It’s been a long time since I wrote, explicitly, about how this pandemic is making me feel. There’s still some of the off-kilter feeling of the early days, but less of it. Or maybe I’m just accustomed to it now; off-kilter is just normal. More, lately, I’ve been feeling resignation. This is what it is.

I know part of this has a LOT to do with the upcoming school year. Carla’s (small, private) school is planning to welcome kids back, in-person, in early September. Of course I have ALL the feelings about sending her back to school. And, along with other parents of her classmates, I anticipate that we’ll have, at most, weeks before school moves to an entirely remote situation. I am resigned to this probability, even as I hope it doesn’t happen.

But These Unprecedented Times – as steeped as they are in uncertainty – are not without their pleasures and joys.

We got together with friends this past weekend – friends we haven’t seen since the Before Times.  We went for a hike in a canyon and slogged through a river and the kids played in miniature waterfalls while the grownups talked. It was one of those perfect summer days that musicians write songs about. The sun was shining in that specifically summertime way, where it was caught and reflected a million times across the water, and tossed upward like a child’s ball and shared, branch to branch, among the trees so that everywhere you looked you were dazzled by its sparkling.

The air was warm but not heavy. The water was cool on our feet. The scent of wet earth and rocks baking in the heat. The cheerful hollers of the kids. The world fell away leaving just the five of us in that liquid sunshine. It was magic.

I was chatting with the wife half of our friends (there is a husband half, too), and we were talking about how good it was to see each other in person, to be together, to watch our children playing. And I was overcome with such grief. Not for the moment, of course, because the moment was perfect. But for all the moments we’ve missed – collectively – and for all the uncertainty of the moments ahead of us.

Right now, we have so many futures spread out across the coming months, just out of reach. Our individual futures, as humans; our collected futures, as humanity. Of course, it’s always been this way – there’s always been possibility and hope and opportunity right there alongside potential for evil and sadness and illness and death. But it’s so overwhelmingly present, now.

During our precious time with our friends, I found myself withdrawing, a little. Not embracing the togetherness as I should have, not facing with stoic good cheer the many, many blessings we do have. But thinking – plaintively, childishly – no, it shouldn’t be like this.

My mother reminds me that there are so many things in human history that have been so much worse than this moment right here. She means this to be comforting. Perhaps it is. To know that things have been terribly, terribly wrong, and yet humans have survived and grown and gone on to thrive and have babies and make beautiful art and feel hopeful and march forward into that great uncertainty of tomorrow with courage and grace. To know that things do get better, if incrementally. To know that this, too, will pass. Of course, it is also deeply exhausting that we continue this eternal seesaw into pain and tragedy and incomprehensible senselessness.

Carla had such a wonderful time, playing with her friends. It was overwhelming, I think – all the physical activity, and the sunshine, and the social interaction. More of each – especially the latter – than she’s used to these days. The next day, we took a break. A “lazy” day, as she called it, where we did no schoolwork, eschewed our regular excursion to one of the local parks, and simply hung out at home. (She made a dragon costume for herself; we built castles out of Magnatiles; I finished a very absorbing book.) I tried to get her to play outside. It was 77 degrees, brilliantly sunny, the air awhir with lawn mowers and honeybees and that wonderful mineral smell of lawns being watered. We need to store up the sunshine, I told her. There’s a long winter ahead and we need to get more than our fill while it’s available to us.

I can make a list of the big and the small, the important and the inconsequential, the silly and the serious – the countless things that I, personally, miss from the Before Times. In-person school and browsing through Target and traveling to visit my parents and talking to someone without wearing a mask and date night and barre class and on and on. We must all have our lists. When will we be able to invite our friends over to our house, to welcome them actually inside our house, to feed them and talk to them for hours about the other worries – everyday and enormous alike – that will continue to fill our lives once the heavy overhang of the pandemic is behind us? (Let it, someday, be behind us.) When will be able to stop punctuating our children’s play by shouted reminders of too close and no touching and six feet apart? When will we be able to look forward to spring, as an inevitable conclusion to winter, instead of feeling like this summer, this afternoon, this breath of sun baked happiness, may be all we get?

What this lengthy, maudlin post is trying to get at, I guess, is that I’m struggling to absorb the fact that this could be it. I won’t stop hoping for the best outcome. But we could have years of political instability and economic collapse and illness and in-home schooling. It’s not inevitable but it’s certainly one of the possibilities. And there’s lots of middle ground between that option and “successful vaccine/election/economic recovery.”

That’s the lesson of life, right? That this, right here, is all there is.

So why not Make the Best of It? Cherish Every Moment and all that? Why is it so hard to live in the here and now rather than despair what we’ve lost, what we still could lose?

Despite the melancholy overtones of this post, despite the normal Call Week stresses and crankiness, it’s been a good week. That few hours with our friends was so restorative, so buoying. When I think back to that sunny Sunday morning, I can almost recreate the joy of being together. I can almost taste not just what was, but what could be again, someday, or someday soon.

But I know my mood is cyclical, too – the down days are right around the corner. So I am going to scoop up my reluctant dragon and drag her outside for as many hours as we can stand it today. Let the sunshine sink into my skin so I can remember the heat of it when it’s just a memory. Breathe it in. Collect it in my pores. So I can dole it out in drops all winter, remind myself that I will feel it on my face again.