Berlin on Berlin Street

So already, just to make it clear: I'm talking about Berlin, New York, not Berlin, Germany. And I'm talking about Berlin Street in Quincy, Massachusetts--the Berlin Street that runs behind my building and onto which I look from every window of my condo. Why is it important for you to know this? Because in the era of the COVID-19, life on Berlin Street in my densely populated, industrial-turned-residential Quincy neighborhood has become so much like life in rural, off-the-beaten-track Berlin, New York. Especially when Scott and I have been there long enough for the novelty of being away from Quincy to wear off, and the routine of being in Berlin to establish itself.

So just what is the routine of being in Berlin? 

If/when we do leave the cabin--to hike or walk somewhere, to pick up some groceries or visit the hardware store, to fill our water bottles and haul them down to the cabin (we don't have running water)--we do it in the morning. 

Generally, in the afternoon, we're "around": I read, write, walk around and take some photos, spend some time prepping food for dinner; Scott reads, paints, draws, works somewhere on the property doing something that needs to be done--you can see him here building our most recent temporary bridge. Soon after we listen to the evening news, specifically the regional weather forecast, I cook dinner. 

We eat dinner outside as the sun sets over the trees at the far end of the field. Sometimes we have company: the deer that wander into the field at its far edge and stand looking at us while we sit looking at them. We don't stay up much past dinner, and we sleep a lot generally.

Sounds pretty idyllic, I know, save for carrying those gallon water jugs--I manage two at a time, Scott manages four--the quarter mile from the car to the cabin. But there's another aspect of Berlin life that makes it like Berlin Street life: there's an ongoing concern with disease in both places.

Scott wandering down to the flume

Observe in the adjacent photo that Scott's wearing a long-sleeved white shirt on an August afternoon (all that goldenrod!). We wear light-colored clothing spring, summer, and fall, long-sleeved if possible, so we can spot ticks on our clothing before they have a chance to burrow into our skin.  

The deer we enjoy seeing at dinnertime walk the same paths and trails that we walk; and when there are deer, there are deer ticks. That's why we tuck our long pants into our socks even on the hottest days and oh so romantically look for ticks on each other's bodies before lights out. It didn't used to be this way, but we've adjusted to these practices in hopes of not contracting Lyme Disease.

I am beginning to think that the novelty of coronavirus stay-at-home exile has begun to wear off for many of us. I suspect this is true for unemployed or retired city-dwellers inhabiting small spaces who are close to having finished all the home improvement projects they envisioned completing while confined to home. It's probably also true, but in an entirely different way, for teachers up to their ears in the challenges and frustrating limitations of teaching online. Working from home in any kind in any way, I imagine, is no doubt better than not working at all; but the challenge of separating work from not work, difficult for anyone who does both in the same place, can get old fast.

Those whose COVID-19 routine to date has been to awake to the challenge of beginning and/or keeping at a project until it could be checked off as "done" may be at that moment when they need something else to do. Their projects completed, they might embrace this moment as the opportunity to develop or simply commit to those habits that reflect what they really want to do or be, what they know energizes and expresses them, what they're hoping to make happen when coronavirus is in the rear view mirror, or at least adequately tamed. At least that's been my approach.

I've been writing a lot since the coronavirus siege began, listening to CDs I'd forgotten I owned, walking a lot more, too--probably because I've stopped going to rehearsals, stopped meeting friends almost anywhere (no Grafton Street charges on my credit card), and stopped visiting my parents as often and for as long as has been my habit (our through-their-windows visits don't last nearly as long as our visits did before visitors were prohibited by their senior living community). I have to commend my fellow Quincy residents for their generally excellent adherence to social distancing guidelines, which makes walking near the beach and the marshes such a safe, cheering alternative to being home.

I've been reading more, too. I find reading to be the hardest thing to do when I live in a world of constant interruption (for which I'm much to blame since I much too readily turn my attention to interruptions--the way I just went to answer the phone while I as typing the word "interruptions"). Just this morning, I didn't get up from the living room sofa until I'd read the entire newspaper. And recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Water Dancer has been insisting on being read.

So what's going on here? Is this really just about fewer interruptions? Or is it about the permission I'm giving myself to stay seated for an extended period of time--which I'm not apt to do, unless I'm writing? Or is it really that this time of enforced exile has created space and time that would normally be sliced into errands and obligations, or at least perceived obligations? 

The kind of involvement I'm experiencing with The Water Dancer is not an unusual experience for me when I'm in Berlin (or, I must say, when I'm on the subway, another place I avoid in the time of coronavirus; hmmm . . . ): some magazine, some novel, some collection of poetry, some extended piece of nonfiction commands my full attention until I've read it all the way through, and maybe even read it again. Robyn Schiff's A Woman of Property sat on my Quincy bookshelf for months, its excellent book reviews frequently recommending it. I even started it a few times. But not until I began reading it again in Berlin did I feel not only that I couldn't put it down, but that I had to read it again as soon as possible. And that didn't mean I couldn't pause from it to do the various tasks and chores that are part of cabin living. In Berlin, it all fits rather than competes.

Funny, though, to be talking about A Woman of Property. I haven't read the book for a while, but I do have really strong memories of how much it was a book about fear--but also a book about faith. I recall a poem in which a young mother, or perhaps a mother-to-be, has discovered yet another way a piece of nursery furniture could be potentially dangerous to her child. (I just looked for the book on my shelf, but can't find it, which leads me to believe it may be on the shelf in Berlin, NY). Even now, I remember being caught up in the poem: it was sad, it was funny--the mind could create such fear, as if there wasn't enough to fear without the mind's machinations. It's always interesting how we choose to spend our energies, though that word "choose" might not apply in all situations. I suspect it applies more than we might like it to, though.

Everyone's Home

In a time when stories of migration so often relate the experience of being exiled from home, not exiled to home, we're forced to confront what home means to each of us. Home for many of us used to be the place we returned after a day of being out, about, and among, not the place anyone could expect to find us at any time. Now all of us are more apt to have to explain why we didn't "pick up" or reply, since we were probably "there" and probably could have.

Generally, some part of me feels most at home on Berlin Street, another part of me in Berlin. Right now, however, my two homes seem to have converged in terms of the similar ways they permit me to shape my days. My routines are working for now.

Meanwhile, beyond our front doors, there's much to take seriously in terms of how we act and what we do to protect ourselves. Good routines, whether we're at home or out in the world, are all we have to see us through right now. Good routines . . . and hope and prayer. Luck, too.