Houses I Don't Live In Yet
Photograph by Fran Virues Avila (source)
They were giving away free roses at the supermarket checkout the other day. Long-stemmed but natural, like garden roses, the flowers still pinched into buds. I took a white one, and once back home, clipped the stem and set it in a big glass of water. A few hours later the petals started to open.
Normal, pre-pandemic life has started to feel like the stuff of legend. Once we gathered together in great halls to look at the art of centuries past. We sat in large rooms, at tables next to strangers, eating food prepared by an unseen cook and brought to us by an unknown server, everyone talking, laughing, coughing, sneezing. No one batting an eye. This strange time we are in now, when breath has become deadly; when I walk down the street shooting daggers at anyone whose mask has slipped below their nose.
For a few weeks the sidewalks were icy but covered in grit. Snow on the grass. Snow turned to ice in the branches. Broken slabs of gray ice on the curbs. One day, going out for bread in the frosted morning, I saw two men dressed in the bright green coveralls of Parisian city workers, with yellow hi-vis vests worn on top, spreading fine gravel from a wheelbarrow to prevent people from slipping. They moved through the narrow backstreets and covered passages like something out of a Bruegel painting, stooped to their task. These two men, the wheelbarrow, a shovel, going slowly through the quartier, paying special attention to the intersections and the crosswalks and the little shaded corners, to keep people safe amid the cold.
I feel myself in several places at once these days. I have started to mentally inhabit other rooms, willing my mind over doorsteps I’ve not visited in years now. I am scattered across space. In California, and New Mexico, and New York, and France, all at once, each place imagined. I have started to spend more and more time in the houses I don’t live in yet.
One night when the wet laundry was brought up from the basement, it smelled so strongly of detergent in the close warm air of the small studio apartment, that I had to have the window open. The two big sides swung inward, and a gulp of the night came wafting in. The cold, and the breath of the evergreen plants in the nearby park, and the river air, and the smell of wood fires, mixed with the smell of high clouds, plus other city smells that I no longer notice. Warm in my bed under two blankets, I did not mind the winter air tumbling in.
The pink ranunculus I’d bought were on their last legs. They’d all turned pale except for one, and were wide open and pillowy as powder puffs, getting ready to scatter. I myself am a jumble of things right now. A mess in a handbag. A plastic tub of toys turned upside down on the living room floor, with small pieces rolling and scattering away. I guess I am a lot of things at the moment. A bare tree standing naked in the moonlight. A house filled with noise and bustle when all the curtains are drawn. For many days in the past two months, I didn’t even leave the apartment at all. I know I am not the only one. I worked at home. I sent someone else to the store so that butter could be got, and milk, and raspberries. Honey was on the list but was forgotten; it was fine, we could live without it for another day. I leaned my head out the window to breathe in the fresher air of the cobbled back drive once again, yet another person stranded on their little rock amidst all of this.
I bought the pink ranunculus to soften the blow of some bad news I thought I saw coming on the horizon. Bad news is always a little easier to weather when the laundry is done, and there are fresh flowers on the nightstand, and your life doesn’t already smell of despair. Instead it was good news that stormed in, with all the trumpets and floral garlands of a lucky Tarot card. That rare feeling, when you’re bracing for another mudslide but all the clouds break open to the light instead, and there it is: the sun, the sun, the sun!