Plum Black Absence

My next door neighbor will recognize that reference. It is totally obscure. It is the name of a paint color. Only someone who does puzzles regularly would be able to guess what color that might be. That is the color that my neighbor, the architect, first selected for the walls of the Common House. It's white.  Not a glaring white, but a white with some tones in it.

Tonight our neighbors gathered  on the greenway, all in masks, grouped by household because those are the only people we are allowed to be near, observing our nightly Happy Hour. It is the only way we get together in person now. Four Greenes sit in a row on their short lawn chairs, swaddled in a blanket. My sister and brother-in-law sit next to each other on their folding chairs.  I lean on my golf cart and Rebecca leans on me. Noel is wrapped in his pillow case mask, standing next to Rhonda who sips her drink by lifting the bottom of her mask.  We leave six feet between each group. We have been meeting for almost a month, and the conversations still revolve around the covid news, day after day.

But this evening Gordon kept stopping our chatter, pausing to listen for a moment. He was noticing an absence of noise. Not silence, but an absence. The noise from Route 7, usually a steady undercurrent in the river of sound, was intermittent.  There were these moments of not-sound. We could hear other things. Birds, wind, frogs far away.

This is how the last month has been, four weeks of not-normal-life. Like people all around the country and the world, we are filling our days differently. We all wonder how rich the Zoom people are by now. There is much more hiking and walking from home. People are learning about all the trails that have always been all around us and seeing the frogs down in the streams.

But there is so much that we all miss. We can't go anywhere but the store. We can't see our friends and family in real life, unless they live right here. We can't eat anything unless we cook it (I guess some people are getting food from restaurants but not most of us). And poor Jon can't cook what he wants because his family won't let him go shopping until this curve is smashed a little flatter.

And yet, we know so well that we are the lucky ones.  This absence of normalcy is not the same as  poverty, or fear, or illness.  This is just a life without the usual texture, but it is not a bleak life. We can stop and listen to the lack of traffic, and hear something else.

It seems pretty clear that we won't ever return to the way things were during the first week of March. But some of what is normal -- hugging, standing close to the person who is talking to you, sharing a meal, kids in school -- that will come back some day. And for a while, we will know enough to appreciate those comforts.