Journal

I lived in New York City for nearly seven years. The experience had a number of side effects, one of the strangest being that I became terrified of dancing in public. Despite a childhood spent in dance classes and many successful moments on dance floors, I suddenly found that I would stand unmoving in the corner of any club judging myself for what I assumed would look like asinine movements, had I dared to do them. Though I could feel the screams from inside my body to move, the daily assaults of living in the Big Apple had left my body frozen in place.

My grandparents were magical gardeners. Theirs was not so much a garden but a small farm. I would lose myself for days in the carefully laid rows of nascent food that stretched from the rocks of Lake Huron to the sand of Lake Michigan.

Likely the garden was a typical size and I was much smaller (who knows if memory ever really serves), but the space seemed massive to me. In the summer my brother and I would trail my grandfather, picking sticky green beans from trellises and digging up worms to catch fish from the lake. My grandmother would fry the fish and boil the beans and dinner was ready. It was a kind of childhood experience that was etched in my heart every summer.

I have decided I will teach my daughter to swim this spring. This is a good decision, not only because the thermostat has registered at or above 100 F every day in our Mexican home, not only because we are blessed enough to have a pool during quarantine, but also because it might save both of our lives.

I want to invite you to a different kind of Mother’s Day this year. It’s fitting, since many people can’t see their mothers due to the quarantine, but also because the quarantine is the result — in my humble opinion — of the fact that we haven’t seen enough of our mamas in recent years. At least not in the big sense.