Everything is the Same

I am a planner.  I have lists on paper, lists that live in my head, symbols of the passage of time are present in so much of my daily life.  

I keep a stack of bookmarks and I choose a new one with each book I start, carefully placing the one just used at the bottom of the stack, ready to use in the future, aware as I do it that the 10 books down the line may be read over two or three months  When I open a bag of coffee beans, I think of the future, aware that when the bag has emptied, six weeks will have passed.

I organize so much of the minutiae of my daily life in this way.  I watch a houseplant as new growth sparks and know that when the new leaf is full, the next season will be closer at hand.  I organize the cloth napkins on which I set out my morning coffee service each week and know that when the floral ones have been used, the bandana prints will follow, and then the green floral prints, and then…..my mind quietly recites the events to which I can look forward: JT will be home from college, T’s birthday will be celebrated, my tomatoes will bloom….

I do this so often, so much of the time, that it feels as if the planning and anticipation are just another part of my daily life.

I thought of this habit this morning when, for the first time in weeks, I put on some mascara, sandals instead of my now customary work-from-home flip flops, a skirt fancier than what I’ve worn for the last few months, and got ready for the last day of school.  But I didn’t walk out the front door and drive 8 miles to school in the early morning.  Instead, I went downstairs to sit at my desk for a Zoom teleconference with the 7th grade.  Together, if from our separate homes, we watched a recorded version of our closing ceremony and said goodbye to the school year.

Today is the last day of school and, in a normal world, I would have been anticipating this day for weeks; weeks marked by bookmarks shifting and different morning coffee set ups, by an app on my phone that marks each day that ticks by until a much-anticipated event will occur.

Instead, the weeks have all jumbled together as we lived in the world of the pandemic.  Daily existence seemed both more important and smaller as we navigated the condensed world of everything happening at home.  The amount of work required to teach remotely meant that weekends were also given over to work, hours and hours spent writing clear instructions for students to read and carefully follow so that they would know where to be: in Zoom, at our class webpage, on a shared Google doc, in a discussion forum…..but all of it from the same place, looking at the same screen.

So it seemed fitting that today would be the same as so many of the school days have been since we began to learn remotely.  That time has passed is clear.  The curve of disease has flattened,  my pandemic anxiety has become a familiar companion, the days have more sunshine and warmth, everyone has longer hair, we’ve learned new things.  But there is a sameness to it all that is the unsettling reminder of all that we’ve been through together even as we’ve been in our separate homes.