It's 3:30pm

“What are you having today?” I ask each of my grandchildren as they tramp downstairs.

It’s 3:30pm. My daughter has already taken her place at the far end of the dining table. I’ve set out the electric kettle on a cloth pad, five small dishes, four  spoons and a pitcher of Half and Half in the middle. My son-in-law swings into the chair beside her and sets down his coffee mug. He’s not a tea drinker and as the designated reader this week for Life of Pi, he asserts that he needs caffeine to keep up with today’s storyline.

I opt for my usual Earl Grey or Lady Grey and my daughter requests the same, but the grandkids will paw for their own flavor of the day among the Celestial Seasonings and Twining’s boxes in the cupboard and bring the tea bags to the table along with a pad of drawing paper or needlework.

 My daughter is consumed with a needlepoint Christmas stocking for her younger child. She’s been working on it for months and in the middle of our quarantine anything we can do to keep our hands busy and away from the news on our screens is a respite from the absurdity out there. The continued lock downs quadrupled the already isolating lives we were living as the kids stayed more to their rooms for zoom meetings and homework, my son-in-law went each day to his store to inventory while keeping customers out, and I, the Nana that left her post in February far away in Montana preferring to hunker down with family in familiar territory.  I settled into the guest room, doing what I could to help out by gardening and cooking. I suggested board games as a way to bring us together or bingeing our favorite tv series like Lost, The Office, Schitts Creek which we did.

Sometime in the middle of March, my grandson suggested we could sit together and read.

 ‘Or better yet, let’s read books to each other! And drink tea!’

 The novelty of it, coming from a teenager, and the image of sitting together, listening to a book while sipping tea or another warm beverage instantly grabbed all of us. We decided by consensus to meet promptly at 3:30 every weekday downstairs in the kitchen. We would take turns as volunteers to make the tea or get it ready; someone will find snacks for the table, and someone will read. All of us will decide on the books and we three adults will take turns as readers.

My daughter was a teacher for 13 years and loved to read both to her students and, of course, her two children. Now at 18 and 14, they are beyond the time of someone sitting next to them in their beds at night to lull them to sleep with Winnie the Pooh or Diary of Wimpy Kid. But now in this time where life is standing still as if for us alone, we chose to return to that something that had always been so soothing, so gratifying and create again the ritual of reading out loud.

What to read wasn’t a problem as the house is stuffed with books and the former English teacher had many suggestions and a few of her favorites from the recent past she said she would love to hear again. The junior members were up for anything not related to school work, current events, health or other depressing ideas.

And so we began appropriately with The Book of Lost Things. We recognized ourselves just as lost as David, struggling to make sense of a strange world, to become himself and learn that courage is not bravery, but just the opposite, vulnerability. As the days turned into weeks and weeks to months, we kept walking onto pages after pages, hundreds of pages, thousands of words,  book upon book, just as so many readers had before us.

“Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.”― John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

That is how all these books arrived at our table every weekday at half past three. Of course, we called them to us. In our deepest selves, we needed ballast, anchoring in the sea of uncertainty and fear where we floated. And so, they came one after another into our lives.

“The bad stuff will be there. If we want to fight it, we have to find joy where we can. We have to find beauty. We have to take our moments to be happy. Because the joy is what keeps us strong and reminds us we have something to fight for.”

― Tehlor Kay Mejia, We Set the Dark on Fire

As spring gave way to summer, there were late afternoon swims in the pool and with school finally out and the annoying zoom classes done at least until August, life slowed even more. We walked in the early mornings before the heat rose, I kept the garden beds happy and weeded, planted more, watered. The grandson started online Italian language classes foreshadowing a spring vacation two years in the future. Both grandkids used this time and their abundant creativity to draw or make jewelry, and of course text and chat with friends, or catch up on Netflix. Each of us found our place in the wheel of this household. But at 3:30pm the carriage stopped at our kitchen table with the scent of Earl Grey steeping and chocolate chip cookies Jack made the night before sitting next to the cream and sugar. We assembled behind our favorite mugs that became part of the ritual so don’t dare try to use another’s cherished cup or there would be words. We pulled the chairs close in to hear the next chapter, put some cookies on our plates and set out on our life raft constructed from ritual and pages of ink.

“It was a peaceful, unassuming life scored by birds in the morning and crickets in the evening, and because it was precious to us, we handled it with care.”

― Ruth Emmie Lang, Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance

By mid-summer, tea time had fragmented into a party of three: me, my daughter, and my grandson with an occasional drive by from the soon to be college freshman now working part-time. Eyes were on the upcoming year at school for both of them. Eager to feel any bit of freedom from the suffocation of the past four months, my daughter allowed one friend at a time to come over for a swim, stay outside and sit a fair distance apart on the patio. This, at least, resembled a bit of normalcy although a very trimmed down, narrow version of swim parties past.

My time focused on the eventual day when I would move out and on, to a house back in the Midwest, where I dreamed of gardens, herbs, wildflowers, and trees! Oh, how I longed for tall green trees after years in the arid southwest.

We had come so far, traveled from wartime England to an island nation state of daring women, a house of misfits with peculiar gifts cared for by two most strange and peculiar men.  The Georgia flu in Station Eleven was a little too close for comfort but we found within this dystopian future there was also great hope. How we came upon the order of things to read remains a mystery. But “…perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.”

― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Just weeks before school began, the 3:30 gathering softly and without any fanfare just faded away. Other things occupied each of our lives. Once or twice, we got together in the afternoon but not to read as there would be no continuity to our thoughts. Instead, we would talk, make plans for a shopping date at the resale store or draw, paint. My daughter would bring out that great eyestrain of a needlework project more determined than ever to have it done for this Christmas. And it was.

In October, I moved across the middle of the continent to set up a new life near the Shawnee National Forest and snuggle into my own home. For the first time since my divorce in 1989, I had a house to love and to fill with all those items from storage units,  moved so many times across the continent I forgot what was even in those packing boxes.

Every box marked ‘BOOKS’ was immediately opened, the contents set on shelves to watch me as I made a new life in a new town among new trees, new mysteries, new fairies and gnomes, legends and myths. At night, I settled into my bed under the window where the windchimes tinkled outside. On my nightstand new books borrowed from the local library witnessed my head nod then droop losing both my place in the chapter and wakefulness.

“How fitting, that the most terrifying time in my life should require me to do what I do best: escape into a book.”― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Once there were five of us around a large table overlooking a yard with  a sycamore and a mulberry tree, a family of quail and the occasional road runners, pots of geraniums and a tidy herb bed where we gathered thyme and mint and rosemary. On those long, sometimes oppressively long, afternoons of 2020, we created an island built from tea bags and sugar cubes, homemade cookies, the soft whoosh of pages turning, sunlight slanting through the kitchen window and bouncing off the cerulean water of the large pool. Or was it only a swimming pool? Into the changing cadence and intonations of various characters, a voice carried us far away from any  frustration, fears, boredom, anxiety that gripped our minds at 3:29pm. Our assortment of fiction books was capable of provoking snorts or even gales of laughter, tears of confusion or grief, gasps of sudden realizations that we kept to ourselves. Each uplift and downturn moved us further from shore, then pulled us back again, into the steady and comfortable patterns and rhythm at our table: the munching of cookies, the drone of the ceiling fan, of family, of together, of safety in the clink of spoons in teacups.

“We should always make time for the things we like. If we don’t, we might forget how to be happy.”--TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea