“Let’s take a walk,” I say.
The kids aren’t sure. The dog is activated.
“C’mon,” I say. “It’ll be fun. Fresh air, stretch our legs.”
I’m lying to them. It will not be fun.
But every few days I look at their gray, tired faces and their hunched spines and I hustle them out the door and into the outside with fake cheer. Online school and cancelled everything makes for long, dreary days. I see sunshine out the window. Outside we go.
On the way out I turn on the air for our Halloween inflatables.
“C’mon, it’s fun!” I lie again. The ghost and the black cat rise up out of the lawn but the 20-foot pumpkin-headed man can’t stand up. His face is planted in the grass.
“We should fix that,” I say. My oldest shrugs.
“It doesn’t matter. He can’t stand up,” he says, “I didn’t even want to put him out this year.”
Together we gaze at the sad pumpkin man. I nicknamed him Sir Pumpkin Head because he looks debonair, a charming if roguish gentleman. Like a minor royal who parties too much but is super polite about it. The kids and my husband put these decorations out, like usual, even though Halloween is a big, sad question mark this year. It was an attempt to inspire some happiness. Normalcy.
The walk is a disaster. Before we’ve gone two blocks we’ve had to cross the street four times to avoid other dog walkers. Our 85-pound lab mix fights with other dogs and so we weave, avoiding every other Portlander with a dog who is outside grabbing a chance at sunshine. We started out as a halfway energetic group of four but soon we spread out, the dog in the lead, actively trying to dislocate my shoulder as he lurches along, then me, stomping and grumbling at the dog, then my son in flip-flops (nonsensical for a walk in October), my 10-year-old last, angry at something her brother or I said to her.
I keep twisting around to look at my daughter because when she’s upset she tends to look at the ground and I’m anxious about her crossing the streets. Her dark eyes come up to meet mine and they look sad. I look at my son. He shrugs. None of us have had a haircut since March.
At five blocks I call it. Forget it. Let’s go home.
In front of our house we pass a knot of young women talking and laughing together by their car. They look amazing in the highest waisted jeans I have ever seen. They have just been at the weed shop on the corner and they are talking about what they’ve bought. I try to stand straighter and look better as I walk past but I know that to these young women, I look like a cautionary tale. My hair, my ill-behaved dog, my children who would rather be anywhere than walking around the block with me.
Back at the house the kids and dog go inside and I begin to dance with Sir Pumpkin Head, trying to push him up to standing. He keeps smiling and tipping genteelly over onto my head. I swear and stomp my feet and push him up again. He falls. I punch him in the gut. He falls. I stomp my foot and scream.
He is politely but resolutely fallen.
Fine. Maybe if I untangle the strings attached to his sides and re-stake them in the ground he’ll be more balanced and he’ll inflate. But for some reason I don’t move. I stand underneath the yards of wet nylon and work on untying all the knots. It’s kind of peaceful under there. I can hear my breath. But also, there are slugs. I mutter to myself. Damn knots. Damn pumpkin man.
I finally manage to untie the knots in the strings. I stake him in place and watch him stand up again to his full height, shedding rainwater. I move over to the ghost and sit on the wet grass to work on the knots in its strings. The strings are all in a wad, with a metal stake jammed through the center. I grumble about how nobody has the attention to detail I have to do these things properly. In reality, my anxiety sometimes makes it hard to walk away from messes. I don’t want to go inside knowing the knots are there, and so I work.
Halloween used to be a wild, headachy, adrenaline-filled night. Every year the kids were gaining more independence, pulling farther and farther ahead of the adults, berserk with sugar and independence and hilarity, going almost but not quite out of our sight. It was the opposite of the sad, cranky parades we now perform around the neighborhood; it was the normal way of things. An evening snapshot of our children’s natural line of development – stretching the boundaries of our eyes and our arms until they are off, free to create their own worlds, boundaries and all.
As I sit with the strings of the ghost, an old woman walks past me on the sidewalk. She had been to the weed shop too. She carries a white paper bag and she walks with a cane, very, very slowly. Her eyes are fixed on a point ahead of her with grim certitude. That look is familiar to me and I think, She’s in pain. I wonder if the marijuana in her bag will help her. I wonder how long she has to walk until she gets to her car.
I start to cry, still working on the muddy strings. I don’t even know why I’m crying, except that it’s a major pastime these days. Maybe the tears are for all the women here on this little corner of the world, living all the timelines, feeling all the things.
Finally all the inflatables are arranged in a way that will let my irritable brain rest. What a weird yard we have, I think. And me, the dingy Halloween gamekeeper, standing here among them, loving and hating them. Thinking about all the things I’m scared of and all the things I’m grateful for. And my and my kids’ slow, mad, sad, beautiful-to-behold procession through it all.