mounting a response

It's spring now, the time of year when nature does not stand in opposition to things like hope.

I got a covid shot last week, the moment I was eligible. 

It rained on my drive home from the strip mall vaccination site.

I squinted to see through the windshield, to see the road and the light at the end of the tunnel.

I am trying to remember myself outside the context of stay-at-home

and out of sweatpants and topknots, in shoes and bras and stores.

For a year I've grasped through murky ideas for some measure of control 

wondering whether there might be relief in the details, 

realizing that it mostly boiled down to what any of us were doing, or not doing

underneath all the warnings and all the words, and how we could do it better.

It still does.

It turns out pandemics are personal and peculiar, 

we cannot expect our experiences and emotions to coordinate.

At our house, this year, we've suffered a series of small bereavements

but none that have stolen a load-bearing beam.

We've made messes and mistakes and progress and plans

and noted innumerable measures of great fortune.

I'd already built a very sturdy muscle around seeing loss and joy coexist.

I've binged shows and double masked, equally unexplainable to any former self.

All of this improvisation will end though, soon maybe

and when it does, what is our new assignment?

I hope to carry into the future some framework for slowing down, for growing in new ways

like spring, brutal and blossoming, a masterclass in the both/and of it all.