the Amazon-employed personal liaison for television selection and viewing purposes - not to mention the stealth marketing prompts - certainly wasn't my idea. 

I mean I had JUST (and I mean within the span of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas) learned how to work the two remote controls that operate the television, toggling between HTM1 and HTM2 like an expert, despite having no idea what any of those combinations of letters and numbers actually mean.

A third remote to juggle has thrown me into a crisis; not the least of which is because we now have an invisible woman in our house who is always listening and, it seems, taking notes. 

And yet I find the creepiest part to be that my husband seems to know exactly how to talk to her. As if she might be the rational, uncomplicated, honey-voiced woman of his dreams.

"You have to be more specific," he instructs. "Say, 'Alexa, show me Casey Affleck movies'." 

How about this: "Alexa, if you show me any more Oceans sequel I will remove the inner parts of your machine and replace them with other parts."

“That seems a tad aggressive.”

He’s right. I’m twisted so tightly around a maelstrom of thoughts in my head it might slingshot into the abyss if I were made of cartoon. But it’s altogether possible that choosing between The British Baking Show or The Grand Tour could be the end of life as we know it.

Months of staring into the void, bombarded by one inconceivable thing after another, I just want to detach. Float off into a warm cloud from the natural world and not the one that may (or may not) contain all the digital fragments of my life.

After all, I've entrusted robots to know the passwords I can't remember.

It’s just television, tell myself and Alexa (because I probably said it aloud).

I push aside any thoughts a Stepford Wife might harbor. After all, I had been using a technique I'd learned from the stereotypic "menfolk." And that was to essentially fail my way through a simple task to practically ensure that anyone else in the house (I don't care if it's a dog intent on tearing the thing to pieces) would snatch the remote away from me and just pick a show already. 

Which, after saying the magic words: "Alexa, Find Caillou!" He was suddenly happy to do. 

Prescriptive glasses

Just before the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve, I raise my glass to the television screen and say a silent prayer. 

Familiar words fall into place as they reluctantly release from my dusty memory and slide through inaudible whispers under my breath. 

"Our Father who art in heaven ... Hail Mary, full of grace ... Hallowed be thy names."

It's been a while. 

I know the passages don't belong together, but their lofty sounds have the same effect on me as releasing a deep breath or knocking on wood. 

A momentary solace courtesy of superstition and parochial school. 

I make the sign of the cross and drain my glass of its effervescent contents. I thumb through a notebook I started keeping in March. 

The pad is filled with doodles that don't make much sense. They begin In the center of the page with the date and they feather out to each edge like a meandering, fine-line tattoo.

It looks like atonal music sounds. 

A cute and fuzzy bunny with razor-sharp teeth and a doctor's bag sits frozen in a portrait-style pose. The entire scene is encased in an ornate frame. A nameplate says, Alvarez.

I don't remember drawing this. Nor do I remember the squiggly boy on the next page, who has a thick mop of thatch-stroked hair and a contour-lined mask stretched over his face.

The upside being I didn't have to draw the features I tend to struggle with: noses pointed at awkward angles and mouths that look like mistakes. 

Honestly, I don't know what to hope for as 2020 moves into hindsight. Surely it won't soon be forgotten. 

Every year offers up the double edge of hope and hardship. It often seems as if the most skilled are the only ones capable of slicing the cork and partaking in something sparkling and drinkable. 

If we're lucky our glasses will be perpetually half full. If we are lucky we will enjoy every ounce we are afforded. Even if it tastes bitter.

The horrors we suffered may be as indelible as the blessings bestowed, which, if we are being honest, we have individually accounted for with Scrooge-like scrutiny. 

The list,  an inverted Christmas tree, balanced on the thinnest point. 

We tell ourselves we have to move forward because time doesn't have Hollywood's brand of special effects. But the only thing we can do for the time being is to stand here, and try to keep our trees from toppling.

This season ... like the last season and the one before that ... will come to an end. 

Some of our prayers will be answered, though not necessarily to our liking. Some of our wishes will be granted with a similar effect. 

Still, for one night only, we'll put on our 2021 bedazzled spectacles (they're prescription so long as you count self-medicating with impulse purchases at the self-checkout kiosk of a local commercial pharmacy). 

In another year's time will refill our glasses (and our prescription for dated spectacles) when we celebrate again.