Opening Doors

February 28, 2021, Freeport, Maine

It is an extraordinary thing that happened this week.  It was only a cup of tea.  Orange and ginger in a white mug.  I didn’t expect it would happen in such an ordinary way and I didn’t think it would happen this soon.  Late on a gray and bleak afternoon, I walk down to Bridget’s house, knock on her glass front door, a dozen yellow tulips in my hand. Somehow, in the last year, in some way I likely can’t blame on Covid, I’ve developed an allergy to these intrepid trumpets of spring.  I need to get them out of my house, and so am delivering them to my daughter’s where no one gets headaches from tulips.  I wait in the cold for her to come downstairs. I envision that she will step outside for a minute, take the flowers from me, ask how I am doing, that we will exchange a few more words before we air hug and I turn around and walk back home. 

Instead, she opens the door wide and says, “Come in,” with a big smile.

“Do you think it’s time?” I ask. 

“It’s time,” she says in that definitive tone she uses when she’s telling the kids it’s time to come for dinner or time to clean their room. 

“Without a mask?” I ask.

 “It’s been almost a week since you had your second vaccine shot and you haven’t been anywhere in weeks and neither have I.  No masks. That’s fine with me.”

For so long now I’ve thought of her, fondly and gratefully, as the Chief of the Covid Police, monitoring to the letter-of-the-law all things Covid related: mask wearing, social distancing, grandchild visits.  She’s worried more about her father and me getting sick than about herself and her family. 

Now, I think to myself. It’s now.

I go inside.  I take my boots off.  I feel awkward.  I don’t know where to put my coat.  I sit on the tall aqua stool that snugs under the island in her kitchen.  She boils water, offers me six different kinds of tea.  When the tea is brewed, she hands me the cup and a spoon and slides the jar of honey she knows I like across the smooth white countertop.  I haven’t been inside her house since sometime after Thanksgiving when the virus ran amuck here in Maine. I scan the big open room with the twin couches on the other side of the island and the wood stove in the corner.  Nothing looks different.  I almost expect to find some sign, some evidence of Covid’s pockmark: a crack in the cement floor, a purple stain on the carpet.  I look out the expansive kitchen windows that overlook the dirt road below her house.  I see a deer standing very still in the middle of the road and point it out to her.  We watch it together and gossip about the many deer who come right up to her house to eat the cracked corn Finn likely drops on his way to feed the chickens.

“The deer have had an easy time of it this winter. There’s so little snow cover they have plenty to eat and can get around easily in the forest,” she observes as she chops parsley and peels a mango for the chicken curry she is making for dinner. 

After I finish my tea, I put the cup in the sink, say it is time for me to go home now and make dinner for Bob and me. 

“Walk Saturday?” she asks. 

“Sure!” I say.  

On the way home, I reflect on the door Bridget opened, the cup of tea proffered, the casual conversation about deer.  I hear myself say the word normal.  But I quickly reject it.  Nothing about the visit is normal.  It is instead a small miracle of science and love and grit and luck and community.  And, maybe, just maybe, of the hand of a ghost, Alice, my beautiful grandmother who didn’t make it to the other end of the pandemic of 1918. 

Early this morning, the same waning gibbous moon hangs low in the sky over the fir trees as it did on March 15, 2020, when I sat here and tried to make sense of the fact that every thread of the fabric of my life would soon spool, unraveled, onto the floor in a tangle of fear and uncertainty.  But now, with the pandemic’s grip slowly loosening, I am thinking about whether I am ready to move outside the safe circle of this home and the roisterous bubble we will soon reform with our family next door. 

I sense that I am poised before this newly opened door, suspended between the past and the future, my hand on the doorknob, uncertain about whether to go forth into the world again. 

I’ve heard my friends and patients talk about doors too.

“I feel like a caged lion who wakes one morning to find that the iron gate between her and the world is mysteriously flung open.  I feel paused on the threshold, uncertain about the freedom beyond, reluctant to give up what I have,” my friend C. said. 

Others compare themselves to prisoners who were let out of jail after years behind bars and now weren’t sure what the world beyond would look like or even whether they wanted to leave the familiarity and safety of their life behind bars. 

I wonder, is it the prospect of loss that freezes me here on the threshold? Loss of the quiet intimacy of this last year, of the slowed pace, the necessary and everyday focus on how precious life is? I need to give this much more thought. The pandemic has offered many unexpected gifts. I don’t want to lose them. 

Is it fear that makes me want to linger here between what was and what will be?  I think about what I know about neural pathways and the theory that “what fires together wires together.” I’ve wired some pretty robust neural pathways of fear in my brain this last year.  I can feel them fire the minute I put my hand on the doorknob.  Doorknob!  It will take a long time to rewire the brain to see naked faces as safe, restaurants as convivial, physical closeness with anyone outside my bubble as soothing. I need to take my time, learn about the safety of the world “out there” one teacup at a time!!