march mornings
by Claire Taylor
This morning the contractors are installing the new floors. Soon they will complete the electrical upgrade, paint the walls, wrap up the finishing touches. Everyone is wearing masks. Keeping their distance. My husband is working from the dining room table. One call after another. His organization is scrambling to create work-from-home procedures, name big picture concerns, field questions from anxious business owners who find themselves suddenly without a source of income. What can you do to help them, I ask when I briefly come downstairs to make a snack for our son. I don’t know, he says and runs a worried hand over his head. No one knows.
My son and I eat graham crackers in the bedroom while watching live footage from zoos around the country. A gorilla in Miami moves slowly around his outdoor environment, wanders back into his indoor space, then out again. Back and forth, in and out he goes, making use of every inch of his confinement. I suddenly feel like I can’t breathe. Like the walls of the bedroom are closing in on me. Everything, the whole world, turning into a tomb.
I make my son put on pants and a long-sleeve shirt. He whines as I slide his shoes onto his feet and I have to bite back my tears. We need some sunshine, I tell him. We need fresh air. I need some space.
The tulips are beginning to push through the earth. My son takes out his construction trucks and drives them over to the worksite—a spot where a tree was once pulled from the ground and left behind a big circle of dirt. Today the worksite is wet and muddy. He zooms the trucks through the mud while I pull clumps of clover away from the sprouting tulips and the places where the peonies will soon be popping up. In April, I cut the tulips and put them in a vase on the dining room table. In May, the vase is filled with peonies, their soft petals scatter across the wood as the flowers wilt. Then come phlox and hydrangeas, daisies, and black-eyed Susans adorning the table and the small vases I sprinkle throughout the house all summer long. By September, the dahlias have bloomed. The zinnias too. Their bright beauty carries me through November. Nine months of bringing the outdoors inside.
As the air cools and frost threatens, I dig up the dahlia bulbs, place them on the windowsill to dry in the sun, and then carefully package them in a cardboard box that sits on the closet shelf until spring. In their place, I add new tulip bulbs. The decorative grasses have turned to dry husk and I spread the brittle hay-colored pieces across the newly planted bulbs to protect them from thieving squirrels.
Winter arrives and like the bulbs, we box ourselves up and hide from the elements. There is finally space for a decent-sized Christmas tree in the living room. We string up twinkle lights in the playroom and the study. In the evenings, the back of the house glows with a warmth I had longed for when we first envisioned the addition. But it is no match for the gray and gloomy days that drag on through January. The house feels smaller and smaller, closing in on me as the weeks pass into February, which greets us with a blanket of ice draped over every surface. We can’t cross the yard without falling so we stay inside and watch nature documentaries about rare, majestic animals and all the ways humans are destroying the natural world.
On a rainy, frigid day at the start of March, I put my son down for a nap, and take the bedroom monitor into the study where my husband is on a call. I jab myself in the upper arm with a finger and pretend to press down an imaginary syringe. He nods and I wave goodbye, off to get my second dose of the vaccine. Inside the gymnasium of the local community college, championship banners hang from the ceiling. I read them as I slowly move from one circle on the floor to the next until it is my turn. When I get back to my car, my arm is already aching. My body is trembling from the damp cold. Relief and fear, anticipation for the gradual emergence of normalcy in the months to come swirls through me like a storm and I burst into tears. By evening I am feverish and unable to stand under my own weight.
In the morning my body is still achy and fatigued, but the sun is out. I walk gingerly around the yard to feel its warmth on my face. Near the gate, a purple crocus is blooming—the first of the season. In a week’s time, green daffodil stalks pop up throughout the garden, small tulip buds begin to peek through the dirt. My son puts on his shoes and together we go outside. He runs his trucks through the mud while I gently pull clumps of clover away from the sprouting tulips, and the places where the peonies are waiting. Can I help, my son asks, and he uses his dump truck to carry the weeds to the compost pile. Back and forth across the yard, he goes, as I lift the broken, splintered bits of dried grass out of the garden, making space for new growth.
Claire Taylor is a writer in Baltimore, MD. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications. She is the creator of Little Thoughts, a monthly print and digital newsletter of original writing for kids. You can find Claire online at clairemtaylor.com.