you’ve got to serve somebody

“In times of deep darkness, we not only need light, we need to be light for one another.”  ~ Parker J. Palmer

It’s quiet here. After ten and a half months of intense family togetherness, with first three, and then four, of us living together under one roof, my husband and I are once again a couple.  The house is still, the solitary hours unspooling like thread. I could sit on the couch staring out the window until dark, and no one would know or care or wonder what’s for lunch. This morning I automatically filled the coffee pot with nine cups of water, only to remember that four is plenty now. Our ranks have been cut in half.

When Henry arrived home last March 13 with two hastily packed suitcases, his spring break plan to meet us for a short family vacation in New Orleans had been abruptly transformed into a last-minute one-way ticket to New Hampshire. At the time, none of us could foresee how radically life was about to change. All we knew was that a week of sightseeing suddenly felt like a bad idea, and that none of the money we’d spent to book it all was refundable.

I’d bought Lysol wipes and hand sanitizer before they disappeared from store shelves, stocked up on toilet paper, and had even sent digital thermometers to our sons.  And yet, looking back now, I’m struck by how little we understood of what was already beginning to unfold across the globe. We certainly didn’t expect to be hunkered down in one place for nearly a year. It seems naïve in hindsight, but it’s a fact:  we had no idea what was coming. Other than the epidemiologists who study these things, no one did.

As the University of Alabama went entirely remote last spring, Henry bought himself a large monitor, an electronic keyboard, a few books, and a bigger iPad, and began to teach his music classes remotely from his old bedroom upstairs.  For the first time since he began teaching, we got to see him not as our quiet, reserved thirty-year-old son but as the engaging, energetic college professor his students know and love.

When summer arrived, and then again in early November, we welcomed our soul daughter Lauren into our family bubble.  Lauren had been working remotely from her townhouse in Georgia, putting in long days staring at a screen, followed by long solitary walks around her neighborhood. Meanwhile, once the Georgia lockdown lifted last spring, her roommate had gone back to work in an office.  It is of course the central Covid dilemma of every household – how to negotiate the world, how to meet the requirements of a job, how much exposure to others feels safe, how much isolation is tenable or feasible or bearable.  And then, how to hash it all out with the people you live with.  In Atlanta, cases were rising. In our small town I could still hit the grocery store at 7 am and be the only person in the produce section. Steve was going to work in his office, too, but alone.

“Come here,” we urged her last fall. “None of us is going anywhere. And you might as well just stay on right through Christmas.”  Unlike in the summer, when everyone had been completely locked down at home, this second, longer, visit required even more caution — a Covid test in Atlanta, a 922-mile drive completed in one day, followed by ten days of quarantine in our basement.

As evening fell, I’d text Lauren from the kitchen, “Ready for wine?”  What she really wanted, though, was to be upstairs helping.  “I started hearing you up there and felt bad I’m sitting down here in my pjs with my book,” she wrote one night from the cellar.  “Feels like I should at least be setting the table or washing dishes.  Soon!”

Later, when I went downstairs to pick up the dinner tray, I’d find a thank you note under her empty plate. What she didn’t know was that preparing a good meal for someone I dearly love wasn’t a chore but a pleasure, just as having all the bedrooms occupied and the refrigerator full had brought an energy into the house I didn’t even realize we’d been missing.  Suddenly, we were one organism, a family by both blood and choice. Sheltering here together meant that all our lives were enriched. Already the days felt more purposeful, more fun.

Lauren’s second negative test came back a few days before Thanksgiving. And so as virus cases climbed everywhere, and at a time when many families were painfully separated from loved ones, we had four people at the dinner table every night. It was as if, after years of perching here in an empty nest, we opened the door and two chicks flew back in – but as adults now, equal partners in the work and play of the household.

It is said that there are two kinds of people.  There are those who go wide – the restless seekers who eagerly leave home in search of adventure and who love nothing more than new places, novelty, and uncharted territory.  And then there are those who go deep – homebodies by nature who are content to stay put, sinking long roots into the earth beneath their feet and fully inhabiting their one small corner of the planet.

For better and for worse, Covid has challenged us all to become people who go deep. By necessity, our roots have been sunk; the question then becomes, Can you bloom where you’re planted? I was already a person who’d rather be home, introverted by nature, happiest alone with an empty day stretching before me.  My husband, a bit less solitary, was used to running a busy office, engaging with colleagues and customers. Henry loved his spacious apartment in Tuscaloosa, his music department, interacting with students and his fellow faculty members, playing piano and rehearsing musical productions. And Lauren, pouring her all into a demanding new job, had found that the key to staying on top of her workload in Atlanta was to adhere to a strict, almost monastic schedule – up early for yoga, logging in before breakfast, a quick walk at mid-day, in bed with a book by eight.

None of us was sure how we’d all manage living in one another’s pockets for months on end.  We are 71 and 62 and 40 and 31 years old – of different generations and different temperaments, with different rhythms, different tastes in TV, different ideas about what to eat for breakfast, different notions about how to spend an evening at home.  Of course, we would be spending every evening at home.

How well, I wondered, could we coexist without any respite from one another, with no place to go, no escape hatches when tensions arose, no friends to meet or shopping trips to take or dinners out to break up the routine?  What would we do?

“I know you want to clean the freezer,” Lauren said one night soon after she’d emerged from quarantine. “Let’s do it tomorrow.” The basement freezer, which I ambitiously stocked last spring and then continued to stuff with odds and ends from all my summer leftovers, was full to bursting.  There was pesto in there somewhere, but finding it would require an excavation. Cleaning the freezer is the kind of job I tend to put off until my hand is forced by, say, a three-day power outage. Cleaning a freezer is the kind of job Lauren is happy to tackle on her lunch hour.

So we did.  And with that, all my worries about how we might fill our time melted away.

Every morning, Steve went to his office, as he’s done through all the decades of our marriage. This year, though, I stopped taking that for granted and began to appreciate, in a way I never have, how fortunate we are that the small business he started almost on a whim twenty years ago not only supports us but continues to challenge and delight him.  As he often says, as he kisses me good-bye and heads out the door, “It’s a good thing I like going to work.”

Every day, Henry recorded piano pieces for his students, coached his seniors over Zoom, taught his theory and musical history classes, and found new ways to engage and inspire the young performers who were singing into computer screens in their own homes instead of in front of audiences and classmates in Alabama.

Every day, Lauren would sit down at her desk before the rest of us were even out of bed and begin sorting through the emails and projects multiplying on her screen.

And every day I embraced the very roles I’d largely retired from when our sons left home years ago – full-time mother, wife, housekeeper, cook.  I’m pretty good at all these jobs.  What I didn’t expect was just how fulfilling they’d turn out to be when I was called back into service in my sixties and given an opportunity to up my game. Everyone was working hard.  Of course I was happy to make grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, cut into triangles, with pickles on the side.

Live in a house with three other people for months on end, go nowhere, see no one, and you either go deep or you start banging your heads against the wall.  We went deep.  We did it by getting to know each other, by extending ourselves for each other, and by taking care of each other.

The great freezer cleaning was just the beginning. Lauren took on the oven, the pantry, a few junk-filled drawers, my yoga room.  She folded laundry, vacuumed, washed dishes, and shoveled snow.  Henry unloaded the dishwasher every afternoon, set the table every night, got up early on Sunday mornings to make his oven-baked pancake puff, and played the piano in the evening.  He curated videos for us to watch and moonlighted doing work for his dad to earn extra cash.  He meditated and ran and FaceTimed with his best friend. By the end of the year he’d read fifty books.

Steve supported us. But he was also the first one downstairs every morning, putting dishes away, letting the dog out, setting out the breakfast things.  He was the grill chef, the snow-blower, the fire maker, the pan washer, the bill payer.

Lauren and I got so used to cooking together that we could dance through dinner preparations with barely a missed step.  We pored over cookbooks, printed out new recipes, made fresh pasta, homemade pizza, shrimp tacos, sticky toffee pudding, granola, and chicken pot pie.  She taught me how to use an InstantPot.  I taught her to make bread, seven loaves at a time. We did Zoom cardio classes in the early morning and rolled out our yoga mats for deep stretching in the late afternoon. We sat on the floor trading fabric scraps and planning our next embroidery projects, as if we were ten-year-olds on a play date.  We learned the fly stitch.

Most nights, Steve built a fire and we all carried our plates into the living room to eat dinner and linger by candlelight, talking about our days.  What was there to talk about?  I can hardly remember now.  And yet every day was full.  We fed the birds, and got to know their habits, the way the three blue-jays always travel together, the way the nuthatches eat upside down, the way the chickadees bounce through the air on their way to the feeder and snap their wings near your cheek as they pop in to eat. We read up on the various woodpeckers, fed the squirrels, and then named them. Pretty soon we were creating stories for them, too, and leaving extra treats along the top of the stonewall.

Each of us read Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter from an American  every morning at the breakfast table.  We walked the road, ten thousand steps or more a day, and snow-shoed through the woods and the fields.  We shared leisurely meals with my parents, and games of Balderdash and Scrabble. We snuggled in under the afghans my grandmother crocheted years ago and watched The Crown, Pretend It’s a City, and every minute of Joe Biden’s inauguration day. We kissed Tess on the nose and hugged each other a lot. We celebrated every full moon, every fresh snowfall, the orchids blooming on the windowsill.   We sewed and read and sewed and read and sewed some more.  Last thing before bed, Henry, Lauren and I would compare notes on our progress on the day’s New York Times Spelling Bee.  Separately, we might be Amazing.  Together, we were Geniuses.

On the night before Henry and Lauren drove South together last week, we ordered take out food and carried our plates into the living room to eat in front of the fire one last time. We used the good dishes, the nice silver, lit the candle, and poured champagne. The car was already packed, their rooms emptied.  It seemed hard to believe we were about to say goodbye.  Lauren was going home.  Henry was returning to Alabama to begin socially distanced rehearsals for a spring musical and to teach some of his classes in person.

“What will you remember most from this time?” I asked, wondering if everyone else was feeling as emotional as I was.

“I’ve never spent this much time here,” Henry reminded us.  I’d forgotten that, but it was true.  We moved into this house during his senior year of high school, that summer he was away working in Maine, and in the fall he left for college.  “But seeing all the seasons come and go, seeing the garden from the very beginning to the very end, and realizing how much work you do out there, makes me appreciate it all in a way I never did when I just came back to visit. I’ve looked at those mountains every day for 10 ½ months, and they are always different. I don’t think I’ve ever paid such close attention to nature before, or quite understood how much effort goes into taking care of everything here. But now I do.”

“I will remember this,” Lauren said, gesturing to all of us, to the room, the fire. “I haven’t had family dinners since my parents got divorced when I was 12.  So to sit down together like this, every night, to have these meals together, these conversations and hugs and closeness, feels like a gift.  I’ll be lonely in Atlanta.  But I’ve also learned here that I can let the job go, a little, and that I don’t have to put in all those hours.  It will still be there the next day, and I won’t ever get it all done, so I don’t have to try.  I can relax a little, and give myself some time.  But,” she paused, “I’m really going to miss being here.”

Now that the “kids” are gone, it’s taking me a while to re-adjust to these solitary days, the empty rooms, the quiet house, the return to two placemats on the table.  When I look back at the last three months, I’m amazed at how much we all got done. But even more, I’m struck by how easy it was, and by how happy we were.  Happy during a time when so much of what was going on in the world was cause for worry, grief, and despair.

The secret to being happy, it turns out, is just to be kind.  The trick to getting along — day in and day out, when you can’t leave and you can’t invite other people in and you are entirely dependent for companionship on the human beings under your roof – is to figure out what those human beings need from you, and then try to give it to them.  Somehow, by grace or perhaps by unspoken mutual intention, we learned what we needed to know.

I’ve been thinking all day about the quote from Pope John Paul II that hangs on a small plaque in our half bath near the kitchen: “To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children,” it reads. “Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of the others.”

It occurs to me now, as I listen to the silence, that perhaps the most important work any of us can do on this earth is to figure out how to maintain joy, even in the face of loss. We humans may be at our best when we’re engaged in the creative process of nourishing our relationships, stepping up to become, in some meaningful way, the servant of others.  For joy and service, it seems, are inextricably intertwined, perhaps now more than ever, as we dig in and try to survive yet another isolating pandemic winter.

We can’t change or control events beyond our door, but we can choose to be the servants of each other.

We can do it by trying to anticipate each other’s needs and meeting them.  We can do it by bending a bit here and compromising a bit there, for the good of all.  We do it by softening around the little things, and by engaging in hard, open-hearted conversations when bigger things come up.  We do it by asking each other questions and then really listening to the answers.  We serve each other by supporting each other and encouraging each other and by letting each other be.

And what I realize now as I think back over this long, intimate time together is that two things which might seem to contradict each other are both in fact true:  This has been a hard, sad, horrifying year.  And yet within these walls it has also been, in countless small ways, a joyful one. I’ll remember that.