These Tempest Days Are Making Us Dig Down Deep

Yesterday, when I was out running, I got to thinking and I decided that these quarantine times are just like the Shakespeare play The Tempest.  But then I tried to remember what happened in The Tempest and all I could remember is that there are these people who live on an island, and one of them is a sorcerer named Prospero and that there was a lot of nudity in the movie adaption of it that we watched in a college class. We called it Prospero’s penis. You can read about the movie here. It is  avant garde the kind of thing professors liked to show to undergraduates in the 90’s. 

 I also remembered that Prospero, the sorcerer sent a Tempest, which is like a big storm at sea, and it blew everything around and made one and everything out of place.   

The play is about how everyone reacts after the big storm.  So, since I couldn’t really remember much of what happed, I decided to google the plot of The Tempest this morning, after which I decided that life is not really like The Tempest, because all kinds of crazy stuff happens in in the play, except for the fact that everything seems to be blown around and rearranged. 

I am not even talking specifically about the social justice issues and protesting that is going on right now. I couldn’t even begin to write about that right now. 

I am talking about something on a more fundamental level. 

For me, personally, in the last 12 weeks, since the quarantine started, my life has been infused in a with a myriad of emotions.  Since I already used the word penis in this post, I will just go for it—This quarantine has been, to quote The Rocky Horror Picture Show, “A mental mind f***”.  

 Though, in one regard, at least in my house, the days have been sweeter than normal life, in that we have way, way, more time for each other.   

Without all the running around, there has been more time to notice things.  For example, I had believed for some time now that the 2 year old, when not being distracted by toys and other shiny objects, was led by the 4 year old in their play and tended to do what his brother did.  But upon further observation during this quarantine, I now believe that the 2-year-old is the more independent child.  He can entertain himself in a way that the 4-year-old still has trouble with.  

For example, without all the rushing around to get to the YMCA in the morning or to get the older one off to school, I had time to notice that the two-year-old, with no trouble, can spend twenty minutes pushing little cars around on one particular shelf in the living room.  He puts them on the shelf then moves them to the top shelf of his toy kitchen. Then he stands on his kitchen and moves them back. He has added to his collection and now there are three cars on the shelf.  They entertain him for a least a little while every day. 

Without all the running around, the four-year-old has more times for his own projects or “experiments” as he calls them.  Yesterday, as soon as he got up, he had to quickly dress and take his safety scissors out into our yard to take a sample of burned grass from where the meat smoker sat the day before. Wants to study this site and “solve the mystery of the missing meat smoker”. (Spoiler alert, it went back to its spot in the shed).   

He put his sample into a Ziplock bag that will sit around in our kitchen forgotten until a grownup finds it and gets to throw it away (who am I kidding? I am that grownup.) 

Another of his “experiments” from yesterday consisted of him, putting shaving cream into a Ziplock bag with water from the kitchen sink. Then adding all the colors of food coloring in the box.  Then him, placing the bag in the refrigerator for twenty minutes.  When he couldn’t wait any longer, he took the bag out of the refrigerator and he cut the top off of the Ziplock bag with his safety scissors (he really likes those), and placed the bag on the table so that the contents spilled onto the table a little and made a small mess.   

But that’s science for you!  Sometimes you make a mess and you definitely get to “observe” things and play with scissors and food coloring. 

So without these lazy days, who knows if we would have had all of these great observations? 

Like I said, the days are sweet.  We eat lunch with Daddy on weekdays, which almost never happened during the non-Convid days. 

The days are sweet until the days are hard.  On the hard days, we are all into each other’s space and there seems to be no place to hide.  Rainy days are long, without the option of going outside. Someday nice days are hard too, with reasons we cannot explain. 

With less differentiation between weekends and weekdays, it makes the weekends less special.  Fridays are less sacred. There’s less absence to make the heart grow fonder. 

I have been struggling with insomnia on and off since the quarantine started.  I can almost always fall asleep with the help of melatonin, which I have been taking for years.  It is the staying asleep that is the problem.  More than once in the last few months, I have woken at some godforsaken hour, and haven’t been able to go back to sleep. 

But the days are good too, we have been having more campfires.  We have had about an average of two campfires a summer the past few years.  This year, we have already our yearly allotment.  Last Saturday night, we even had a grownups only campfire after the boys went to bed which really hit the spot. 

We also can’t just recycle the same old material in conversations anymore either as I haven’t seen the library patrons since March and don’t really have any library stories right now and he and his co-workers plan to try not and be in the lab at the same time.  We also have the same sons and watch the same TV shows so we are forced to dig a little deeper with our conversations. It is good. It is promoting a lot of realness.  

Eventually, life will be starting up again as normal, albeit with masks this time.  In my area, we are moving from a red county to a yellow county tomorrow and with that we will gain the freedom to have gatherings of up to 25 people. 

What new changes we will see to our lives post quarantine remains to be seen.   But at least now I know that I can sleep easy now that I learned last weekend that Mr. Katie wants to take up smoking meats as a hobby and he knows that I cheated and watched a few of the episodes of the final season Bojack Horseman without him.  

The price of this new level of openess?

12 weeks of togetherness. 

It’s pretty great.