Let It Be

In the dream I’m at a big box store. I have finished shopping, and the lines at checkout are long. I finally reach the register where a cheerful woman begins removing items from my cart. Her name is Nikki. It’s embroidered on her denim shirt just above the pocket that covers her left breast.

“I’d say you got seven-hundred and fifty bucks worth of stuff in this cart.” She picks up a three pack of Dawn dish-washing soap secured by heavy-duty shrink wrap that is going to take a pair of scissors and some swearing to undo when I get home. She smiles. “Sure you need all this?”

I don’t and feel stupid when her forearms strain to remove a wedge of Gouda the size of my head from the cart. I point to the cheese. “I certainly don’t need that.”

I stand back to survey what I have done and begin to sort items. When I finish, there is a cart filled with things I don’t need. My total in ninety dollars and seventy-two cents. Nikki and I are waiting on a price check for two white t-shirts. She holds up the shirts. “What do think?”

“They’re non-negotiable. I need them,” I say, though I have no idea why.

Nikki shrugs, and we wait for the kid who said he’d be back lickety-split with a price on the shirts.

The guy behind me doesn’t seem to mind the delay. He points to the case of Sierra Nevada I bought for my husband. “I could go for one of those,” he says.

I look around the store. Customers and employees alike are bustling about. It feels like the holidays, but I’m not sure what time of year it is.

Nikki has a t-shirt turned inside out looking for a barcode or something to enter into the register. She sticks both shirts in a bag and winks. “I’ll tell the kid you decided you didn’t want them.”

“Are you sure? I can wait.”

The kid materializes out of thin air. “They’re five bucks a piece,” he shouts over my head, then disappears into the crowd.

Nikki rings up the shirts and says, “We almost got away with it,” and we both laugh.

I push my cart toward the door. While passing the food court, I wake up and whisper, “What an ordinary dream.”

My dreams are vivid, often prophetic in nature. I wake teasing out their meanings, while I frantically write them down before they dissolve into the ether. I lay on my back confused.  Ordinary. The word danced around the room waiting for my conscious self to rouse before worming its way back inside me, where it dissolved into an over-whelming sense of melancholy.

Thank God, for Nikki, the guy standing behind me in line, and the kid who ran to do a price check. They didn’t know. None of us knew. It was an ordinary day before the pandemic hijacked our global consciousness, leaving everyone on the planet acutely aware that an invisible monster lurks among us, waiting to infect its next victim.

I got up like I do every morning with a long to-do list in my head. Fruit flies had found the plums I stored in a paper bag to ripen. The bag was on the kitchen counter. I placed it up on a shelf with canning supplies so that I would remember to make jam. The residue of the dream was still stuck to my skin, and the motion of putting the plums on the shelf got me wondering. What other ordinary things had I put on a shelf since March 13, the day Trump declared a state of emergency after nearly two months of denial.

Ron and I watched the news and remarked on our good fortune as we witnessed people emptying grocery store shelves of toilet paper and bottled water. We live in the middle of nowhere with enough supplies to last us months. With our closest neighbor a mile away, social-distancing, and stay-at-home orders are things we practice every day. A two-week quarantine? Not a problem.

I planted a garden and in no time, we were picking zucchini. Peaches and plums came on, and I made cobbler with homemade ice cream. We cooked steaks on the grill and had Sunday dinners here at the ranch with friends who were also following New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s stay-at-home orders. Ron and I celebrated his birthday in the Chiricahua Mountains by dipping our bare feet in Cave Creek. I even met a friend to go hiking. Do we dare hug? In the end, we did, and I realized how much I had missed our easy conversations and her thoughtful insights.

All these ordinary things were going on while simultaneously the embers of isolation, despair, and longing for my old life occasionally flared. I pitched a fit while looking for my binoculars after my husband had used them. I cleaned the house until my fingernails split and my hands bled. I swore I would run away from home when Ron’s shoulder surgery was rescheduled, and I had to cancel my trip to Wisconsin to see family for the second time since the virus struck.

We said goodbye to our beloved cat Kaboodles. Our veterinarian put a hand on my shoulder as I held my little, three-legged darling and sobbed. “Okay, that’s enough,” he whispered, and maybe he was right. Doctors in hospitals around the world watched in horror as their patients died from Covid-19. Giving in to suffering was risky business, so I put my grief on a shelf.

Ron’s dear mother, Natalie, passed in May, and I shelved my pain again. The threat of coronavirus stripped us of traditional customs for burying a loved one. We called the state health department hoping for guidelines to plan a funeral. The information was vague at best. In the end, we honored Natalie in a Zoom memorial with family and friends and buried her on a hillside facing the rising sun, a small group of us standing around unsure of our roles absent a priest or funeral director to guide us.

Then it happened. Ron and I woke to the sound of our Blue Heeler, Baby, struggling to stand up on the hardwood floor next to our bed. She was having a seizure. I lay down next to her and waited for a miracle. When it was clear my prayers had gone unanswered, I ran outside and shouted to God in heaven, “I want my old life back!”

There was no more room on the shelf for my heartache. Every ordinary thing I had done in the last three months had acted as a thin veil concealing the extraordinary. The things I had taken for granted and deemed certain in my life were gone. And now, I would lose this precious girl, too. “Let it Be” by The Beatles echoed in my head as we drove three hours to the veterinarian’s office with Baby in the backseat, my despair gaining traction as her health declined.

When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom,
Let it be,
And in my hour of darkness,
she is standing right in front of me,
Speaking workings of wisdom,
Let it be

Clouds rolled in, bringing welcomed relief after days of 100-degree temperatures. I finally went through the bag of plums and was making jam when the rain came. I turned off the stove and ran outside. Our Border Collie, Hank, darted between trees in the orchard while I got soaked chasing after him. Baby was afraid of thunder and for a moment, I wondered if she was safe inside the house. With my concern came grief when I remembered she was gone, and I cried. I miss her.

I miss so much.

We are all mourning the lives we were forced to abandon. The loss is profound, but each of us has a paper bag of plums on a shelf that needs our attention. Roll up your sleeves and dig in. It is the blessed ordinary things in our lives that heal our hearts, reminding us of who we are.