6.2 Williams

Small Sounds

Alison Williams

Keywords: death, cancer, semi-rural environment, care, Covid, pandemic, family, soundscape

Categories: Parenting and Possibility in Impossible Times; Sick/Disabled Bodyminds during Sick/Disabling Times

Content warning: death, cancer, Covid, pandemic

It is Saturday morning. Through the picture windows that look out into my yard, I see my six chickens weaving back and forth in front of the door to the coop my boyfriend and I built together in May of 2020. Their caws of complaint reach my ears even through the windows and walls of the house. Their antics make me smile. Where do they want to go with such urgency? It’s the same every day—out to their enclosure, where they’ll scratch and peck and nest and bathe in the dirt all day. Every day, the same small things.

It’s good to smile first thing in the morning, especially in a time when there hasn’t always been much to grin about.

I’m grateful for my pandemic chickens. In April, I stood in a highly suspicious socially distanced line that wound around the block of the local feedstore to get the chicks. “Come early,” the owner said when I’d called the week before. “Bring a chair. Last month sold out in an hour.”

I came to semi-rural Ojai four years ago. A pre-pandemic move that was the culmination of a lifelong dream—to sell my business, teach and write full-time, and escape Los Angeles, my hometown. The reality of the experience had turned out to be as good as the dream, which isn’t always the case.

Then, the pandemic. Everyone wanted chickens. Wanted out of the city.

I start with gratitude, because I recognize that a peaceful semi-rural life is not how many, or most, people have experienced these many months following lockdown. My kids started back to school online, in a makeshift pod, which we quickly had to shut down when my daughter tested positive for Covid, striking fear into the hearts of five families and everyone else we were in contact with. After no symptoms, numerous negative tests and later, an antibody test, it turned out it was likely a false positive. But the lesson was the same. Nothing was safe, no matter how safe you tried to make it.

But they go to a tiny school, with a large outdoor campus, which the school entirely reconfigured for outdoor learning. Soon, they were given the go-ahead to be back in person, outside. My kids had school outdoors for the entire year, rain, snow, or blistering Ojai shine. I did some outside activities. I volunteered at the horse rescue across the street, mucking stalls and exercising new recruits in a mostly unpeopled stable. In addition to chickens, I also adopted a horse.

There were other good things. Writing workshops on Zoom bloomed. That’s where I got the idea to do a little project recording the sounds of daily life during Covid. I recorded my walk down the dirt road to the barn in the morning, the neighborhood hawk crying out overhead. I recorded my morning coffee, the ritual indicating another day had started, when they all seemed to blend into one another. I recorded the sound of my daughter’s breathing as she slept next to me in my bed. She had come back to it early on in the shut-down and stayed nightly for months, giving both her and me comfort.

There were hard things. While I centered in this new version of life, I offered care to others whose lives were going awry. I mentored and held space for my students, who were adjusting to remote learning. Many of them had to leave and go home overseas, and were stuck in hotels, isolated for months. Each quarter, in my classes of twenty-five, I had at least two students with severe mental health issues or suicidal thoughts—those were, of course, the most drastic. I stayed flexible. We are all learning, I told them. We must all create reasonable expectations for ourselves. Put care for yourself and your family first. You can email me your essay later, when your WiFi works.

Crisis, spurred by the effects of the pandemic. My teenage daughter, canceled on social media, doxxed, and receiving death threats. My boyfriend, struggling to make ends meet while holding two jobs in L.A. in the restaurant industry, one of them acquired right before the pandemic. My sister, moving into divorce after twenty years and two kids. My best friend, fighting to hang on to her twenty-year restaurant. My ninety-five year old grandmother, isolated in her care home. All of us, struggling with our relationships, with our livelihoods.

I focused on the small things and was grateful for them. I exhausted myself with giving care, showing up to every crisis. Teaching, while challenging, gave me structure and purpose. Caring for loved ones, while draining, made me feel in some way like I was helping to hold up the world as it crumbled around us.

By the beginning of the summer, it was too much. I had to start to take it back. In doing so, I faced more loss. In July, the dissolution of my three-year relationship. In August, the unexpected and tragic death of a dear friend, certainly a byproduct of the isolation of this time. And on the second of September, I lay on a table in the hospital while a radiologist indicated on the ultrasound screen an abnormal mammogram that appeared to be cancer.

It was, in fact, cancer.

As the pandemic restrictions eased, and the world started to open up, I took a leave of absence from work to care for myself. I wasn’t sure people would show up to care for me. I am used to taking care of my own self, and taking care of others. I’m not used to others taking care of me. But a good number did, just the right number, some unexpected. Others I expected would be there, were not. Throughout, I learned that care isn’t always exactly reciprocal. It was hard to ask for what I needed, but having cared for others, I realized I could. That help would come if I let it. And that I could say no to what was not helpful. That - as many of us are learning - saying No is, in fact, a form of radical self-care.

There are many forms of care. Some are more useful than others. It is up to each of us to ask for and give care, as we can, as needed. To keep ourselves, and others, safe. Or as safe as we can.

Being diagnosed with cancer compelled me to turn the labor of my care to myself. I know how to care for myself. I wake in the morning. There is coffee, and feeding the chickens. I listen to small sounds.

Time changed during the pandemic. What once seemed inevitably incessant, like rush-hour traffic, ground to a halt; while the slowdown of cruise travel turned the waters in the dirty canals of Venice, Italy crystal-clear. All the days blended into one. This piece didn’t escape the time warp. When I submitted it, cancer was not even on my mind. Several weeks later, I had an abnormal mammogram, and wrote to the editors to make a change to the middle paragraph. A year further, I am post-treatment and in remission from Stage 3 breast cancer. If you experience some time lapses while reading, now you know why.

(Click on green links below to listen to audio.)

New Recording 22

23 June 20