On Scattered Things and Rabbit Holes

By Catherine DiMercurio

These days, I collect moments. We had coffee in bed. I couldn’t name the bird singing outside as the sun was rising. I found myself becoming aware of all the details at once. The unnamed birds (somehow wilder because I didn’t know what to call them) and the tightness of the red tree buds and the morning light on our faces and the scattered and speckled pattern the coffee made on the white sheet where I spilled it.

And this: that day, was it only earlier this week? and the warm fog of my dog’s breath in the morning air when I, after days of saying I need to go for a walk, went for a walk. And it had just snowed and the flakes were thick and damp and insisting on themselves as they settled on my face and on the black spots of my dog’s coat, making much ado as they rained down on warm March sidewalks before they disappeared.

Another walk, a few days later, and it suddenly feels like spring. Another walk, trying to beat the rain, and failing at that. Arriving home, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I’m washing my hands and I see the pattern the warm raindrops made on my skin, like something spilled and scattered.

I insist on noticing the ordinary things these days, and I can’t tell if it is to keep the confusion of the world out and a semblance of peace in, or to let the chaos in my brain out and the tiny fragments of life as we knew it in. It is a permeable membrane maybe, this fragile sheen of sought normalcy. I soak beans for soup. I fold the laundry. I hum while I wash dishes.

Maybe the insistence (that normal activity exists not just in the world as we knew it but as it is now) is the result of our brain’s worrying us away from the rabbit holes of news, social media, statistics, exponential growth graphs. I think of rabbit holes, and Alice, her miscellany of sense and nonsense, the way she sought to match known world to new. Adapting.

I think, too, that rabbit holes work just fine for rabbits, and if I could only think like one maybe it would be okay down here, cozy like the little home where Peter Rabbit’s mother tucked him in bed with chamomile tea when he wasn’t feeling well.

What is the overlap between known and new? Is it simply the unfolding of ordinary moments, of insisting on them?

I think of the things we forget to insist on when we scramble to adapt to the upending of everything.

These days, I don’t just collect moments. I work, and I try to box up worry and stuff it in a corner, lock it up with luck. I’m lucky; I have work I can do at home. I’m lucky; we’re still healthy. I hum loudly with my fingers in my ears as if it can keep luck from running out. I work, but it is hard to focus. Deadlines clang in the distance like the tardy bell at school half a mile away and I remember how I heard it on the first day that school was cancelled and I don’t hear it any more, but maybe I just stopped noticing.

These days, I’m perpetually calibrating, trying to tune my psychological and emotional response to the day, moment, beat. Sometimes it’s all static.

Like anyone these days, I don’t know what to think, and coping looks different all the time. More information. Less information. Different information. Silence. Noise. Coffee. Music. Breath. I like to look at faces, sometimes longer than people like to be looked at.

It’s impossible to stop myself from thinking of how quickly things have changed, how immediately so many plans we had for ourselves seem to have unraveled. But we are nothing if not weavers, and we routinely loop things back together and of course we will do so again. Rebraid the frayed strands, remake our plans, create new ones. Adapt.

A friend reminded me recently that our days are filled with choices, though things seem limited now, constrained and boundaried in ways we weren’t able to imagine just a couple of weeks ago. We choose moment by moment to be hopeful, to proceed, to connect, to insist.

I try to read a little poetry every day. To keep writing. To keep up with the home improvements that need to be done before I can sell my house. Though plans everywhere are collectively paused, we know they won’t stay that way. Timelines might have to be reimagined, details tweaked, but we will move forward, individually and collectively. It’s what we do, what we are doing. Inch by inch. Choice by choice. Coffee by coffee, poem by poem, word by word, walk by walk. Breath by breath.

I’m trying to see something of value in the scatter of my thoughts here. I feel like I have tried to organize a few stones on the beach into little cairns, but having failed, stare at the jumble of them and stop searching for sense. Isn’t that how Alice began to navigate Wonderland? Wasn’t it easier when she stopped expecting sense? Though innately, we do keep trying.

I think of scattered things, birdseed that ends up taking root, crumbs carried away by squirrels, coffee grounds across the garden soil. Things have a way of working out, I suppose, of rooting like seeds, or nurturing in unexpected ways like the crumbs from my bread or the grounds from my coffee.

Things have a way of connecting us to other, like all those tunnels in a rabbit warren. It makes sense to rabbits. They know where safety is, and what to look for, and when, and there is comfort in that, and beauty, too. We just have to look for it, adapt. We become curiouser and curiouser.

Love, Cath