Happy 2021.
I eagerly await Chinese New Year and the change from Rat to Ox, which will occur on Friday February 12. I have a feeling we might all get a reprieve then, from feeling so cornered and defensive.
The hotel provides pancakes for breakfast – even me. They aren’t buckwheat, but they are gluten free, and yummy. The boys are happy to get chocolate milk again.
Part of their journey towards home means that Jack and Wizard are keen to catch up with their friends and family. I know this is going to be a priority for the rest of January, and while part of me embraces the idea (I’ve also been lonely, and missed a lot of people), I also just want to go home and check in with the fruit trees. Settle in, bring the cats and chickens home, and make some plans for my future. I still feel like I am on hold, lurking in the shadows, allowing myself to fill gaps, margins and peripheries, without as much agency as I need.
To ground myself, I embark upon a thorough tidy up of our premises. It’s laundry day again. I am determined to scrub the toilets with our dirty linen. I pack two shopping bags of excess stuff and stash them away in one of the cupboards. With a sudden creative impulse, I use a few left-over paper bags to fashion low baskets to store collections of toys. I use two bags per basket. One has Star Wars and ET action figures; one has horses, knights and dragons; one has an assortment of other figurines and the fourth stores the monster trucks, small cars and airplanes.
Suddenly it looks organized. At least for five minutes. I like the way our rooms are thus transformed into looking sleek and trendy. All the bey blades and launchers fit inside the arena. I am always amused that changing the way things are stored attracts the eyes of the children. A change, they say, is as good as a gift-giving holiday.
We decide to make a calendar and start blocking in some dates. I call my Mum, to work out when she wants to have our post-Christmas/Channukah get-together. I come up empty. The pandemic is still affecting so many people. My sister and her family are in N.S.W. They were planning to visit us in Adelaide once quarantine was over, but now the borders are closed. Again. My brother works in a remote area and had thought he would be available in January because he would be working over the Christmas period. Instead, the site closed for a couple of weeks over Christmas and he’s back at work again. We will get together with whoever can make it, whenever. We can’t mark this on our calendar!
My in-laws, also in N.S.W., call with some unwelcome news. Brown Owl’s sister and brother-in-law had planned to travel from Victoria to see them. Another plan cancelled. I’m not sure how Brown Owl’s brother and sister-in-law are going to manage their relocation from Melbourne to N.S.W. either, under these fickly conditions.
I watch Jack make a list of all the friends he wants to see. He wants to see them all at once. He has a long list of people he wants to include, and during the day, he keeps coming up with more names! Wizard makes a list as well. He writes his name at the bottom and under his name: the host. His list is shorter, but no less precious. He might have several smaller visits, one-on-one with friends. I don’t write a list, but I keep one in my head.
During the afternoon, Brown Owl tells me that the hotel is giving us all a special treat – fondue. We’ve been advised via the hotel quarantine guests’ page. I surreptitiously log on and post a comment that this sounds wonderful, and I hope it’s gluten free.
Brown Owl gets all the goss – probably because if I am using my laptop, the boys generally want it, and if I’m not using it they generally get it, unless I’m doing something else with them, whereas she is able to use her laptop and they still remember it’s reserved for “work”. Sadly, Brown Owl has counted up and realized that after quarantine she will only have about a week and a half of home time before returning to work.
Our dinner bags indeed contain the makings of fondue – all except the dipping chocolate. There are three boxes with dried fruit, marshmallows and rolled wafer biscuits, an extra tub of fresh fruit, presumably for me, in addition to four small containers of the most luscious looking strawberries I’ve seen this year.
Brown Owl gets on the phone and in her best manner, talks to the restaurant people. Within 20 minutes, a small brown paper bag has appeared on the stool outside our door. It contains 4 tiny tubs of fondue sauce. Two are labelled “contains gluten”. I take my chances with one of the others, and I don’t regret it. Thank you, Brown Owl for being brave and not telephone phobic.
Wizard discovers a space small enough behind his bed to hide in. It’s a narrow wedge between the wall and the headboard. Maybe he half-heard my suggestion earlier in the day, that he make a cubby, and he soon pulls the bed away from the wall and uses the long curtain and pillows to make himself a fort.
He is determined to sleep in there tonight. I’m unsure how well reading is going to work with this arrangement, because there’s really only room for him and his beanie bears. Brown Owl lies on Wizard’s bed and reads with him. I lie on our bed and read with Jack. We are making our way through the first Septimus Heap.
I am far too sleepy to pick up The Spinoza Problem and am only vaguely aware that Brown Owl has settled both children (Wizard needed melatonin in his pillow fort), switched off my light, and is crawling into her side of the bed.
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