Release
A very good evening. The stress of the semester is finally beginning to lift now, a little over a week after grades went in. Chloe has had a bad cold for the past several days, and this evening it began to lift, bringing the whole mood of the house with it.
I had a nice two-hour coworking session with a climate humanities group online, during which I completed an endnote on Hugo De Vries (and Liberty Hyde Bailey’s not insignificant role in the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in the 1890s) for my Outlook to Nature edition that I hadn’t worked on more than a few times since early fall. Then I came downstairs to a relatively cheery Chloe, up from a three-and-a-half-hour nap, coughing quite a bit less than recently. The three of us decided on a “special movie night” and pulled out one of the $1 thrift-store DVDs we had recently bought but hadn’t seen before—The Muppets Take Manhattan—which we watched while having dinner. Very strange, quite fun (and at times quite nostalgia-inducing).
After dinner, I did something I’ve barely done at all this school year: sat at the old piano from my parents’ house (and from my childhood) and started pulling out some of my old music from high school (which was the last time in my life I took myself at all seriously as a pianist). Chloe came over, and for the first time, rather than try to distract me and pound on the keys, said “Can you play ‘The Little Donkey?’” (“The Little White Donkey,” by Jacques Ibert, which I once played for her while narrating the sections as a story.) A request! She actually danced a bit to it (even her momma joined in), then wandered off, and, as I began to cycle through some of my old favorites (a three-movement sonatina by Kabalevsky, a manic bagatelle by Tcherepnin), which seemed to come back to my fingers better and with more of the old muscle memory than they have in years, Chloe began intermittently stopping by to show me how she was coloring in a coloring-page illustration of a bunch of roses, with different roses different colors. She’s getting much better at coloring things in, and I stopped playing to praise her highly each time she stopped by to share progress, reveling in the pride on her face. She finally brought the complete artwork to me, and told me it was for me. We put it on the fridge together, then eventually wrestled our way to bed—playfully.
It was a beautiful evening of recovery and release. I wish every day could end like this, and I wish such space for joy for each of you.
I recently shared this perhaps somewhat sophomoric post across my current social media platforms in a moment of frustration: “I am not a brand, and neither are you, and we should celebrate this quality of being humans together. I feel a strong urge to shout this into the social media void from time to time.”
Perhaps, rather than such shouting, we need more often to share embodied moments like those I experienced this evening. Our muscles know how to do this—what makes it so hard?
