Scaling down, spiralling out

If anything brings out the inner child in me,

it’s tapping ‘home’ in GoogleEarth^©

and watch the screen zoom in,

across the globe and Africa,

country, province, city

till, there it is:

our place!

But…

                            when it

                                                happens

                                                  in actual life,

                                                                                it’s not a game!

(but still, quite weirdly, almost funny).

Happening to us (as it did to hundreds-million others all across the globe), the season of a many-crowned microbial war had come – a (w)hole(ly) year long (and counting!).

Ten years ago (and for most of twenty years before) we’d stretched our wings and moved around (often actually flying) across borders, rivers, mountains, populated areas and wilderness, through neighbouring Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe and little Eswatini, once even immeasurable Nigeria. We met people from all over the globe, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia; cold Siberia to burning Congo, from USA to UAE, Columbia, Cuba, Singapore and China, old Europe and New Zealand…

Our range and circumnavigation shrank in size when our retirement arrived (too soon!), but still… we roamed our city and beyond, met other hero’s, saints and sinners, visited pits of despair, towers of hope. We danced in the city’s streets with clowns, heard histories of horror and escape, saw life through strangers’ eyes.

At home, we treasured our roomy little patch of land, invited others, held feasts and celebrations, offered refuge to animals and people, enjoyed serenity – and were free…

 But now, LOCKED IN – not because of governmental laws or science’s decrees – we’re jailed by fear. Our ageing bodies are smorgasbords of comorbidities (blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, plus). One sting of nano-size may bring us down… for good.

Hiding from invisible droplets, loud sneezes, coughs, infectious hands, we shun our friends (and they shun us). “No closer, please!” than video calls and WhatsApp^©-notes! We’ll hug again and dine together, way beyond this war.

We sidestep covid, but other enemies of man move in (germs, weakness, nausea, loss of appetite, a crippled sense of balance, a fall, a broken bone and scalpel scars, fatigue and pain and angst) - right into our house, our wing, eventually our single room – our (l)on(e))ly place to sleep, to eat, to nurse, to listen, to read and write - and pray and wait…

Part bedroom, clinic, refuge from the plague, part office, library, movie theatre, concert hall and (virtual) meeting place, part dining room, chatroom, love nest (writer’s studio!) and cave, it is a place to hide unseen, wait out the (never-ending?) storm.

Late parents-in-law’s marital bed; grandpa’s desk; a wheelchair, walking frame and crutches that served both dear departed mothers; my old, dilapidated sleeping chair (because I snore – less at an angle), also serving as nursery for baby kittens underneath; Ma’s beach umbrella in vivid shapes of red and white, to keep away the rain from weak spots in the century-old roof - they all define our room, our flat, our shrunken home.

Short ventures into town (masked, sprayed, alert), brief forays to our kitchen (for cooking, washing, checking stock), then back to the room, to feed, nurse, support and comfort, or watch, read, listen, laugh – and back to sleep. A year drags by.

Poirot comes to visit often (in sound and light), Frost too, actors from way back then and vintage radio storytellers, old book and movie friends from childhood, a few new faces/voices. We tear through Kindle^©’s offerings, hitchhike (a lot!) through YouTube^©s universe. We follow foreign lands’ elections (as if we really care!), see leaders rise and fall (and lie and cry) – we watch comedians, politicians (and get confused about who’s who). We Google^©-surf much more than move our legs, go visit Mars, the oceans deep, Middle-Earth and Middle East, lush forests, Pompeii and Oz.

Unable to fulfil our dearest wish, to visit them at home, we travel to Australia’s shore on unseen waves and watch our grandkids through a screen. Hardly more than TV-actors in their eyes, we mix (compete!?) with PawPatrol^©, Spider- Bat- and Supermen - with puppies of our own, kittens, grazing horses, and two old wrinkled faces – and hear them laugh and cry, and see them grow (up, up and away).

No Christmas Day with family and friends, no funerals or wedding feasts - we celebrate and mourn alone. My wife turns 62 and I turn 64, too young to wait in idleness; too old to gamble with our lives; too soon to sit and see the months roll past; too late… for who-knows-what we have already lost.

Sentenced for, we thought, ‘at worst a month or two, until the war is won’, we watch like frightened mice the months roll by. The plague falls back, then launch a new attack, hundred thousands of collaterally damaged people fall, front-line soldiers die in droves. We wait for bail. Forgotten in our cell, we fear the key is lost.

Friends get infected. Some die. Some suffer far from us. Our hands are tied. We watch the tides go up and down, then up again; we see the waves and numbing numbers, hear news (some good, some bad). Isolated as never before, yet, closer to our race (sapient, but not quite enough to stem the tide in time - in time we may) we feel the pain of one humanity. Humbled as a species by the smallest foe, yet challenged: “Fight together and act as one!” 

The

room is

small, our

tightest home

 since birth, yet,

also, endless like a

cottage in a dream. The

walls are thick, but virtually

opaque. They shut us up, but can

not keep our spirits in, who roam the

globe, tour history, look back or dream ahead.

It is a narrow space, no room for dancing (even if,

with injured bones, we could), and yet, like in the view-

piece of a telescope, we find us whirling far beyond the stars.

We raise our cups of tea, and clink. A year has gone (365 days, crazy as any we had before), yet we’re still here – our hut is small, but safe (and limitless as well).

Another year?

Parole denied?

Well, we HAVE

a room-sized

cave - a home.