Mid-wash

(cross-posted from my other blog, Food for My Daughters)

I ride my bike to drop off a copy of my book, Food for My Daughters, to a friend who had given hers away years ago and wanted to reread it (as it’s increasingly relevant again now). She lives by the elementary school that her children and mine attended, and I swing by there afterwards.

I take a photo on the wooded path that my younger daughter and I used to walk to get there on the days we didn’t ride our bikes (a story about which, titled Every Inch, is in the April chapter of that book).

And then I see the relics of a world now gone from just four weeks ago when schools had their last day of in-person classes before closing due to the global coronavirus pandemic. The sign that says you’re tardy. A child’s head adornment (before masks). Jackets still hung on the fence by the now-closed playground, as if everyone left mid-wash (which I guess they sort of did).

This reminds me of the poem by that name (Mid-Wash) that’s in my book on pages 72-73, and I reread it, reminding myself how temporary we all are. How fast things can change. How what’s left is what’s left. How nature prevails.

And how we still hold the power in our hands to determine what direction we’re going to take when this is all over, and what will ultimately remain at the end of the day.