BY BETHANY SPRAGINS LUTZ

Photos by Courtney Searcy

FEATURED IN VOL 6, ISSUE 2: home and garden

I’ve been hiding out from the world now for 55 days.

In the beginning, there was adrenaline coursing through my veins, and I made lists of projects and hopeful homeschool schedules and age-appropriate chore lists written in marker on index cards. Like a lot of us, I heaped pressure on myself and everyone around me to do better and become something better while we had so much unbroken time.

We aren’t in the beginning anymore, are we?

I did not know then what I know now. I didn’t know how exhausting social media would become, as my neighbors and friends dug their heels in deeper than ever, both sides afraid, both sides so sure of everything. I did not know that it would only take a week for me to become oversaturated with bad news and that I would need to avoid it altogether most days to save my shredded sanity.

I have felt, at times, like the only reasonable thing to do was to run away from home. Other times, I have thought that I would like to crawl out of my own skin. My thoughts are often a jumbled mess that I can’t untangle, no matter how hard I try.

There have been good times, too.

In the sweet moments, like the long nap times I have been able to spend rocking my three-year-old instead of sending him to preschool, my heart is full to bursting as I look at his dirty little fingernails and feel his breath getting even and slow. But even in the good times, ever-present in the back of my mind is the low hum of fear and dread of all the things we are hearing and the things no one knows for sure.

Will my little one with a history of respiratory issues be able to stay well as stay-at-home orders are lifted and people return to their normal patterns? Will I be able to keep him safe? If he isn’t well, will I be able to give him the care he needs at home? If he has to be treated in the hospital, will the hospital still have what it needs to treat him? Will they take him from me?

I lay him in his bed and for thirty minutes, no one will need me. I should catch up on emails, I should check in with my boss, I should write something, anything. I should call my cousin and check in on her. She has spent days on end on hold with the unemployment office with no sign of an answer. She’s trying to be brave but I know she is scared now. I should wash the dishes, fold the clothes, write the blog post, work on a side project that’s actually billable, order the groceries, get the winter clothes out of the closets, balance the checkbook, bathe the dog.

I am surrounded by work, everywhere I look, with no markers to tell me where one task ends and another one should begin. I had my work days and my home days, back when life was normal. Now I have a revolving list of good things to do in my brain but I am paralyzed by the thought of writing them down and ranking them in importance. Everything feels ultimate, and I am exhausted but unaccomplished when the baby wakes up. I have neither rested nor worked.

When I get downstairs with my little one on my hip, the phone rings and it’s someone I love very much, brainstorming for the hundredth time today. We have spent days searching together for a safe plan that could keep her business open and continue to serve her customers well in the midst of this pandemic. Her pain gets all over me, under my skin, and I forget to breathe for a full minute when we hang up.

We are all so scared. Everything feels like an emergency, all day long.

I have to get out or I might explode.

I step outside to walk around my backyard, leaving my shoes inside. My ninety-year-old home on Westmoreland was owned by a gardener named Mr. Joe for decades before we moved in, and this is our second spring here. It’s the first spring, however, that I have actually been home to watch the grey winter give way to bright spring.

I walk along the flower bed closest to the house, checking on the annuals I added this year. My heartbeat climbs down out of my ears.

I walk along the stone path beside the huge bed of Helleborus orientalis where I am sure all the snakes live among the deep, green, broad leaves. They are blooming again, bending low under the weight of the elegant purple flowers. I walk through the arbor Mr. Joe built out of 4x4s and scrap metal. Just a few weeks ago, there was nothing but a pile of sticks up top, but now it’s covered in leafy vines, its own ecosystem, and I can’t see the sun when I stand under it and look up.

I am surrounded by good things that I didn’t plant, in soil I never tilled. I couldn’t have known what a gift this yard would be when we committed to this home and sold our last one before we’d ever walked its perimeter.

The long bed in the way-backyard, as we call it, was tended carefully all those years that Mr. Joe lived here. We moved in at Easter of last year, and everything was just starting to fill in and green up and bloom. We had no idea what was waiting for us under the surface. All summer long, bulbs that had been waiting in the dark earth would burst up in turn, each week a new round of color.

There were probably a lot of plants back there that sprang up and turned back to dust last
summer without being noticed, at least by me.

This time last year our family of 6 had a different activity on the schedule each night of the week, three jobs between my husband and I, and he had grad school classes each week after work. The pace was breathless and we all crashed hard into June. It was really hard to live that way, and I can’t imagine signing back up for all that again, even when this is over. I don’t see a new way forward yet, but the path back to our old life seems to disappear before my very eyes when I try to look back. I don’t know what comes after this, but I hope there is no way back to the way things were before.

Now that I have had my hands in this little plot of dirt that I call mine, I can’t imagine living so hard that I miss its gifts next year. I have planted and dug and weeded and unearthed bulbs that are older than me and laid in the grass staring up at trees planted almost a century ago. The dirt is rich and black and cold and it stains my fingernails and it is breaking me open and making me new.

COVID-19 and the devastation it has wrought is purely terrible. There is no spiritualizing away the suffering it has caused people, and I don’t find it helpful to engage ideas of a God who would cause this kind of suffering. God is love and love is simple. No cosmic force sent us this scourge to teach us a lesson and make humble homemakers out of CEOs.

I have to hold the devastation and suffering that this virus has caused in my left hand and the very good gifts it’s brought to me in the other.

There is no black and white in this life, only gray. The good and the bad are always mixed up together and this time is teaching me how to hold them both, without giving way to paralyzing guilt or overwhelming despair. This time is making me strong enough to stop lowering my eyes from the reality of the suffering of so many and teaching me how to hold space for real suffering without crumbling or numbing myself. This spring has been devastating and life-giving at the very same time. We have mourned death and loss while new life has been bursting through all around us, demanding to be acknowledged alongside the pain of quarantine. I can’t look away from either. I believe that we will see the other side of this, and I hope that we will never be the same.