Wednesday, June 24, 2020

The Lament of the Hostess

Heaven knows, I am a compliant soul. My female condition, not to mention my Catholic girlhood, incline me towards obedience. So when, in this virusy era, residents of the community where I live are directed to wear a mask, stay out of stores and each other's houses, and keep a six foot distance from each other, I bow my head and strap on the mask, reject the shelter of a friendly roof in the rain, and keep both friend and foe a sword's distance away from my body.

When a visitor arrives, I carefully place our chairs eight feet apart on my front porch. We sit and strain to hear our muffled voices beneath our masks, guess at our hidden smiles, and peer into each other's eyes to discern the real meaning of what we think the other just said. Even in Vermont, it gets hot at this time of year, and as the hour passes my friend and I begin to sweat while our glasses fog up, and we hear the air conditioner's chilly hum in the forbidden indoors.

None of this is easy, but for me one of the hardest parts is not being able to offer her...anything. I'm not talking about a four-course dinner, or a smear of brie on a cracker, or a single roasted peanut. I'm not even allowed to give her a cup of coffee (iced and with a splash of cream would be lovely in this weather), or a glass of wine, or a drink of water. In order to swallow any of these things we would have to remove our masks and open our mouths, thereby shooting clouds of virus into the atmosphere.

I don't know why this particular restriction seems so hard, but as my friend and I sit mumbling into our facial coverings, I keep having to quell the urge to jump up and run inside and bring out something for us to share. I had no idea that the hostess instinct was so rooted in me, but there you have it.

I suspect that I'm not alone in this. There is something atavistic about the desire to offer food and drink to a visitor. Perhaps as she hands over a bowl of dip and a plate of crudités, the hostess's subconscious is saying "See? My hands are full of good things. I cannot attack you." And the guest's subconscious sighs: "Whew! I guess it's o.k. to relax."

Our fellow primates, the monkeys and apes, share food with their friends. My dogs Wolfie and Bisou used to share bones (well, Wolfie, who outweighed her by seventy pounds, used to let Bisou have his). And partaking of meals is at the center of countless religious rituals.

So yes, it's tough, and it feels inhuman not to be able to eat and drink with friends. This is why restaurants were among the first establishments to open in many states (restaurants and tattoo parlors, the latter pointing to the even more primitive urge to paint one's body), and people flocked to them. And many of those people are now paying a heavy price.

Which is why for now I'll keep my fridge door tightly closed when a friend comes over. Instead I will indulge in one pleasure that is still allowed and never gets old: complaining.



Wednesday, June 17, 2020

How I Watch the News

This is how I watch the news these days. First, the cat, the dog, and I jockey for position on the loveseat. Guess who always wins...


Then the daily blend of despair-inducing catastrophes, outrages, and cataclysms assaults my ears and threatens my sanity:


But when it's over, I put my arms around my comfort critters and things don't look so dark.


Thursday, June 11, 2020

Mater dolorosa

I haven't thought of Our Lady of Sorrows in a long time. But in these soul-wrenching days, when the distress both in me and around me has drained words of their meaning, I find myself turning to the Mater dolorosa, that image of the Divine Feminine onto which humanity has, for more than a thousand years, projected its longing for consolation. Whatever your own source of solace, may you find strength, hope, and ease in this bleak summer of 2020.


Thursday, June 4, 2020

Grateful Houseplants


(Although it feels frivolous to write about houseplants at such a sad and anxious time, I offer this post in the same spirit as those Italians who sang arias on their balconies at the peak of the pandemic.)

I like a grateful houseplant, the kind that perks up after a watering, and smiles greenly at me in the morning when I spritz it. Take the giant peace lily that I rescued from one of those big box stores just before the quarantine started. The margins of its leaves were being chewed up by an invisible pest or disease of some kind, but when I got it home I trimmed off the damaged bits and put it on a regimen of daily misting and weekly watering (it’s the only one of my houseplants that demands such frequent drinks). It promptly rewarded me by putting out a dozen shiny new leaves and even a couple of those weird white blossoms known as spathes. That’s what I mean by a grateful houseplant.

At about the same time, I also brought home a corn plant (Dracaena fragrans). It was an impressive specimen, taller than me, with thick, woody stems and several clumps of long, arching green-and-yellow striped leaves. Although the nursery tag did not mention this, I read online that I should never water Dracaena with city water. Even spritzing with it would cause the plant to develop brown spots that would expand until the leaf—and eventually the entire plant-- shriveled and died.

I looked at my Dracaena and realized that whoever had been caring for it in the store had not read those warnings, as many of the leaves were already speckled with tiny brown dots. The experts advised using distilled water, but that seemed both expensive and ungreen to me. The alternative was rain water. It doesn’t rain much in February in Vermont, but there is plenty of snow, so for weeks I scooped handfuls of snow into a bucket, brought it inside to melt, and used it to water and mist the Dracaena.

Along with the Dracaena I had also bought a lovely variegated Cordyline fruticosa, or Ti plant (what can I say? It was the depths of winter, and the plants were unbelievably cheap). Again, though the nursery tag didn’t mention it, the online pundits were unanimous against using tap water on the Cordyline, so I put it on the same melted-snow diet as the Dracaena, and expected that all would be well.

The spring sun finally melted the snow, and from then on at the first sign of rain I would rush out and put a bucket under the downspout. The rainwater seemed to be working, at least for the Cordyline, which was putting out bright pink leaves that mixed with green as they aged, to produce a lustrous coppery color. But the Dracaena did not react so well. The original brown pinpoints grew larger, and new spots appeared where my rainwater spritzes had landed. I rechecked the online sources, made sure I was doing everything right, and continued with the treatment.

When the Dracaena showed no signs of improvement, I moved it to the brightest spot in the sunroom, but it continued to droop. Day by day it looked more feeble, seeming to shrink into itself. I began to feel that I was running a houseplant hospice.

There is something about a sickly plant that drains the soul. Locked indoors with my dying Dracaena, I found myself avoiding the sunroom with its doom-laden atmosphere, and resenting the plant for not responding to my attentions. All my other green houseguests—the peace lily, the Ti plant, the aloe, the aglaonema, the jade, and the spider plants that I grow for Telemann to nibble—were glowing with health. But not the Dracaena. Every morning I would look at it, give it a few spritzes, and check the soil to make sure it wasn’t too wet or too dry. But the plant ignored me and continued to decline.

I could have simply gotten rid of it, but it was a living thing, and a large one at that. It had presence. For all I knew, it had feelings of some kind. I had brought it home and taken responsibility for it, and in exchange I hoped that it would bring badly needed cheer and vitality into my days. Like people who hesitate to euthanize a suffering pet, I clung to the expiring Dracaena.

And then one afternoon, in a fit of irritation not untinged with guilt, I dragged it outside, chopped up the leaves and stems, and scattered everything in the woods. Then I went indoors, sat down in the sunroom, opened my book, and basked in the aura of ease and contentment that radiated from my remaining, grateful plants.



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