THANKFUL FRIDAY
Cindy Maddera
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I am going to make a confession that Michael doesn’t even know about. After every grocery shopping trip, when I have everything loaded in the car and I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, I take off my mask, rest my head on the steering wheel and cry. I know. It sounds dramatic and depressing. I am not crying over the trauma of grocery shopping. I am not fearful of contracting COVID-19. I take it seriously, but it does not strike a cord of terror in me like it has for others. I am crying because I am mourning a way of life. I cry for the way things used to be. I cry because grocery shopping has become an actual chore. I also cry over the good parts, the way everyone is so respectful of each other’s space. I cry over the grocery workers who I know are exhausted, but still manage to greet each person with a cheerful ‘hello’. I cry over how polite we have become to each other, the patience we have with each other as we shop for the things we need while maintaining our distance. I also cry for this moment I am alone in my car.
And I am grateful for those tears.
While I miss things like going to the office everyday and my Saturday morning grocery experience and being able to sit in the same room with friends and family, I feel like I am settling into this new routine. I spend Mondays and Tuesdays in Python class and coding my assignments. Wednesdays are spent watching an Illustrator tutorial on figure preparation for journal submission and reading the manual for the electron microscopy image processing software. Thursdays have become grocery and cleaning days and Fridays are lab meeting, reading the paper for the next Journal Club meeting and Friday Science seminar. Then there are slots of time between all of those things for me. Every morning around 9:00 AM, Josephine pats me on my leg while I work at the computer. That’s her way of saying that it is time for her walk and I take her on an exploration of the neighborhood. I still take a moment every Monday for my Buddha Board project and once a week, I mine the tarot cards for writing some short fiction. Then there is that hour in the middle of the day when I roll out my yoga mat. My yoga practice has gotten hella strong. I do up to twenty to thirty rounds of sun salutations with warrior I and warrior II. I work on poses that I never really do because they’re too much of a challenge. The other day, I was in a wide leg forward fold with my forearms on the floor and I just spontaneously popped myself up into a head stand. Then I started laughing at myself and fell out of it, but when Michael came in I said “Hey! Watch what I can do!” and did it all over again.
So, I can take my moment to mourn. It’s really just a tiny slip of a moment that is growing smaller each week, and then I can resettle myself into this new routine, new life, and this new version of myself.
I am doing a fucking great job.