April 2020 – MOIRARTS

Surprise! Sunchokes

Today we went out to the yard to get started on the annual effort of beating back the weeds and giving the garden beds edges again. Over the past couple of years, volunteer sunflowers have blown into our back garden from the yard of the neighbor down the alley. At first there was just one, then a few more, then last year they kind of took over. Today I decided we would weed most of them out before they got big and leave just a little patch for our kid to enjoy. (We all enjoy them, they’re just in the part of the garden where they get to plant what they like, mostly consisting of plants I don’t like that I’ve weeded out of other areas and my child has rescued from going into yard waste.)

The first thing we do is walk around and decide on how many plants will be allowed to live. Then we start pulling out the extraneous sprouts. Or, I should say, we try to pull them out. They are tough and require some tugging, when I finally do get one to come out, it has a little rutabaga attached to the bottom of it. Which is confusing. We get a trowel and start digging around more, and all of them have these tubers on the bottom of them.

Which is when I realize that they are sunchokes. Jerusalem artichokes, native sunflower with edible tuberous roots renowned for their habit of taking over any space you give them. Oops. I guess I should have put more effort into identifying the variety of sunflower that first year when I noticed that it got ten feet tall and didn’t resemble any of the other native sunflowers we had around the yard. Or even the year after that, when I noticed that our neighbor down the alley had dug out the patch of them that used to line her driveway for no obvious reason. (I guess we now know the reason.)

Good news: we have free food growing in our back garden! Bad news: we have (yet another) plant taking over our back garden! I think this now makes five natives I’ve introduced to the garden that have tried to take it over in some way. In the front, we currently have an aster that is OOC and due to be dug out; a couple of years ago it was something I forget the name of that formed a carpet and tried to crowd everything else out. In another part of the yard, it’s a different kind of sunflower that is smothering my favorite rose. Let’s not forget the milkweed, which, while much wanted and loved, still requires constant effort to keep it limited to the places we want it to grow.

The only thing we know how to make from sunchokes is latkes. Sunchokes are a perfect substitute for potatoes if you cannot eat white potatoes and still want to celebrate Hanukkah with friends. Time to get down the electric griddle, rewatch my child’s favorite holiday song video a million times, and Skype in our friend who is the latke expert, who usually does the actual frying for us, for some on-the-fly coaching!

Day 31

A month, we’ve been here in the house together. All day, every day. A few times, we’ve gone for walks alone; four times, one of us has gone to the store. Otherwise, three people, one house, around the clock.

It’s a bizarre situation, to know that we are so fortunate to have a home that is spacious enough for all of us to be comfortable; to have each other to interact with; and to have our incomes be so far unaffected. I am acutely aware of how many people are sheltering alone in apartments; are continuing to be at risk in jobs they cannot do without and cannot be done from home; and how many families have each other but not the space to be out from under each others’ feet. I am actively grateful for our yard multiple time every single day; I grieve for my friends struggling to stay healthy in small, lightless spaces.

At the same time, we are challenged by the impacts of my chronic illness and inability to access my typical maintenance treatments. My fatigue ebbs and flows, even while the demands of school and cooking do not; our stable income relies on my partner being essentially unavailable for 10 hours a day, regardless of my capacity; and my pain and musculoskeletal dysfunction are increasing day by day. I still manage, but I’m starting to have persistent aches and areas of constriction that will not ease with the treatments I have available at home. I try not to worry, but it’s impossible not to wonder when I will be able to get back into care and how much I’ll be limping when I finally do.

We also have the specter of food scarcity looming. While we are all unclear on if, how, or when food shortages will start to manifest, our family’s need for a regular supply of specific allergen-free foods makes that uncertainly feel more urgent. I would like to believe that state governments will act to adapt our food systems to redirect the tons of food that are being trashed and discarded, from restaurants and institutions that are closed to the food banks and pantries that so desperately need it. At the same time, I know that if our household becomes food insecure, two out of the three of us will not be able to eat the common carbohydrates that are provided as the bulk of the sustenance. Striking a balance between mindful preparation and anxiety-driven stockpiling is nearly impossible while we can only be guided by supposition and speculation.

What we have learned in this month is that there are some ways in which our family is resourced to live this way for long periods of time, namely those aspects that touch on our physical living space and our temperamental suitability to working or learning from home and through screens. In other ways, we are watching the clock and our diminishing stores of rice and meat, despite knowing that way madness lies.

Balance. What that has meant for us is an ebb and flow of interaction with those we can’t currently sit with and share a coffee or a romp in the yard. My child exchanges video messages with their friends wherein they mostly demonstrate their prowess with the silly effects and drawing features. I have been checking in with Wallace and Jay whenever my schedule allows, for my own enjoyment in being enveloped by smart, music-loving, city dwellers as well as for my contribution to a friend’s connection to the world outside a small apartment. We’ve been donating money to food banks and migrant services, participating in phone and letter drives to urge officials to support stronger relief measures, and bartering with friends who are willing to make us masks for the low cost of our gratitude and some extra material to put towards masks for others.

As so many are now emphasizing, physical distance does not have to mean social isolation, and all that we can do to see and hold each other emotionally is support that could turn out to be life-saving. Anything we can do to contribute to ensuring that people have shelter, sustenance, and safety, we should do. In the words of the old anthem, we fight for roses too, and those roses are us and our sanity. Every day, often before I am even out of bed, I am holding you in my mind’s eye and I am thinking so vehemently, just survive.

Day 27

The days are starting to blend together. Days when we finish schoolwork early feel like Fridays, days when we are bored and cranky feel like Mondays. We’ve settled into routines, but they require us to forget that we haven’t seen friends in almost a month or hugged anyone outside of the three of us in that same amount of time. Working from home, managing school online, both require a huge amount of physical, mental, and emotional energy. At the same time, we seem to be doing okay. Spring keeps offering us flowers and blue skies and small birds and we keep inviting it in.

I have been a little fixated on why we are doing okay. Are we numb? In denial? Then the other day I read one of several excellent pieces about how disabled people are used to living lives that are socially restricted and it clicked: I’ve been living much like this ever since becoming seriously ill three years ago. I have to carefully manage my energy during the day to make sure we have school, food, and home covered, and there’s very little left by the end of the day for going out in the evening. I know how to work for a while, take a walk, rest with a book, plan our cooking so that it all gets done when it needs to, throw in some laundry when I have the oomph for the stairs.

If anything, being quarantined has created a socially legitimate reason for me to not be at all the openings, local bands, dance parties, and whatever else is going on. I have folded my kid’s schedule into my regular day, working mostly in the mornings when I have peak energy, resting and prepping for dinner in the afternoons. Not having to manage the trips to and from school in the morning and afternoon opens up a surprising amount of space in our lives. Staying in reading or watching TV at night because I’m too exhausted to do anything else doesn’t feel as isolated when I know everyone is doing it.

The grief that many are feeling at the loss of freedom, the restrictions, letting go of what you thought this year was going to be: I went through that acutely three years ago and have been living in that space to varying degrees since then. Only now had I begun to reclaim a life outside the home, making art and sustaining friendships with those who stuck around through the years when I felt like I was barely living.

What I can tell you from those years is that this is a life. This is also living. It took me a long time to move out of feeling like I was only losing time or being held in some kind of potentially endless pause in my real life. Eventually, I accepted that I can’t know how long this will go on, whether my situation will ever change. If it does change, it will not go back; I will not get to start again when my child is 7 or 5 or 2 and have those years of struggle back again in different form. There is no return, no path to before. Only this now, only whatever comes next which we have no acceptable choice but to live into and through.

This is not meant to be one of those rise and grind pep talks that are treating COVID-19 like a sabbatical or a Kripalu retreat. Nobody here is trying to be our best selves. Or rather, we are going to be the same best selves we always are, the selves who are going to survive this. Who are getting up every day and moving through anxiety, pain, exhaustion, and the weight of all of it, and finding our moments of peace, laughter, and connection, but also anger, fear, and fatigue.

We were always living, this was always a life. All we need to do is survive. To live into who we are.

Document

A few weeks ago, when I was getting extremely anxious about this virus but it seemed like nobody else was, I had the strong desire to hear “Exhuming McCarthy.” That song was one of my favorites as a young teenager, right at the point when I was growing into what what would become my permanent taste in music.

At that time, we all bought our cassettes from Von’s, the shop that occupied several connected store fronts and sold everything we needed as teenagers: books and magazines; records, cassettes, and later CDs; t-shirts, smutty cards, and gag gifts; and what can only be described as hippie shit: polished slices of geodes, statues of animals and wizards, decorated wooden boxes with hidden doors made in Poland, crystals and semiprecious stones, silver jewelry, that sort of thing. I didn’t have as much money to spend as most of the kids I knew, but once I was old enough to get a part-time job at school, I put almost all of it toward music.

I probably bought Document because of “It’s the End of the World…” or maybe just because that’s what we all were listening to. However, in the midst of the (first) Bush presidency and the start of the (first) Gulf War, it was “Exhuming McCarthy” that became my favorite song, with its scathing indictment of the hypocrisy of corporatist politicians. (It would be many more years of education and activism before I would grasp what it meant to be “addressing the Realpolitik.”) The more years I spend in DC, the more it rings through my head at times of government failures, never more so than when Democrats invariably choose not to use what power they have to fight for us.

This month, rather than turning to the internet, I dug out my old cassette and put it on while I worked. After all these years, Document is still an excellent album. It’s rare these days that I have the patience to listen to an album all the way through; I’ve been spoiled by decades of the ability to skip around on CDs and find online only the song I want to hear at that moment. That day, I just put the tape on and let it go. In doing so, I was reminded of why this was a favorite album, why bars of it come back to me at the oddest moments, why I listened to it over and over until I can still sing along to the whole thing thirty years later.

From the first distinctive notes of “Finest Worksong,” I was back in my high school bedroom, full of enough indignant energy to carry me as far as I needed to go. I have been so demoralized by the last ten years of governance in this country. This year may be the one when we truly see how far “it could always be worse” takes us, but I have learned not to assume we have hit rock bottom. Being confined to my house while the world drowns in its own lungs, though. This is taxing. It’s hard to maintain a determined revolutionary spirit in the midst of so much worry.

We’re all turning to the arts to sustain us, but it was necessary for me to remember the power of music to awaken and energize rather than only soothe and numb. To remind us of who we are.

Landed gentry rationalize. Look who bought the myth.

We are the followers of chaos out of control.

There’s something going on that’s not quite right.

Crazy, crazy world. Crazy, crazy times.

Singer, sing me a song.