we remember moments

The days, at last, are lengthening.  When I step outside for the sunrise now it’s both earlier and noisier.  The birds, including a few hardy robins and bluebirds, are back and they are busy calling spring into being.  We’re a long way from thawed earth and green shoots in New Hampshire, but after a winter we’ll remember more for ice than snow, the soft, verdant world will come round again.  I’ve ordered seeds.   And yesterday I snipped a few leggy pussy willows from the suddenly abundant bush in our swampy north field.  There’s something fresh and hopeful in the air.

It’s been nearly two years since our world went into lockdown.  Just typing those words gives me pause.  Can that be right?  Has it really been only two years? In many ways those innocent “before” times feel like another life altogether, busy and distant, an existence I naively took for granted — right up until the moment every store in town went dark, every plan large and small was canceled, and people began anxiously tracking Covid numbers the way we follow winter storms and wild fires.

Maybe the epidemiologists could see the writing on the wall back in March of 2020. But as we all embarked on our vast, unprecedented indoor vigil no one else had any idea how much devastation was in store. How could we have  begun to imagine such heartbreak, illness, outrage, confusion, disinformation, worry, fear, and loneliness?  Not to mention death.  We can turn away from the still-rising tally (936,000 as of today) but not from the ripples of so much heartache. Grief has become the silent undercurrent of our days, a collective, relentless, unassailable tide of loss.

As this unsettling spring arrives, it seems that nearly every conversation I have with friends is limned by both gratitude for what remains and for lessons learned, mourning for all that is no more, and uncertainty about what may yet be around the corner. We’re so ready for Covid to be over. But no one’s under any illusion that Covid is done with us. The mask mandates may be disappearing, but we are not the same people we once were, nor are our lives really going back to “normal,” whatever normal was.

And yet, if we’re lucky our lives are ongoing.  And if we’re wise, we will proceed now not with abandon but with some workable combination of hope, compassion, and caution. Therein lies both the gift of this precarious time and its challenge.  Never have I been more aware of how fragile life is.  Never have I been more attuned to its beauty and wonder, either. And never have I felt such an urgent call to pay attention to what matters.

It is, I think, this desire to be awake to the shifting subtleties of life and conscious of its brevity that is helping me envision my own way forward, forward through my sixties and into years I’m determined to embrace but that will surely be defined by even more challenges — losses both anticipated and completely unforeseeable.

Do you know the famous line from the movie August: Osage County, “Thank God we can’t tell the future, we’d never get out of bed”?  We laugh because it’s true, and yet get up we do, every single day, because the world in all its mystery and splendor awaits.

I get out of bed for the first cup of hot coffee in the morning. And for the Wordle text thread spanning three generations – my mom, my brother and me, my son Henry — which often begins before 5 a.m. with results from whoever couldn’t sleep last night. I get out of bed to greet the sun as it silently slips into view above the mountains, to see the red squirrel on his perch on the stone wall, the dawn light splashing across the floorboards, the goldfinches and woodpeckers at the feeders, my husband reading the newspaper at the table, the new day getting itself underway. I get up because, no matter how dark the night may be, every new morning arrives like a gift waiting to be unwrapped, gratefully received, and put to good use.  “At some point,” as Toni Morrison writes, “the world’s beauty becomes enough.”

For the first year of the pandemic, I kept a nightly journal, jotting down a few random snippets from my day.  These notes weren’t crafted, just a kind of bullet-copy record of everything from the weather to the news headlines to what flower had bloomed in the garden.  By the time I’d filled a notebook with, what seemed to me, a bunch of dull, repetitious pages, I wondered if there was any point to this exercise in accounting.  It wasn’t real writing.  It served no real purpose. And the truth was, when I finally got into bed and picked up my pen at the end of each long, unexciting day, I was pretty much done with putting out effort of any kind. Why spend twenty minutes jotting down that I’d cleaned the woodwork, had lunch with my parents, and taken my hundredth walk? Why not just scroll through some Instagram photos of embroidery and English gardens and then escape into sleep? And so, a few pages into the second year and my second notebook, without really thinking about it, I stopped.

The other day I came across these journals in a drawer.  What a surprise it was to discover in their pages not tedious accounts of boring pandemic days but a trove of memories I want to keep, countless small moments that surely would have vanished had I not taken the time to write them down. What a loss, I thought to myself, as I looked at all the empty pages I’d never bothered to fill.

And so as this anniversary that no one wants to celebrate approaches, I’m renewing my commitment not only to notice these fleeting moments, but to record them, too, if only to remind myself some day in the future of all that is right here, right now.

I want to remember my father’s 86-year-old hands, so much like those of his mother, bent with arthritis yet gracefully peeling a potato with as much care and precision as they once wielded dental instruments, shaped crowns, and sutured the delicate tissues in his patients’ mouths.

I want to remember my mother setting a bowl of her homemade vegetable soup on the table for me, and eating  lunch with my mom and dad as snow swirls outside the windows and a lone skater sails across the ice on the pond across the road.

I want to remember three linen napkins, three glasses of water, the three of us together, enjoying one another’s company. I want to remember how grateful I am to still be a daughter at my parents’ table on a winter afternoon.

I want to remember a long cold walk with my son Jack’s voice in my ear telling me about taking his girlfriend out for dinner, his happiness with his life, our easy affectionate connection. And that, even on a day when the high is seven degrees, I bundle up, put on hat and mittens, and head outside anyway.

I want to remember reading an important letter my son Henry sends me to edit, the unexpected flush of pride as I see him not as my kid but as the experienced college professor he has become. I want to remember calling him back to say I wouldn’t change one word.

I want to remember winter nights in front of the fire with Steve, our dinners balanced on our laps, the sheltering sense of home as we sit together on the couch sharing the small events of the day as we have for thirty-five years of married life.  I want to remember that, even as we drink wine and count our blessings, we also speak of endings and sadness, and of how hard it is to let go of anything that’s loved.

I want to remember finding a package containing Abigail Thomas’s A Three Dog Life in the mailbox. I want to remember that this is what love feels like: an unexpected gift from my soul daughter Lauren, sent simply because she knows how much I adore this profoundly moving little book and that I’ve somehow lost my own cherished copy.

I want to remember that, when I tell Lauren I’m writing about moments, she reminds me that we humans are here not only to notice moments, but to create and hold them for one another, too.

And so it is that we who attune our eyes to look for moments also delight in bestowing small moments on someone else: A love note written and hidden in the pantry to be discovered behind the flour bin; a filthy, salt-encrusted car washed and returned to the garage without a word; a quick dance in the kitchen; grilled cheese sandwiches cut into quarters and served with pickles on the side; a poem shared or a photo sent of a found heart or a face in the pavement; a stash of new pens left on a kitchen counter; a foot rub with lotion at the end of the day; a surprise bed turn-down with a pair of PJs arranged just so; a few kind words exchanged with the cashier at the grocery store; a story recalled from the distant past and shared with someone who might have to remember it for you someday, long after you are gone.

“We do not remember days, we remember moments,” the Italian writer Cesare Pavese reminds us. As I look back on the last two years – years in which the days easily blurred together and my sense of time was often muddled by monotony — it is the small moments that remain luminous in memory, moments I might easily have missed had I not been learning to see more and more deeply into what has been here all along.

There is so much we don’t know.  But I do know this: In choosing again and again to keep my focus close, on the here and now, I find my footing, my best self, my happiness. “To pay attention,” as Mary Oliver suggests, “this is our endless and proper work.”

This afternoon, the last of the snow that covered the ground when I began writing this essay vanished.  The temperature reached 55 degrees and I tied my coat around my waist, swept a winter’s worth of sand out of the garage, and filled the birdbath so everyone could have a quick dip before tomorrow’s expected storm arrives.  We could have a foot of snow by Friday afternoon, but today a tiny pansy showed its face to me. And that feels like something worth jotting down tonight before I turn out the light.

We are here to witness creation and to abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.
Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other.
We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
We witness our generation and our times.
We watch the weather.
Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.”
~ Annie Dillard