It is six AM in the middle of April and Anissa is watching through a large bay window. She is watching the marshmallow snow plop down from the canopy, melting into the thick white merengue slung between the tree trunks. She is watching a bewildered possum sinking its naked feet into the fluff, apprehensively crossing the brook and then disappearing behind her neighbor’s wood pile. The jubilant birds are singing and preening around the feeder, unperturbed by the chilly surprise. Delivering long firm strokes to her ecstatic, vibrating cat; she watches until her coffee turns cold.
Setting her cat gently aside, she pads barefoot to the kitchen. She swallows what is left, and then runs the empty mug under cold water for a few seconds. The action triggers a memory.
“The most mundane tasks,” she remembered an old boyfriend scolding as he eyed his scorched, greasy pan that she had placed in the dish drainer, “should be done with patience and contemplation.”
In a nod to his philosophy, she deigns to give the cup a proper bath. She squirts a bead of soap into its mouth and, working the edge of the scrubber around the lip, she gazes out the window above the kitchen sink, searching unsuccessfully for the possum. The counterfeit snow is still falling but will disappear within the hour.
Under normal circumstances, this idleness would not be the pace of a typical Thursday morning. Instead, Anissa would be racing to get ready for work: yanking a wrinkled shirt from her overstuffed dresser drawer, plowing it with the iron, and darting off for a quick shower. She would eat breakfast in the truck, leaving behind a deluge of crumbs and small drips of coffee wherever she went. At work, she would proceed at the same accelerated pace, powered by the persistent stress churning in her chest.
For as long as she could remember, Anissa had approached the necessary tasks of life expeditiously. She did this even though the result was often calamitous: errors, spills, stubbed toes, broken objects; It was worth the risk, she thought, because of a certain calculation: the less time spent doing work, the more time she’d have to create
“Work is for survival, art is for existence, and if you need them both you are usually screwed,” was her challenge to her old boyfriend’s lesson on mundane tasks.
“You must slow down and appreciate being,” he maintained. It was the last significant thing he said before leaving her.
Throughout her life Anissa had worked many different places. No matter the nature of the work, it was always accompanied by a seething resentment and a tenacious yearning for long stretches of uninterrupted time. Time to compose any number of poems, stories or songs that drifted through her imagination, to make sculptures from pieces of nature or junk, to play music, to draw.
Creativity was so valuable to her, in fact, that she deliberately set up her life to have few obligations. Never-the -less, she remained consumed by the expectations of work. She would save money with the hope of taking time off. Then, some major expense would claim it. As the decades went by, she gained little in the form of economic advancement, and her art went unassembled, her stories unwritten, her instruments un-played.
Recently, she decided to act. She trimmed her expenses to the bone. She drastically cut her hours. She had accumulated some savings that would serve as a cushion. She would only work enough to survive.
And, then, came the pandemic.
Anissa now sits at her desk. Today
she is writing. Tomorrow she may be drawing. The next, playing music. From her radio she hears the stories from hibernating
voices across the country, across the world: accommodating the change as their
circumstances allow. She is moved by the layers of physical, psychological and
economic devastation. She watches developments closely. She watches as her own
savings dwindles.
She does not want to go back.
