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| Camel's Hump, July 2021 |
"Eventually I grew weary: I had traveled so far, yet was no closer to my destination than when I began. I was a fish inside a sea inside a bigger fish inside a bigger sea, and I wondered if the world itself swam also inside the belly of a much greater fish, all of us fish inside fish inside fish, and then, tired of so much wondering, I shut my scaly eyes and slept…” - Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
New Year’s Day, 2022, and this passage, among all the many passages in a handful of books I’ve read this month, resonates. So much has changed since last spring, and so little. We continue to exist in this seemingly endless in between. The virus mutates, flares up, spreads, then quiets down, only to mutate and flare up again. We mask up, lower our masks, mask up again. Now, we are told, we should double mask; Omicron is the most contagious variant yet. Weekly samples are left in tubes from swabs that circle our nostrils, first one, then the other. They are sent to the lab. We await our results. Negative is positive, positive is negative. We’ve entered our third calendar year of COVID and still it is disorienting, the now-regular routines somehow still foreign and unfamiliar. Our sense of what is past persists; what is present still seems like something that shouldn’t be. It remains impossible to see the future. Fish inside fish inside fish.
The year end tally is this:
Global case count: 288,680,388
US case count: 55,696,500
Deaths worldwide: 5,455,377
Deaths in the US: 846,905
Deaths of people I know personally: just 1.
Nick Kenyon, 42, father of two girls, son of Doug and Donna, owners of Kenyon’s Farm Store, sellers of dog food, gardening tools, plumbing supplies, compost, fresh eggs. Many other things.
Here is what has changed:
We are vaccinated. We visit with family and friends. We got my Dad and Louise, and Amy and the boys, to join us on a family vacation on the Cape, just before a tumor grew out of the side of my Dad’s temple. It was removed; he seems okay. We built a garage. I took on a new role at school.
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| Cape Cod, June 2021 |
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| Celebrating Father's Day on the Cape, June 2021 |
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| Celebrating Olivier's Birthday, August 2021 |
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| Saranac Lake with Char, August 2021 |
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| Boat Building Class with Addy, July 2021 |
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| First time up Camel's Hump, with Giselle, July 2021 |
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| July 2021 |
And Quinn has changed, in so many ways, as have I, in the opposite direction. As Quinn grows more strongly, more beautifully into her self, I’ve turned 50 and feel myself withering. Muscles are a memory. My skin grows papery and thin. In the mirror I see my mother, not my own face. It is New Year’s Day and I have set “new” intentions, again. More exercise, better balance, more joy. And yet even now, on the morning of this first day, I feel skeptical.
The one constant and true source, for me, of inspiration, laughter, palpable joy and heart-aching love is Quinn. She is in 5th grade, at Crossett Brook Middle School. She reads constantly, loves animals fiercely, and responds like a divining rod to the world around her. She is learning to manage her worries, she is trying new things, accepting imperfections (her own and those of others), articulating her needs, listening to input, forgiving herself and us. She is tall; the top of her head now over my shoulder, but still under my chin. She exists all day at school in the presence of others, but in the constant absence of any smiling faces. I suppose she has learned to detect a smile in the crease of the eyes, but still, it is not enough.
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| 4th grade graduation from Thatcher Brook Primary School, June 2021 |
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| On the boat at Char's |
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| 2nd day of 5th grade |
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| 11th birthday |
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| Visiting the puppies at JP & Steph's |
Last month the US Surgeon General issued an advisory on the youth mental health crisis we are experiencing. And no wonder. I can’t bring myself to record the statistics here. All I can do is document, for posterity, that my early questions about Quinn—why is she acting this way? what is going on? what am I supposed to do to help her? Those questions are gone. They don’t matter. What matters is this: she is everything that is good—and I love her. And when she reads this someday in the future, she will roll her eyes, and laugh at me a little, and say, “I know, Mom. I know.” And that means I will have done the one small thing I can do as her mother: I can imprint on her the unchangeable fact that she is loved, deeply, beyond measure. More than life itself.
I’m sure that feels like too much, but I can’t scale it back. I’m sure I will have screwed many things up. I can list so many mistakes already. But failing to love her with my whole being, every single day I’m able, will never be one of those things. At the same rate that malaise and ambivalence have increased in me, the clarity of what few things matter has crystallized. She sparkles, her edges catch the light, no matter how hard I try I still can’t count her layers. I'm sure she wants it that way.
