Sunday, April 12, 2020

Total Confirmed: 1,850,220

Total Deaths: 114,215

Total Tested in US: 2,805,892

You’re not wearing pants again, he says. What percentage of the day do you not wear pants?

But I lost track.

It’s Easter, I guess. No Easter Parade, no festivities. I didn’t even bother to color Easter eggs. I mean, I could’ve hidden them for my husband but I don’t think he missed that I didn’t.

I imagine the eggs were sold out at the store. Everything sells out at the store. But I was good and stayed home and sat in the sunshine.

The Pope is used to a hundred thousand people attending Easter Mass. This time there was one person per pew. And he didn’t even speak from the balcony of the Basilica like usual. The Great Easter That Wasn’t. So it was time for a bike ride.

We found an e-bike park and were totally thrilled with ourselves. It’s an old golf course that the city took over and turned into walking trails and windy bike trails around bushes and little hills and around this little tree and that one. Aidan called me Chipper Jo a lot because I was so happy but then I only had one bar of power left on the bike and we had to go home and then he called me Crabby Jo. We made it just in time and rolled into the garage and plugged them in right away.

My Dad was a big time cribbage player and when he passed, we ended up with about 20 cribbage boards. We’d been wondering what to do with them for a few years now, and Aidan finally came up with a great plan.

Let’s paint them and make signs for the garden! he said.

So we busted out all his old acrylic paint from painting models 35 years ago that was still miraculously usable. All the old spray paint from an estate sale that we got in bulk for, like, $5. The paintbrushes from our paint-by-number paintings, and all the leftover little twenty-seven-and-a-half sample paints I got at Home Depot when I was trying to figure out what color to paint the living room.

We sat in the warm sunshine on the back patio and painted away. Strawberry, Blackberry, Plum, Peach, Apple, Cherry, Lavender, Leeks, Chocolate Mint, Spearmint, Peppermint, Cat Mint, Bee Balm, Lemon Balm, Lilac, Snapdragon, Sunflower. It was so fun and relaxing and creative and healing.

I was grateful for the sunshine and the warmth on my head and the warmth of my little family.

And any residual COVID bad feelings I’d been carrying on my shoulders and my lower back and the spot right behind my left eye turned into sunshine and gave me a farmer’s tan.

And I felt safe.

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