I always figured I’d get the virus at some point. I mean, I got all the vaccines and masked up and socialized outdoors, but I was never the overly-cautious sort and once vaccines were available, I frequently fudged the rules because I couldn’t bring myself to get my panties in a wad over preventing something that everyone seemed to get anyway. But still, I kept not getting it and not getting it and not getting it which was truly wonderful but also made me feel sort of left out, like, what was wrong with me that I couldn’t get what everyone else was getting? And then I started wondering if I was invincible, my blood cells ironclad-protected against the coronavirus, but —

Oops, guess not!

I had sniffles for a couple days, and then suddenly a fever. I didn’t think anything of it — colds are going around — until 24 hours later when I took my grassy-tasting cannabis drops to help my fever-seized body relax enough to sleep and realized I couldn’t taste them. At all. Two tests later — one expired and one not — and it’s confirmed: I am not invincible. Well DARN.

It’s actually not been that bad, really. More like a bad cold with fevers, thank you, vaccines! The worst part is the intense boredom that comes with feeling sick enough not to do anything but not sick enough to not care.

My mom brought me cough drops and COVID tests and a pint of incredible soup packed with veggies and a wonderfully seasoned broth that I couldn’t taste but scarfed down nonetheless. My daughter picked up citrus and saltines from the store. I’ve continued to drink my morning coffee (something I don’t do when deeply ill) and turn eight gallons of milk into cheese two days running, started a couple pints of fermented lemon honey, parbaked some pie crusts, made chili, painted my nails, made crack, and watched so many Netflix I nearly melted my eyeballs. 

Speaking of Netflix, have you seen Million Dollar Decorators?

It’s such a marvelously smutty show — Schitt’s Creek come to life, I kid you not — and the absolute best thing to watch when sick. Here are five takeaways:

1. Just because something is expensive doesn’t mean it’s not tacky.
2. Rich people get PLAYED.
3. Interior design is a gift.
4. It’s delicious fun to call everyone “Dah-ling.”
5. I lovelovelove my house.

I binged almost the whole show in one day and then I made my older daughter watch the first episode with me when she came out to visit. 

Speaking of my older daughter…

I gave her a concussion. 

Before y’all report me: IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. And actually, it was half her fault. We ran into each other when playing Ultimate: her head and my shoulder, SMACK. The collision sounded quite impressive, but I felt fine and she just laughed, shook it off, and continued to play. But afterward she took a nap and then called to say she was still alive, and I was like, Wait, something’s wrong? By that evening, her head was hurting pretty bad. 

light reduction techniques
^{photo credit: my older daughter}

Monday, she didn’t work with my husband or drive, and she slept all day. That evening my younger daughter fixed her up a supper basket and hung out with her for a few hours.

Lil Red, minus the wolf and cape

She didn’t work on Tuesday, and she only made it several hours in the dishpit on Wednesday before the pain was too much: dizzy, sore teeth, and sharp headachy pain behind the right eye even though I’d hit her on the left side.

^{photo credit: my older daughter}

By that point I was beginning to wonder if I should be concerned, so my husband asked our son to swing by her house after work. Just look at her eyes, we said. Make sure there’s no brain bleed. (The kid lives by herself so how were we to know if she was slurring and staggering?) Our son gave her a thorough neurological assessment and pronounced her sound, BUT he benched her for the rest of the month, much to her enormous dismay. (That we’re already halfway through the month has not appeased her one bit, silly girl.)

Anyway, COVID.

paying me a visit, i.e. interrupting my workflow

The loss of taste only lasted about 36 hours, thank goodness, and I only had periodic fevers for two days, again, thanks to the vaccines.

even without taste, the texture of crack is delicious

Which brings me to my next question: do I still need to get my COVID booster this year? I haven’t yet gotten my vaccine (it’d be my fourth) or my flu shot for this year. After that long month of dental woes, I haven’t found it within myself to set aside a few days to feel (potentially) unwell from vaccines. But now that I’ve gotten COVID, does that mean I’ve been naturally inoculated for the season? At this point, wouldn’t another vaccine be kinda redundant?

Either way, I guess I still need to muster up the courage to get the flu vaccine. Two full days of Netflix is about all this woman can handle for one winter. 

This same time, years previous: rosemary asiago cheese, wedding whirl, how we homeschool: Terra, croissants, sour candied orange rinds, science lessons, the quotidian (12.15.14), bits of goodness, soft cinnamon sugar butter bars, cracked wheat pancakes.

One of my high school classmates has been incarcerated for the last thirty years. About eight months after we graduated from high school, and when he was just 18.5 years old, BB was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to Life Without Mercy.*

Over the last number of years, my friend Kelly, also a high school classmate, has been advocating on his behalf. Last Monday was his “second-chance hearing” — a plea to change his sentence from institutional imprisonment to house arrest. While Kelly has been keeping me up to date on the case as it progressed, I wasn’t planning to attend the hearing, but then my dad emailed on Sunday. Kelly and her daughter would be flying in from Denver for the hearing, he said. Want to go?

I did not want to go. I had plans to tackle office work that morning, and a two-hour round-trip drive to West Virginia would be an inconvenience to my tidy life. Plus, I don’t know BB. I didn’t really know him back then, either — I was shy and reserved in high school, and terribly insecure, which probably made me appear stand-off-ish to many of my classmates — but I do remember him. I have an image of him dribbling a basketball down the court and flashing his gorgeous smile.

But Kelly would be there! I wanted to support her, and I did want to support BB even though I wasn’t connected to him because I one hundred percent believe in second chances. I knew I was being given an opportunity to show up, to see our judicial system in action, and to stand in solidarity with a person who made a horrible mistake when he was the same age as my own children, and who has been paying for it every day since, but I had a schedule to keep! Back and forth I waffled, my conscience pricking the whole time — because: giving up a Monday morning versus thirty years in a jail cell? Come on, Jennifer! Make your freedom count! — until finally I decided that if I was this conflicted, then it probably meant I should go. So I went.

The hallway outside the courtroom was crowded with people, mostly older folks who were BB’s family members, from what I gathered. There were some police officers, and some spiffily-dressed young guys who looked like attorneys. Kelly introduced me as salutatorian of BB’s class to two older women and one of them quipped, “So what have you been doing with all those smarts?” “Uh, hanging out at home and making cheese,” I answered dryly, which ended up sparking a lively conversation. (Their favorite cheese? Longhorn. I love Longhorn and I’d forgotten all about it!) And then the door opened and BB’s name was called.

I’d never been in court before (except for a driving ticket). It was like another world. Most of us sat on one side of the room. There was a big screen up front for people who were connecting via zoom — a couple other classmates, BB’s attorney, and down in the far right corner was BB himself, sitting in his cell. At the start we could hear the banging and clanging prison sounds, but eventually someone muted him. 

The whole thing was understated, practically dull. The judge fussed about having people on zoom and having to handle a case that originated in another county, and the defense attorney explained the history of the case and why they were bringing it up now. The prosecutor recounted the murder and listed off the reasons why it was important to keep BB in prison. The judge fretted that granting a second chance to one person would open the floodgates, effectively flooding the entire judicial system with people asking for second chances. The defense attorney patiently explained how and why his fears weren’t warranted. 

And then the defense attorney called the single witness, one of the spiffily-dressed men who was sitting two rows in front of us and who explained that he got to know BB in prison because he, too, had committed first-degree murder: straight out of high school, he’d gotten involved in drugs and shot a guy in a deal gone wrong. But in his case, he’d been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with mercy. He served 16 years, was released, and was now an assistant pastor of a congregation, married, and with a young child. Calmly and clearly, he spoke about BB’s peace-loving, compassionate character. For the last thirty years, BB had behaved in an exemplary manner, a fact that was never once contradicted, and he pleaded with the judge for BB to be given the same chance to contribute to society as he’d been given.

Listening to him speak, the similarities between the two men were remarkable, similarities which made their differences all the more stark:

1. The witness had been solely responsible for committing murder while BB had participated in a crime led by another person, and 
2. The witness was white and BB was Black. 

The judge watched the video that Kelly had prepared. He said he was impressed that so many people had come out in support of BB — “most of these men have no one,” he said — and then he denied BB a second chance. Thirty years ago, the jury made a decision and so they’d stick to it, he said. Gotta keep things fair, was the gist of it. 

The monitor screen went blank. The judge shuffled papers in preparation for the next case. The tiny woman sitting beside me asked, “The judge ruled against him?” and I nodded. We gathered our things and filed out.

leaving Moorefield

For the rest of that day I felt weird, off-kilter, both heavy and detached. I’d just had a front row seat to narrow-minded, eye-for-an-eye logic and bald-faced racisim. It dawned on me that, in a way, I’d actually just witnessed a murder — a person’s life off-handedly tossed away — but a murder so clean and sterile I almost couldn’t tell it’d just happened. It made me feel dirty.

And I couldn’t stop marveling at how the judge had simply said no. Just. . . no. He hadn’t consulted with his wife, or with his pastor. He hadn’t paused for a minute or two to reflect. He hadn’t spoken a word to BB, or even looked at him, as far as I could see. That a single elderly white man sitting on a platform at the front of a room had the sole power to grant someone life, and yet had chosen not to, sent me spinning. I know court cases are complicated and that there are many legalities to take into consideration, but if those with power, people like me, can’t find it within ourselves and within our systems to give people second chances, then what hope is there? How can we ever expect anyone to grant grace to us when we need it?

a video that Kelly shared with me: a similar situation.

In the week since I drove to the Moorefield Courthouse with my dad, I haven’t thought about BB’s case very much. It could be because I don’t know BB and his case doesn’t affects me personally, but I think my short-term memory stems from something deeper. First, the judicial system is so all-powerful that confronting it feels useless, so why bother? And second, prisoners are an out-of-sight out-of-mind segment of the population. If we can’t see them, they don’t exist. They’re ghosts, the living dead, the forgotten ones. And yet imprisoned people are fully human, and with the same capacity to feel and suffer and change as the rest of us.

***

If you want to take a small action on BB’s behalf, here’s a simple petition that you can sign.

*The crime happened then; the trial and conviction happened about a year later.

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (12.12.22), just what we needed, second amendment sanctuary, in praise of the local arts, Italian wedding soup, hot chocolate mix, constant vigilance!, sunrise, sunset, my elephant.

Quotidian: daily, usual or customary;
everyday; ordinary; commonplace

I didn’t feel like cooking a Thanksgiving meal so we had leftovers.

A week later I redeemed myself.

And made a pile of broth from the carcass.

We got to hang with these sweet monkeys for a week.

“Let’s make an ad for chocolate milk,” I said: nailed it.

And then we gave them axes and released them into the wilds.

This is my family pulling down a cut (and stuck) tree with a truck while arguing nonstop and very loudly.

Movie night with the cuzzes!

The short and tall of it.

The spreadsheet guru imparting her wisdom.

Who says standing desks have to be fancy?

Team headlight replacement.

Every morning: Heading out to visit the ladies.

This same time, years previous: the fourth child, 2020 garden stats and notes, the quotidian (12.9.19), the quotidian (12.10.18), when the dress-up ballgown finally fits, yeasted streusel cake with lemon glaze, managing my list habit, in my kitchen (sort of): 4:15 p.m., stuffing.