Time

“How long have you been home from school?” K asked as we took our now-nightly, post-dinner family walk. “Is this the second or the third week?”

Not willing to pull out our phones mid-walk, we couldn’t figure it out. Such are our days now: one day blends into another as effortlessly as — as what? I can’t remember a time when time itself seemed so free, so floating, so held down by so little. With the only thing to distinguish a school day from a non-school day being how the kids spend their mornings, the days are a blur now, a smear of time and virus.

How long have we been worrying about this? How long have these precautions been in place? The powers that be suggest that we’re not even at the halfway point, but it already feels as if this has been our reality for as long as we can remember.

It’s not that I’m complaining. We all understand why we’re doing it. We simply didn’t realize how quickly this would be how we define “normal.”

Organization

Today, L started a project with Papa to rearrange and reorganize all his file folders. Nana was a thorough bookkeeper, and she kept track of just about every significant (and many less-than-significant) documents that came through their house. Take receipts, for example: in case of audit, they’d kept tax records for years, including receipts. Every month’s receipts in separate monthly envelopes, all envelopes for a given year in a box for the year.  We still haven’t burned all those. So that gives an idea of the granularity of their record-keeping.

Papa has decided he doesn’t need all the other records as well, so he’s thinning everything and reorganizing it. That’s where L’s responsibility begins: she is a fastidious organizer. She likes for us to sit in order of decreasing age at the table for dinner. You can see it in this picture, minus me. Some — namely I — might suggest that this is a bit much, a bit obsessive-compulsive. But when it comes to reorganizing, that’s just the mentality you want.

Aim

The Boy and I have been shooting his bb gun quite a bit these last few weeks. We have a few standard targets in the backyard: L’s archery target, a clump of trees backed by a forest of bamboo behind our neighbors’ lot (it’s possible to see the flight of the bb as it moves toward that clump of darkness), Clover’s ball (if she’s not out; if she’s out, we have to keep her away by kicking the ball to the opposite side of the yard where we’re shooting, always keeping an eye on her), the Boy’s basketball — a lot of targets. Lately, a favorite has been the Boy’s basketball, as it sits at the bottom of the hill and we stand on our deck. Google measures that distance at 69 feet. That’s a fairly impressive range for a seven-year-old to hit a basketball, but once I taught him to compensate for the effect of gravity on such a long shot (“Aim high, really high” I told him), he’s done it fairly consistently

In the late afternoon, when the sun had moved to the front of the house enough to provide some shade to the back deck, E sat with Papa on the back deck. They were shooting E’s bb gun at one of the small plastic cups (perhaps a little bigger than a shot glass) into which we put Papa’s meds every day. Papa took a couple of shots and missed; E took a couple of shots and nailed the cup; Papa missed another shot. “Do you want me to go get a bigger cup?” the Boy asked.