TOUCH

The lucky ones live on the first floor. Down there at ground level, where the evidence of an impending bloom disturbs the winter worn soil of the flower beds under their windows. Their bodies are worn out and their souls are weary, but still they soldier on! For some of them, their brains have taken a left turn and they can’t seem to find their way home. Under the best of circumstances their lives are a daily struggle. 

There’s comfort in routine; sleep when it’s dark, dress when its light, eat when you’re fed. Their homes are in the past; their living room sets and their recipes and their shelves full of books. Decades of rich thick lives reduced to this: a single bed, perhaps an easy chair and a familiar quilt. And planted atop a single small dresser are silver framed photographs. I look around me now, here on the threshold of my own exit, and find comfort in the hope that, while I may lose all this “stuff” that swirls around me, what they cannot take away, when I am old, are the people I love.

In my almost weekly troubadour travels to retirement centers and nursing homes, I’ve repeatedly seen this scene unfold: We are singing songs of the past, and we are connected, happily reminiscing. But if someone comes to visit one of them, nothing else matters. The world around them melts away and the music stops and every molecule of their fragile being is magnetized to their visitor. Like a cotton dishcloth swept against a spill, they absorb the love that comes to visit, sucking it in with bright affection, looking around to see if everyone else notices that someone they love came to see THEM, and no one else. 

At the end of every gig, when the people I am singing to are healthy, I tuck my guitar into its case and one by one touch the skin of every person there. There is incredible power in touch, a magnetic force that awakens sleepy corners of our spirits. We need to touch. We crave connection, even if we are shy or introverted or scared. Tender touch, like oxygen breathed into yearning lungs.

So, when this wicked Coronavirus reared its head last month, sneaking across the ocean like the foggy Angel of Death that floated into households in the Ten Commandments movie, we took heed to protect our ancient treasures. Since the elderly are the most vulnerable, we decided we need to tuck them away. Like grandmother’s silverware, locked into a wooden box. All for love.

Her children come to see her through the window in her first-floor room, standing in their coats and gloves out in the cold. They unfold their lawn chairs and dial their phones, staring past their own reflections into their mother’s eyes. She raises her wrinkled hand to the window, pressing the palm flat on the glassy surface. Her daughter’s hand does the same, then her son, and her grandchildren try to sing as loud as they can, but the glass will not let it in loud enough for her murky ears to hear them. It helps, sure it helps, to try. It helps a lot. But still, when so much has been taken away, bit by bit at first, then in one fell swoop, it seems so unkind to rob them also of the one thing they could still afford to keep: touch.

Like the vaccination that makes the baby cry, we understand the why. But we hate the how. So, we pray, from our far-off places on the other side of the bedroom door and the hard glass window pane, that she will survive this, that she will sleep soundly until that day when she can once again press her heart against ours.

IS IT NAP TIME YET?

It was 3 pm, on a typical Wednesday during a worldwide pandemic. After a grueling day of self isolating, under the drone of the heating vent whispering sweet nothings into the still of the day, my regular episode of Lazy-Eyelids began to fall upon me. I should add here that I have had this afternoon ailment all of my adult life, pandemic or not. Right before the kids got home from school I was ready for a nap. Just about the same time I had to drive them to their various extra-curricular activities. I carry roughly 35 “stay awake while driving” pounds on me. That’s why you’ll always find some sort of chewables in the console of my car.

But I digress.

Today, at 3:07, to be exact, I forced my lazy bones up out of my chair to answer the door. This is what I found on the porch:

My friend and one of my Girls with Guitars students, Al Morgan, had sent this text:

Al and her husband are owners of a number of FIIZ businesses here in Utah. She’s also a nurse. And a mom. And a snowboarding instructor. Obviously, Al has lots of time on her hands, because she has nothing else to do. (insert sarcasm emoji here) So she brings FIIZ sodas around to sleepy sluggish shut-in’s.

Coke. Straight up. None of the other doo dads added in. With a nice scoop of that crunchy ice.

Woke me right up.

Thanks, Al.

My first Fiiz. Hand delivered.
(oh, what a relief it is)

When they let me loose and I'm out performing my normal avoidance behaviors, where do you think I might stop for a drink?

AIR

When a warm wind rolls up from the south it wraps itself around the American flag planted in our front yard. If the hard water of our sprinklers has not completely darkened the spotlight in the flower bed at the bottom of our flagpole, the flag dances in the light. The ribbons of white and red ebb and flow through the darkness. If we are driving home at night, we nearly always comment as we turn into the culdesac: “Oh my, isn’t that just so lovely?” We pause up there, before we roll down into our driveway, and gaze for half a human second. There is just something majestic about that flag. The direction of the stripes was made for active mountain air.

I’ve been pondering the value of air the last few days. It’s warming up now, in this mid-March thaw, and the crocuses have pushed through the winter-worn soil. Today I saw hyacinths pregnant with color, ready to burst. I leave the window next to my side of the bed cracked open all winter long, unless the temperatures dip below zero. It’s been a long held belief that fresh air is medicinal. I’d rather fall off to sleep snuggled under a down comforter with a chlly little nip at my nose than be tucked into a toaster oven with the heating vent blowing in my face. The only thing that makes me occasionally want to close that window is a strong burst of seasonal pollen.

My friend Annick tells me her mom never made up their beds in the morning. Instead, her Swedish mother came in and flung the bedcovers off the sheets, opened the windows and let the linens air out for an hour. She then returned and made up the beds and closed the windows.

I recall the clotheslines of my childhood, some of them strung between two sturdy metal T shaped poles, some of them looped like an inverted umbrella set atop a single pole. Soft cotton towels whipped in the fresh Idaho wind. Sheets and pillows and soft white diapers danced like our front yard flag does now. I don’t recall the basket of clothes brought in from the line smelling that good when we moved to Pittsburgh, but that was in the era of belching steel mills. Our mom learned to use the electric dryer in Pittsburgh. Now we use fabric softening sheets in the dryer to try to imitate what God put naturally in his recipe for air.

We are steadily swirling into the whirlpool of this pandemic of Coronavirus right now in America. My sister Sue texted this afternoon that they have been ordered to shelter in place where she lives in the San Francisco Bay area of California. Shelter at home, except only in emergencies, until April 7^that the earliest. That’s 3 weeks from now. Canada has closed its borders to all except US citizens, who are exempt for the moment. Our daughter Kate lives in upstate New York but is earning her doctorate degree at Brock University in Canada. She crosses the Canadian border every day. They have closed the doors of the university. But school goes on via technology. Kate has to do a presentation tomorrow, using Facetime. Then she will close up her house and hop on a plane in Buffalo because the buzz in the air is that there will be a national travel ban, and New York is just plain too far from her support network. It’s a curious thing to me to think of Kate coming home to us, sitting in a chair up there in the air.

She is coming more for us than for herself. If this goes on and on, then I need to know she has people who love her close by. I’m praying they do not ground airplanes before she gets here.

Restaurants are being ordered closed. Stores are limiting their hours. The stock market is plummeting. All the public schools in Utah have been ordered closed by the Governor. Calvin, Beth and Tess spent the day here with me while Annie and Jordon worked. We are all trying to process what is happening. It is a strange and disturbing time. We do not personally see the sickness yet, but we hear it is coming. The big unknown lays before us like a velvety black curtain. We sit here watching, waiting for it to open and reveal the stage.

Meanwhile, I still open my window and welcome the air. I breathe it deeply, when I think of it, demanding my lungs practice the routine, imagining how this respiratory illness might challenge me if it found me. I open my window and let the fresh pre-spring air come in with its army of angels. I whisper a prayer with the opening, praying for health for me and mine, but praying also for strength to endure and triumph regardless of what the wind blows our way.