How We Drink Now

In my apartment in Brooklyn is a blue-and-white china vase. It once held a geranium but is now a receptacle for my wine corks, which overflow onto the lightly worn oak of my kitchen table. I assume it is still there, anyway, the corks lying scattered as they fell, as I haven’t been in that apartment since the beginning of February. For four months, I’ve been on a long and unanticipated hiatus at my mother’s home in Maryland. I came here to help her through cancer treatments, a bag of laundry in the car, anticipating months of back and forth during her long battle. But she was hospitalized three days after I arrived and I had to go on immediate leave from work. The laundry was done and packed in my trunk, where it has been ever since; the pancreatic cancer claimed her life in six short and vicious weeks. When we buried her on March 10th, the country was beginning to shutter. So I stayed, confined to and quarantining in my childhood home, forced to use my time to go through her things, our things, my family’s things, room by room, with many tears. In some ways it’s been helpful, confronting all that grief head-on. In others, it is a hell I can’t escape.

Sometime in March (who knows when; “time is a suggestion,” my aunt said when this all began and the hospital days were blurring together, a statement that fits Quarantine Time, too) I began a cork vase here, this one clear glass with a scalloped rim. I remember when it was filled with fresh cuts from my mother’s well-tended garden, sitting in the center of our old kitchen table where I am writing this now, the table around which we breakfasted and dinnered and homeworked for thirty years and more. The small vase was quickly overrun, the corks spilling onto the shelf where it bookends her cookbooks as my family and I (and eventually just I, when they went home at last) went through the supply of wine I had driven down from Brooklyn,