I have a calendar stuck to the side of my fridge. Most days I scrawl notes across the squares to keep my family’s life in check: Dentist appointment, vet appointment, storytime at the library. But lately, the squares are empty and we’re hunkered down at home, confined by COVID-19.
My daughter, at two and a half, who cannot see the blank calendar and doesn’t care anyway, does not seem to know the difference between now and a month ago. Sometimes at supper she asks, “What are you talking about?” To which we reply, “The world,” or, “Some people who are sick.”
Mostly she’s just ecstatic about picking worms out of the dirt in our backyard, then running over to each of our chickens to hand-feed them, one by one. Last weekend, when 10 turkey vultures soared over the yard, she beamed and squealed then took off across the grass, tilting and charging with arms outstretched, head bent low, “soaring”. If childhood innocence is a cliché, then it’s rooted right in front of me, every day, in moments that blossom, if I’m watching. Everything else falls away.
Even COVID-19.
But these moments are easy to overlook. After breakfast I pace the kitchen, gripping the phone, trying in vain to convince my husband that his job is not “essential,” that he should be working from home. Right under my nose, my daughter is gifting me early, intimate discoveries. Sitting on the rug slapping a horse puppet against a tower of blocks, she hollers for me then sputters words like bubbles, giggling, offering up random vocabulary. “Mommy Mommy…. SCEW-driver!” “Mommy Mommy…. Fla-MIN-go!” Or, one finger jabbed in the air, nodding deeply, proudly, she gasps, “Mommy Mommy…. CATTLE-guard!”
I may not always be listening, but she is. One morning I stand at the kitchen counter, phone cupped between shoulder and chin, arguing with my sister, who lives far away in a big city overwhelmed by COVID-19, isolated at home with two toddlers and a backlog of reports to complete. We discuss the constant health emergencies of our aged parents. My daughter, humming at my feet, shifts puzzle pieces across linoleum. “Mommy Mommy!” she grins. “Pan-DEM-ic.”
But how instantly she overrides distress. She and my husband have their own thing. After supper, he plays ABBA hits. Dancing Queen. Super Trouper. Mamma Mia. “Sing, Mommy,” my daughter commands. “Now, dance.” I cannot sing. I am no dancer. But some nights, while the dinner dishes crust on the counter, it’s non-stop ABBA with me belting disco and stomping around the coffee table until I call off the party to tell her it’s time for bed. She pitches and wails and hurls herself around the room, landing in my husband’s arms. He persuades her into pajamas and scoops her off to bed, leaving me in breathless silence wondering if that was the most fun I’ve had all day.
It’s a quiet revelation. But I’m tired of isolation, and feeling sorry for myself, and I forget to have fun. We’re out in the garden, my daughter and I. It’s early yet to do much so I’m transplanting rhubarb. I want a bigger patch, more backyard food to circumvent the risks of a grocery store. On my knees I plunge my hands through loosened soil to rake out dandelion roots. My daughter mounds the roots into the seat of her doll stroller, where she has securely strapped and buckled my insulated mug of coffee. I’m starving. I want my coffee.
“Mommy,” she calls, wheeling my coffee away.
“What.”
“Mommy.” I am staggering across the lawn now, lugging an armload of rhubarb corms encased in dirt like concrete. “Mommy.” My forearms are cramping, my hair is slipping from my ponytail, and I need to pee. “Mommy. Mommy. Mommy.”
“What! What! WHAT!”
Her face crumples. She pounds my chest when I try to hug her close.
Sometimes, I slow down. Pressed against my thigh, my daughter digs with an intensity that makes me proud, clawing at the dirt as it falls away from my hands, picking out worms for one chicken, who is sick. She collects a cache: A junebug. A cat turd. Last year’s shriveled backyard apple. She cups them in her palm, strokes each one, coos to them, then lays them side by side in the grass and yells, “Back! Back!” slapping me away when I try to swipe her treasures into the weed pile. “Leave them,” she whines, then murmurs, “So the ground can love them.”
These moments, they overtake me. For one breath, they remind me, of a simplicity I have forgotten, a clarity I have lost.
So I take another breath, and though we’re late for her nap I wait while she struggles to maneuver her sagging stroller over rocks and clods toward the back porch.
Upstairs in the bedroom, we cuddle. She wants a story. And a song. This is our routine. She wants Mamma Mia. I sigh.
Mamma Mia. Here I go again. My, my, how can I resist you.
“Mommy.”
“What.”
“I don’t like your ponytail. Take your ponytail OFF YOUR HEAD! Now dance.”
We clasp hands. We stomp and spin. I cave in and I start to laugh and she reels and squeals and claps and stumbles and cracks her head on the corner of the stool.
Screaming like you cannot believe. I hold her, stroke her face. She falls asleep in my arms. It’s quiet in the room. I want to finish up in the garden. I want to make supper, send an email. I want to clean my house, I want to sleep, I want to call my parents, I want to walk out of my yard and into a day where I know what to do next, because COVID-19 is behind us.
When my daughter wakes up we check on her chicken, who is dying in the dim corner of the coop. In the face of pandemic, I know that the loss of a chicken pales against the loss of a job, a life savings, a loved one. Still, my eyes well.
“You’re sad? Mommy? Are you sad?”
She says it rapid-fire, even, looking me square in the face. Not anxious, not anguished. Just confirming what she knows.
“Yes.” I say. “I am sad.”
“I wish I could bring you a friend.”
Before I can respond her face opens and she cries, “We should tell a story. And sing a song!”
She peers down at the chicken, leans over her. “Once,” she says quietly, “there was a girl, and a chicken, on a trail, in a meadow. And Mommy and Daddy were there.”
She looks at me. All I can do is nod.
She turns back to the chicken. Time for the song. I am expecting Mamma Mia but in a high, airy, wordless crooning she delivers the sweetest sounds I have ever heard.
“There.” She looks at me. “Now close the door. Mommy? Have you never heard a meadowlark sing?”
I am not writing this to prove how adorable or absurd or profound my daughter is. I am writing it because it is the story I am telling. Not to you; to me. To remind me: That I am grown and I am nicked and I am flawed and I will never repossess my daughter’s innocence.
But it exists. Covid or no COVID, if it were a song (and if I could sing), I would sing it. Every day.
Vaia Errett lives in Whitetail with her husband Jeff and daughter Daphne.
