Unrestricted
Ann Kathryn Kelly
Dispatch, from a May morning.
The birds don’t know. They didn’t get the memo. Their songs outside my window on this May morning as sweet today—more than a month into our state’s shelter in place order—as it was before everything was shuttered. Before I and my neighbors huddled in our houses, abiding by rules, moving only as far as our decks, our patios, a quick walk around the block, alone or with our dogs.
Before the new normal swept in.
When I can’t secure a scheduled slot for grocery delivery, I drive to the supermarket. Before leaving the safety of my car, I slip elastic bands around my ears, look in the rearview mirror, adjust the navy blue mask with white paisley print.
I walk through sliding doors, hurry up and down aisles, catalogue slim pickings, throw backward glances. A man strays near. We reach, together, for cans of baked beans. He, unmasked. Distrust simmers. I decide he’s willfully blind, like those I see on the nightly news playing pickup basketball on an outdoor court in New York’s latest hot spot. Like the ones congregating in houses for corona parties.
I am judge.
Jury.
Irrational, yes. But we’re all running scared, hopped up on non-stop news reports. COVID-19, the newest constant in our vocabulary. Everyone around us a potential, if unwitting, vector.
Safely past him, hurrying up the next aisle, I fume over his unmasked visage. I drive home, rub cans with Lysol wipes, throw out the bags, head for the shower. Later in the night I pore over news stories and updated guidelines, listen to video clips from experts, wash my hands for the umpteenth time.
Sing Happy Birthday. Twice.
I remind my eighty-five-year-old mother, living with me, to keep washing her hands. A retired nurse, she reminds me that she instilled this lesson in me decades earlier, before it became trendy.
Mom and I follow the rules, keep to our house, our backyard, our small safe corner of this tenuous world. But the birds, they fly overhead, far and wide. Unrestricted. Their songs, sweet and free.
Dispatch, from a September afternoon.
Six months. We’ve been … existing … for six months. Nearly five months now, since I wrote about soaring birds and sweet songs. I watched them, at the time, chitter-chattering to one another. Building nests. Heralding spring in New England.
Nearly five months since I wrote about a new normal I believed would be temporary.
I see now that it’s not. That we still face arduous months ahead, soon to be compounded by a winter that will bring dark and cold to this landscape. Months more to go, as we watch numbers from COVID-19 tick up. Cross thresholds once thought unimaginable, with hundreds of thousands already lost in the U.S., and surpassing one million across the world.
I still dash into the supermarket weekly, masked and rushing through my order. I no longer wash my cans. I’ve lessened my intake of nightly news programs and online scanning, for the sake of my sanity.
Mom and I still follow the rules, still keep to the house, our backyard, our small safe corner of this world. The birds still pass overhead, far and wide, though smaller in number on the cusp of autumn. Their songs, still sweet and free.
To sprout wings, to join them in their escape from here to anywhere, remains a daydream. I think about what it would feel like, up there with them, pulling air into my lungs unfettered by a constant but invisible threat.
Their domain, a portal I imagine to be safe. It beckons me.
Ann Kathryn Kelly lives and writes in New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine, works in the technology sector, and leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her essays have appeared in a number of literary journals.
twitter: @annkkelly / insta: @annkkelly