2020 Was a Message. Maybe.

The tempation to reflect as the calendar year flips over is too great for me to resist. I've ordered my 2021 calendar (a pinup calendar, yes. Of Norse goddesses. Yep. I'm an adult, I can do what I want.) So I think that means I can, gingerly, gently, with much deference and genuflection, put this cluster of a year to rest. 

But it eludes examination. It slithers out of my awarenss. What was this year, even? I have to consult outside sources. My memory is just a gray haze of heat, cold, panic, and immobility. 

So I go to instagram. This is why I have it, by the way. It is a net to catch memories that my sieve-brain just lets dissolve. 

Last January 1st, 2020, we got up before dawn, parked at the closed gate of the parking lot on Spencer's Butte, and scrambled up the bitter cold stairs. I had just pulled the kids out of bed, as is, so they were draped in blankets instead of coats, with thick fuzzy socks stuffed into slippers (aka flipflops). We looked around for the rising sun. The google map on my phone pointed vaguely THERE-ish, but there was no difference in the dim cloud cover. The whole sky seemed to lighten evenly. No sun for the first sunrise of the year. Should have been an omen.

By now the parkinglot was open and a group of Japanese college-age kids was 30 meters away, turning in circles like us, trying to find the rising sun. 

Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu! I called to them as we bundled past, back down the steep stairs, back down the mountain. Congratulations on the cracking open of the new year! They hooted and yelped after us, Uaaaa, sugoi! Akemashite omedetou!

****

I had decided to have an easy holiday season-- no travel, no big gatherings. One overnight solstice fire ceremony with friends and then long lazy cool weather days. It's been intense for the kids, moving to Oregon, starting new schools, joining new girl scout troops and gymnastic classes. It had been hectic. And it would be a crazy year, I thought. School will pick up, with all those activities. And then we'll travel, we'll have adventures over the summer. We can have a restful winter break, store up our reserves.

We started the year, just as whispers of the weird pnuemonia started drifting across the news, getting ready for our big hula performance. I was in the front row as we chanted and danced to Kalakaua in a packed hall at the Asian Festival. So many people, shoulder to shoulder. My dad came out to visit, hobbled along the beach with us, telling us about the surgery he was about to have for his messed up knees. And it was just wonderfully easy to have him with us, to talk about books and shows and our lives. 

I was playing music and going to Morris dancing (and the pub after) every week, and working on some art pieces for my friend's fundraiser-- some celtic kangaroos to benefit the Australian wild fires. Liko took a baby hula class and we went to weekly forest school playdates. Maile's school orchestra did a big concert in a packed school gym, parents perching on bleachers. RJ went to a middle school dance and posed patiently with his friend, both grinning with brightly colored hair. Maile and our neighbor went door to door, selling girlscout cookies. 

Then, in February, Maile got sick. Some kind of nasty, lingering cough. This is my kid with a whole pnuemonia routine. She and Liko both have ended up hospitalized from coughs that migrate into pnuemonia, and then do an immunilogical freak out and turn into systemic shut downs. We went into stay-home-sick mode. RJ had a few more weeks of school, but the news was getting more insistent. This virus was coming. It broke out in Seattle, and then in meat packing plants closer to us. We stayed home.

That was...10 months ago.

Ya'll know what happened next. 

Good thing we had toilet paper, and three months worth of pasta, rice, dried beans, and oatmeal. You can take the girl out of the LDS church, but you can't remove the compulsion to hoard food storage!

I taped "How to Wash Your Hands" instructions with Lady Macbeth's "Out out damn spot" speech to all the bathroom mirrors. And I taped Wendell Berry's Peace of Wild Things poem to my mirror. A meditation, an incantation, married to a new purification ritual.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free

Schools shut down. We played with painters tape and chalk. I bought a plastic kiddie pool and a badminton set for the backyard. There was an attempt at virtual school, until that limped to a halt. I was glued to the climbing stats for our state, for our county. I saw myself in the shocked open faces of friends and celebrities online, musicians and actors and authors giving their love away. 

***

RJ stopped eating.

I called the therapist's office every morning at ten am. No spots opened up today, try tomorrow at ten! Finally I got him in. He didn't have anything to say to the therapist.

Now he wasn't waking up. Just a few muzzy, dizzy hours a day. Gaunt, silent, lurching.

I took him to the pediatrician. He had a seizure and blacked out on the table.

"Don't waste food on me," he said.

I starting checking him in the middle of the night-- is he still breathing?

***

I got bees. I wrote: 

"I feel so lucky to have the time and space to play in the garden and build up our little homestead. Today we ventured on a new homestead skill and installed bees in our new little hive. I sang Liz's song of the Yeats poem, "I will arise and go now, and go to innisfree...nine bean rows will I have there, and a hive for the honeybees, and live alone in the bee loud glade..."

The bees murmured under my hands and specked the air. It was awe inspiring to stand in the midst of them, I felt curiously like I was moving through warm little stars. The moved into their hive, and found the sugar water and the entrance and began nosing furrily around the fruit trees and the daisies. I love their dear fuzzy little insect hearts!"

***

By May I was frantic about RJ. He was failing. 

***

Thea and Nalen came to pray. We stood outside, and built up a little fire, and RJ and I tucked pinches of tabacco into prayer ties, and wafted white sage over them. 

Please, please, please, please. That was my prayer. 

Thea and Nalen sang for RJ, and for me. They prayed for us. I cried. It was a lifeline. Tie RJ to this world.

***

I did some art commissions. A Buffalo, a jellyfish, a medicine wheel, a celtic knot. I don't remember doing them, but when I see the pictures on instagram I remember what the pen felt like scritch-scritching over the watercolor paper. I sent them off.

On mother's day I wrote that we went to the shore, and I took a picture of Liko running down the cold windy beach. 

"Thor's Well

This mother's day was really painful but the ocean and the wind and having a forest picnic and a long winding coastal drive through quaint ghost towns and deathly hallows audiobook and actual CDs in the car and spicy ginger ale and scones for breakfast and shrimp for dinner and sweet kids snipping at each other to "stop being awful, it's mother's day" and gifting me hand written cards and surprise porch gifts from friends and a cookbook from my sister and the irises in bloom on the hill made it better."

A few days later it was my birthday and I wrote: 

Happy birthday to me! For my birthday, my sweet kids brought me breakfast in bed including strawberry shortcake. Maile made an elaborate treasure hunt for me with clues all over the house and yard. Since it was pouring and everywhere is closed, I decided in order to remember what I did for my 40th birthday instead of letting it blur away into the brainfog miasma that is covid19 brain, I would conscript my kids into making a quilt with me. So they picked the fabric from the fabric hoard in the garage and cut it all out, and then I happily put om my headphones, listened to Lady Sherlock audiobook, watched old BBC Robin Hood, enjoyed delicious food from my sweet neighbors and beautiful flowers from my dear friend and overall had a beautiful day! Happy new decade to me! Thanks to every single body who wished me well. I love you all.

It's almost funny to read this peppy message, and remember how bone-deep miserable I was. My boyfriend, not in our quarantine bubble, sent me a text, "hbd". I had always imagined that my 40th would be a big celebration, a huge party, a giant trip to Europe. Instead, I was terrified that RJ was dying, and we were isolated in a plague. Still, I was finding things to be grateful about. 

RJ was willing to work, to get better. I told him about FBT, family based therapy. I would make him eat. 

He was willing to try.

***

I finally called a specialist-- my sister had rallied her connections and found a dietician who specialized in eating disorders. Fifteen minutes into my conversation she told me to hang up and call the in-patient treatment center. "NOW," she said. "I'll call them from my end, too. He needs to go in, YESTERDAY."

Covid meant that RJ's full time treatment was online. It was a desperate blessing. He got to stay home, with his art supplies, his snakes, his houseplants. I wanted to grip him, nail him to this reality. He seemed to be flickering out of it, losing his grip on this world. 

If I dug in hard enough, if I was awake enough, all night, if I was just-- enough-- could I get him to stay?

***

Matt's 4th deathiversary passed. I didn't take a picture of it. So I don't remember what we did. 

On previous deathiversaries, we've been traveling, and we've taken his ashes to farflung places. Scotland, Denmark, The Big Island. This year... did I bury some under a tree in the yard? Did I cook a stake and put on slack key music, or Lonesome dove? Possibly. I blogged about it, vaguely. About how grief changes our calendar into a new set of personal high-holy-days.

I am a compulsive journal-writer, record-keeper. But I don't know what we did.

Sometimes, if it's too painful, I make sure I don't leave a mark.

***

Liko and Maile built blanket forts in the livingroom, and we went on walks on the empty little trails in the hills and mountains around town. We waved at friends from a distance, mimed air hugs, and kept to ourselves. 

***

The spring greened, sprawled, went wild with herbs and bees and squirrels and birds. We snuck away from the in-patient program on the weekends and went camping, once on the coast, in the dewy sand dunes at Eel Creek Campground, and once in the high mountain lake Waldo. RJ shivered and shivered and shivered. He was eating again, but nothing was sticking to his bones. He was a bird's wing. 

June and July came, and we went, all masked and distanced, to the Black Lives Matter rally in downtown Eugene. The sadness and heaviness of the world seemed like a shared experience. Look around, the world said. People are suffering. Not just this month, not just this terrible year, but for generations. People's suffering-- Black and Chinese and Native and Mexican people's suffering-- is the ossified bones of our country, laying our traintracks, laying out the laws, the zones, the punishments-- a cruel stamp of suffering that shapes our country, down to the DNA. 

We went. What could we do? I had to go, I had to take my kids. We have to be witnesses. At least that, at least to start. 

July is a month of mourning for me. Mourning my mom and her slow death of cancer is a different kind of grief than mourning Matt's suicide-death. It's only sadness, no perilous razor-wire just beneath the surface.

I wrote: 

I'm thinking of my mom Kira Pratt Davis .
She left 7/7/97 at 7:07 am.

We'll never ever stop missing her. Her twinkly wit, her intuition and insight and super focus and keen eye. Her gentleness and loyalty and love and bravery. And all those other ordinary things that we miss, miss, miss.

It breaks me that she never knew her grandkids, not on this earth anyway. She'd say she was their co-conspirator and confidant in the In-Between world's, and I hope so. I see her wit and magic and fierceness and talent in my kids. I wish she was here to hold them, and let them know they're not alone, now or ever.

Love is an ever fixed mark. She'd twinkle that line at my dad. Our love for her is ever-fixed. A lodestone, a hokupaa, a guide-star.

Sonnet 116
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd

The summer ripened, and Liko learned to ride her balancy bike, and I built half a dozen shelves in my garage to try and contain the camping stuff, the fabric, and the food that I had been canning and drying. 

In July, we had been looking forward to going back to the Sundance ceremony in Minnesota, but it was cancelled because of covid. My boyfriend Joe, the Sundance chief, who I hadn't seen for months except in distanced passing, went by himself to hold space for the ceremony. 

I missed that ceremonial high point. I missed being with my new Sundance family, together in the sweat lodge, letting ourselves melt into heat, steam, and prayer. I printed out booklets for my kids of Hawaiian chants, stories and geneologies, and every night of the full moon in July, we sat around the firepit outside and sang together. RJ began to twinkle again, he began to be present. 

We tried to stay connected with our people on Zoom, or Marco Polo, or Facebook video. It's a little bloodless, but at least it's another voice, another face.  My dad read a book to the kids, and we sat outside in the hammock, and turned the pages of our copy as he read. It was a gorgeous book, 

Actually, these virtual places became real places. One group was based on and amazing concept, reading one story a night from the Decameron, about people entertaining themselves with racy stories during the medieval plague. 

My weekly writer's group met every sunday morning virtually for coffee, encouragement, and flabbergasted survival. 

I video-chatted with old friends and new. My favorite ritual is "art avoidance" chats, where we confess the projects we're avoiding, maybe even pick up a pen or two, complain about how miserably hard art is, and then maybe manage to make some art together. I virtually attented fantastic Sherlock conventions and Irish music workshops and Hawaiian Makahiki workshops. We had weekly Hula on zoom. I loved the way that things, previously locked behind distance or cost, were suddenly available. Weird, sure. Different. But there. I loved that. There were silver linings. They were people.

***

In August, my boyfriend broke up with me. There was another woman. I was crushed.

Our friendship limped to an end. I had already hired him to redo my floors, the job was halfway done. He finished the job, I paid him, and I haven't seen him since. 

The thing with that kind of loss is it makes space. The relationship, the breakup-- it had been a lot of content. A lot of .... noise. And with it over, it was like walking around an open-plan house with the radio off. What are the bones of this architecture?

Every relationship and breakup I've been through has been a lesson. Sometimes the lesson is, people are assholes. (I won't categorically exclude myself from that category).

But nature. The river, the streams. We couldn't be with other people, but we could drive out to Moon Falls, to Spirit Falls, to the high altitude lakes with a little blow-up boat. We could walk under the hazelnuts at Dorris Ranch, out to the cottonwoods along the river. 

***

RJ worked hard, and he got better. This 13 year old did about a decade of growing up over the course of the summer. 

Our garden churned out tomatoes and the brambles along the back fence were covered in supersweet blackberries. I found out about some local farms that call in gleaners, and we picked 40 pounds of blueberries and 40 pounds of apples and pears. I had the big canning pot rattling and bubbling away, and my forearms were streaked with burns. No worries, I learned how to make salves and tinctures with the mounds of herbs in my front yard. 

My Mormon year's supply in the garage was waning. Something tickled the back of my brain-- this is a practice run. When we're really faced with things shutting down, the power going off, how prepared am I really? Lucky I had rice and beans, lucky I had basil and tomatoes in the garden, and eggs from the chickens. But this whole thing-- the fragility of our lives became clear. As much as I like the idea of ".5 acres and independence", really we're skinning the surface of the earth. That midsummer garden bounty, and the way 20 pounds of blueberries can sour into fur and vinegar in just a day or two, reminded me of one of Matt's favorite poems: 

“In this world
We walk on the roof of hell
Gazing at flowers”

― Kobayashi Issa

I wrote this:

How will I remember what's been going on in these last hot dry weeks of summer if I don't document it, try and catch the ephemera of a long weird lovely summer?
Today I put my shoulder to the...kitchen grindstone...and canned tarragon pickles, pear jam, made sooo much kimchee, made blueberry-apple leather, baked two pear gallettes, and made fermented ginger carrots. Yesterday we paddled around Waldo Lake until sunset and it was blazingly beautiful-- evergreens and clear deep lake water studded with worn volcanic mermaid thrones.
The kids have gotten into the swing-hah- of long hot boring afternoons in the hammock.
It's torture to be separated from friends and loved ones all these months, but we're finding ways to spend time together but far apart, like the starry night movie theater, and a social distanced ren faire (all my fiddlesticks chestnuts came through for me) and porch picnic birthday celebrations.
Miss all y'all.

My dad had another surgery, and his brave and beautiful teen kids took covid tests, and drove out to visit. It was like a feast to be around them, to remember that we have family and that they matter to us, to see my kids at ease with other kids. And to see how teenagers, the most astonishingly transformative of people, can be entirely new beings each time you meet them. New, and glorious. 

 And then, in September, Oregon burned.

It's a little blurry. The Holiday Farm Fire burned 173,000 acres. The evacuation area was 2 miles from us. The sky was red. Everything was covered in thick flakes of ash. The neighbors evacuated. The air qualility was in the 500s, far beyond what was safe. If I went outside to take out the garbage or feed the chickens, double masked, I'd come back in lightheaded, heart pounding.

I joked it was all the legal oregon weed burning. That's why my brain was slow, thick and stupid. 

The red sky.

The ash everywhere. The news said, "Don't blow it around, don't disturb it." Don't breathe it. Don't eat the vegetables its touched. The last of the berries and tomatoes, all ash-burned. 

The dry wind whipped it everywhere. The inside of the garage was coated with oily-flakey ash.

The little plastic kiddie pool outside was filled with lye, caustic water. 

We packed our bugout bags. I shoved photos and journals into a box and slumped it by the door. I coordinated with family. I could go to Utah, we could stay in the spare room. Covid? What covid. The air is on fire.

We were immobilized. The mouse staring into the eyes of the snake. Would it strike? Would the fire jump the couple of blocks, the roads and houses, and come to us? No. Surely not. But... who could have imagined everything else that had already, in fact happened this year? 

People evacuated. We stayed, staring down the tremulous fire snake. For days, days, days. 

Gradually the orange-black sky dulled to grey. Eventually it rained. How many days-- it felt like two. It was two weeks.  The fires stopped spreading. Finally, neighbors came back. The smoke cleared, little by little. 

And suddenly, under the ash, it was Fall. We shakily celebrated Bilbo Baggins Birthday, dressed in hobbit finery, and zoomed in friends and family to read poems and tell jokes. 

School started again, mid-firey inferno. RJ managed two weeks before it all was too much. I pulled him out to homeschool. He took a virtual art class and I made a low-key bare bones 8th grade curriculum for him. Read, write, think, speak. 

Bare bones. Putting meat on the bones.

There's this seasonal depression that rolls in the undertow every fall. Every year I hope the heat and the brightness of summer can keep me lifted. But it can't. Every fall, it feels precarious. I love my life, I don't want to check out early. But it just.. it's too hard. I try and make things soft, try and build in structures and reliefs and reasonable expectations. But it's a slow gritty grind from September to December, until the light starts to come back.

A few daily rituals are my wobbly rope ladder over the chasm. Wake up. Drink water. Flip Youtube on the TV and go to the hula practice list. Start moving. Try to learn the words. Bend knees, loosen hips. Where is my breath, where is my body? 

And then another generous life-line. Kumu Kalei Nuuhiwa began doing daily Hawaiian oli on zoom, and sharing them on facebook. Underwater, in the slip stream, chanting and learning was a filiment of light, of oygen. 

October Liko's birthday. We drove out to the beach. I wrote: 

happy FIVE to this bright and shiny kid!
We did the traditional breakfast in bed, packed a picnic and headed to the coast. Otters, socially distant seals and sharks, and a romp to the blustery beach---
Unfortunately the picnic didnt make it in the car. And liko wouldn't eat unfamiliar snacks from the gas station. Ah well, epic birthday meltdowns are also traditional. Pizza delivery, and a three tier three flavor cake by RJ and Maile, and an palliative episode of Dragon Prince, and birthday peace is restored.

I sewed Halloween costumes in a mad rush after I realized Joann's Fabric can deliver. We embraced our nerdiness, and really cosplayed. Umbrella Academy, She-Ra, Avatar, and Korra. There wasn't any trick or treating, but we went and threw candy at the neighbor kids from a distance. It was strange to walk down the streets and see everyone's extra-ornate Halloween decorations, and not see a soul outside.

I love the spookiness of Halloween, the intentional leaning into the dark. There are so many stories and rituals. And we leaned into the horror-- I found all my favorite old silly scary movies and shows. We dove into Supernatural, and lost ourselves in the hero's journey of frail human good guys conquering overconfident supernatural bad guys. We carved our pumpkins, homegrown from last year's jackolanterns, into anti-possession sigils.

One neighbor had a giant Trump spraypainted on plywood, sneering, double thumbs up. It was unclear if this was terrifying halloween decor or a political statement. It was time for the election. 

Refresh, refresh, refresh the feeds. Any news? Is there any chance things will go okay? Trump winning 4 years ago had seemed like the most impossible kind of bad luck, an evil omen, a crossed timeline, a glitch in the matrix. No matter what the numbers or the forecasters said, I had no confidence that civil war wasn't about to break out. 

And then, while we were waiting, #destiel trended on Twitter. 

And I think it may have broken one of the 66 seals of the apocalypse, because what surreal timeline is that? Where #destiel and #putin ride the high wave of national focus, briefly eclipsing the election results??

My poor shattered shippers heart... Years and years ago, I loved Supernatural and read all the romantic Dean/Castiel fanfiction I could get my hands on. But the engine for a big fandom ship is the ambiguity and the frustrating failings of the show writers. Shows that answer all the questions and grant all the wishes don't NEED fic. And with a show as, how can I put this gently, unevenly written, as Supernatural, you can't really expect that they'll deliver on the narrative promises they set up. 

So, for #destieliscanon to trend, mid election, was a crazy lightning flash on a reality where maybe, possibly, okayish things can happen. 

My big kids and I jumped into the show nightly after dinner.Tales of tragedy and triumph. The possibility of love.

***

My sister Liz came out to visit, with her negative Covid test in hand, and we got to be around another human for one miraculous weekend while she picked up her brand new baby puppy. We all immediately fell in love with this new fuzzy cousin, the best of all possible puppies, named appropriately Felix. May he be an elixer of luck and love!

***

Late Fall 2020.... The leaves fell, the squirrels mobbed the sagging sunflower heads, the river rose. It was Makahiki, the season of Lono. The season of cracking open, smashing open the clogged dams, opening up the magma rifts. We had a tiny Thanksgiving, Cornish game hens and mini-corn and teensy flutes of sparkling apple cider. 

After dinner, we built a fire, and talked about Lono, and chanted and danced. We thought about the directions the stars were moving across the sky, and we watched the stars come out. Let's hope this new year lets good things fall through the net, onto the land.

The rhythm of the days, weeks, months ticked by. Friday night pizza. Shows after dinner. Reading time. Practice hula. Dinner. Tea. Sunday hikes. Saturday chores. Grocery pick up. Tick, tick, tick.

Christmas, when the lights are up, and everything is cold and dark outside and warm and candle-lit inside. I unpacked the christmas books and the nerdy fandom ornaments, and tacked christmas lights over the windows. I trawled Etsy and made impulse purchases from the local bookstore, wanting to say yes to every thing my kids wanted, everything that I wanted. 

There's such a hunger this year. We're missing our friends, we're missing our clubs and groups and classes and teachers. We're missing restaurants and cafes and libraries and concerts. So many things this year have been, "no." No friends, no family, no new people, no adventures. So many of the things that defined us become, No, no, no. The stack of gifts under the tree represented "yes." 

We talked about the Green man, the Holly king. I read The Dark is Rising, and told the Hannukah story and listened to my mom's Hannukah songs. 

****

People really are the lifeline. Our next door neighbors, by some bizarre stroke of good luck, are nerdy fannish musician educator Sherlockian with ties to California, Japan, Holland, Maryland and Hawaii, with three kids. They are similarly locked down in a very strict quarantine, and we've bubbled up. And that heartbeat of being able to run next door for tea, or to watch their baby, or to sing Christmas carols together-- it aches, it's so good. 

People. I don't want to take people for granted any more.

I remember so many times thinking, before quarantine life became a thing, that "this experience is cool, and it will happen again." This concert is fun. The next one will be fun, too. This jam session is exciting, I'll be better prepared for the next one. I had an expectation that good things were replicable.

Maybe not. Maybe it's just right now.

***

We're floating through this weird year. Writing, drawing, cooking, feeding the animals. Watching and reading good stories.

So was 2020 a message? Was it "no." perhaps? Was it Gaia pumping the breaks, or God forcing us to slow down, to appreciate what we have? Was it a wise chance for recalibration?

There is danger in ascribing meaning to global disasters. Anything that is big enough to have that much persepctive and control, and doesn't fix bad things, is a malevolent god.  I prefer to believe in fae-sized gods. They may help you find your keys, but they won't smite 300,000 people. That's just virology and bad luck. 

So was 2020 a message though? I don't know. Maybe it's just compost. Maybe it's just a fallow time, for rotten things to rot, and dormant things to grow, and buried things to come to life.