Day after day I hear doors shut*

It is the end of March. A year of pandemic lifestyle changes. Poetry Month is coming up. I’m revamping the look of the flower beds out front, a new edge and rock to fill between plants vice mulch. I’ve pruned the shrubbery back, moved some bulbs to a pot, found the Hostas and marked their space. The weather in perfect for outdoor work, sunny and a little breeze. I dug up some of the Mondo Grass which has grown so tight came out in giant bricks of sod. I’m hoping I can separate some and transplant. I cleaned the raised beds this weekend, added some topsoil and will turn in a little fertilizer soon. I’ve been calculating how much mulch I need around the house for areas not getting rock. All of these activities come in a week where I have three appointments that can’t be shifted, so I’m also calculating how much I can get done between days. Next week I’ll get my second dose of COVID vaccine. Jerry gets his (second) the week after and then we enter the two week “after that” period. Then we see what happens. I won’t stop wearing a mask. I may never stop wearing a mask, readying for the next pandemic and the anonymity is spectacular, though it really is just the gloss over what comes from just being a female of my age; that’s probably enough.

I think of this distinction often. Invisibility, the “not seen” and then there is the not-not seen. The invisibility of a graying woman is a nuisance. The always in the open and watched and ignored that my love gets is (for me) heart wrenching. I remember reading an essay once by a white poet about her daughter of mixed race and her saying her daughter will never be able to go into the world as she has. And it was one of those shaken awoke again moments. Of course. How many times during the week do we repeat to each other (and mention one of our friends that we owe money for the saying) I’m surprised that you’re surprised over some new slight or injustice. Then, too, we have a Dave Chappell quote we like when things really get going, from Mr. Chappell’s opening on Saturday Night Live November 2020. What kind of a man would do that (referring to 45 and his ilk)? A white man. I use that one a lot, I think of that one a lot. I worry for my family, I worry for my friends, I still worry for the Palestinian woman in Connecticut, who after September 11th, was afraid to take her children to the library.

The interesting thing about being invisible is what you can see and hear under perfect cover.

*Invisibility by Renato Rosaldo