good morning from the dark kitchen
Are there no other words more beautiful than your test results are negative?
I will continue to lay low and test again this weekend. My fingers remain crossed and I will continue to isolate from anyone outside my foursome. I feel relief when I see the email come through, after an entire day of refresh, refresh, refresh and waiting impatiently while staring at my phone and wondering if my test got misplaced since Brendan received his results first thing in the morning and he tested just after I did. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. I lean on my sister, bothering her all day with texts because that’s the contract we both signed when we came into being alongside one another. I think about the NYC healthcare workers, still sending out results to people like me at 10:50pm on a Tuesday night. Thank you for staying late.
I should be getting my kids out of bed. M is in the top bunk and has been reading since 7am. Pia is the teenager, already a tough one to get out of bed. Little Gary is on the counter, watching the steam rise from the coffee like it’s a tv show for cats. They sky is pink and orange this morning and a single helicopter hovers over it all, the sound of its motor cutting through the quiet. Now the steam heat pushes through the kitchen radiator. I hear the water moving, everything ok around me.
Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.-Mary Oliver
My friend Lauren wrote about this experience. Please read it.
Keep safe, everyone. Take good care of each other.
