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Kathryn Mayer • Writing Out Loud

I write stuff down. writer • humorist • activist

Ode to a Pandemic: shadows on the wall

June 15, 2021 by Kate Mayer 5 Comments

paint suppliesInstead of milk and bread before a storm, I rush to Newtown Color Center for paint and spackle, hoping to fill my time and thwart the impending pandemic before it strikes hold and renders me useless.

They match a gallon to the original color, Serene Sky, to brighten a dull family room, and I’m off, to spackle dings left by nooks and crannies that come with rooms well lived, cover up the faded shadows left behind, and boost my spirits during the looming lockdown.

On tippy-toes, I take down the large frames, cobwebs drip from wire to nails, sticking to my arms and face as I remove them one by one, balancing them against the fireplace.

An antique advertisement from a defunct factory; a driftwood fish jig-sawed into folk art by folks unbeknownst to me, wishing it was something my own great-grandad had made, but suffice to think someone’s great-granddad made it.

framed pictures leaning against the wallAn intricate, hand-drawn family tree going back to the Bigod days, when people were named Bigod, or people in my husband’s family were, meticulously updated to include “spouses” like knobby warts on a historic tree, included for ancestry’s sake, but nothing binds in-laws to the tree, limbs easily sacrificed in a storm.

A spring watercolor of the family camphouse, where descendants of Bigod gather for nearly 100 years, a gift to my husband, the great-great-great-not-so-great grandson of the patriarch. It’s a fairy tale cabin nestled in rolling hills with babbling brooks, an outhouse, smoke from the woodstove proof of life within. The framed painting a pretty reminder of the summer family reunion, where we gather, sing, eat, hug, laugh.

Not this year.

These framed pictures reflect his family, not mine; their shadows spiteful after being reluctantly removed, daring me to replace them.

It would only be a couple of weeks. A month. Maybe spring. Over by Easter. Memorial Day. Holidays update calendars but the death toll grows. Election day, says the president, sit tight, but top doc says 2021. Late 2021. Maybe.

If and only if we can follow directions, and science, but we cannot. We’ve proven that.

Shadows remain.

The wall does not get painted. Not that first week. Or month.

Not when adult kids come home, afraid of freezer trucks for bodies and endless sirens keep them up all night, furloughed, no work, no toilet paper. Come home, help me paint, I say. It’ll be okay. A couple weeks, that’s all. A month maybe. Hang on. Come home, baby. It’ll be okay.

But the shadows remain.

People stop dying. Eventually. At least here, but dying begins everywhere else. The south. The west. The middle. We tried to tell you, we cry. You should have listened.

I banish the pictures to the basement, unable to watch them watch me. The paint sits unopened, dust gathering. The wall empty, bare and naked, shadows bright, waiting for me to act.

I haven’t picked up the brush. Not once. Not yet.

There’s so much to do.

There’s nothing to do.

I do nothing.

*

Sept 2020 in Byrds Books prompt class, facilitated by Judith Marks-White: pandemic lessons.
This essay is a proud winner of Newtown CT pandemic essay contest, sponsored by Friends of Newtown Seniors and Cyrenius H. Booth Library, and will appear in a future printed collection.

Strong as an ox, quiet as a mouse: a life runneth over
Get your freak on: the story of a first kiss

Comments

  1. Pamela Perrault says

    June 15, 2021 at 10:12 pm

    First – congratulations, of course, your writing is brilliant.

    This post in particular because it is so moody and the aura and mental disposition you describe are all too familiar.

    Brills!

    Thank you!

    Reply
    • Kate Mayer says

      June 16, 2021 at 11:14 am

      thanks for the read, and for grasping the aura. hoping for better days ahead!

      Reply
  2. lhc says

    June 15, 2021 at 11:06 pm

    Thought it was just me that was paralyzed. Thank you.

    Reply
    • Kate Mayer says

      June 16, 2021 at 11:14 am

      not just you.

      Reply
  3. Robin says

    June 18, 2021 at 11:27 am

    So artfully written. Love all the blindspots played between the lines. LOVE.

    Reply

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About Kathryn Mayer

Kathryn Mayer

An irreverent storyteller with a foul mouth and big heart, Kathryn Mayer (aka Kathy and/or Kate) is a writer, humorist, and (former) activist writing out loud with humor and grace about little life moments with big ripples, including the space between parenting and aging parents, social issues, angsty reflections of midlife, and, sigh, gun humpers. Still. Sometimes a big deal, sometimes not Mayer is a national award-winning columnist, according to the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and her essays have been recognized as Voice of … Read More Here...

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