It’s April 10. Good Friday. The 26th day of isolation/quarantine for us in New York’s Hudson Valley. A month since I’ve been physically in the theater, working in the costume shop — since that day I didn’t realize was going to be my last day going to work.
That’s not intended to be melodramatic. The people I work for are good people. They’re still sending me whatever sewing work they can: masks for donation to healthcare workers, some for the safety of other theater employees, greenscreens for the virtual production of the Theater students’ spring show…. Things my grandmother wouldn’t have dreamed her incredible Bernina sewing machine would see. I am lucky. With my handful of hours per week, I will help earn what we need for the bills that still have to be paid during this time.
What’s more, we are surrounded by beautiful space — willow trees golden with new foliage, wide cornfield measured out by the shallow furrows of a disc-harrow, brigades of yellow-shining daffodils, the tiny green shoots of future salads poking up from our garden plot, a wide expanse of sky through which pass wheeling hawks and vultures, jubilant bluebirds, robins, bluejays, and chickadees… We can step out our door without fear.
One of the bluebird friends.
But that’s not all.
I have time. All of a sudden I have time. Time to practice. Time to just sing. Time to take weekly voice lessons, now that they’re online and not hours of travel away. Time to write. Time to watch as many operas as I like.
Yes, I’ve lost three professional music gigs so far, and my husband has lost more — some will be rescheduled, some will not — and the budget changes.
Yes, there have been days when I’ve just wanted to curl up and not do anything… and sometimes that’s exactly what I’ve done.
But this time feels like an immense gift to me. Because, while I’ve had my music gigs here and there, this post-graduate-school year I haven’t been a full-time musician. I have not had the rug pulled out from under me like the singers working for opera houses whose season all of a sudden ceased to exist — who fear that their lives may never be the same again. I have no idea how I would feel in that position.
However, in my own shoes, I feel I’ve been handed exactly what my desire for stability made me afraid to take: time, unpressured, to sing — to make up for all the singing I might not have done in four years of undergrad conservatory, when I was intent on academic excellence, and two years of graduate conservatory, scrabbling to stay emotionally afloat.
It’s a gift that comes bound up with guilt, though. Because while I am thriving here, not far away people are dying, others are working grueling, dangerous, inhumane hours trying to keep them alive, other have no work, no money to live on… All these situations caused by the same thing that has granted me the time I longed for.
I’m not sure if I know the exact reason for my writing this today. Is it a need to publicize my sense of guilt? A need to justify my productivity after seeing numerous articles reminding people that they should not feel pressure to use this time for all their dream projects, because it is, after all, a time of global grieving, suffering, and trauma?
I don’t know.
I know that my heart has felt heavier these past few days than ever in the last four weeks; that yesterday morning I couldn’t stop crying; that my voice teacher’s reminder of the physical and emotional catharsis of singing was timely. I know that, this morning, recording Mozart’s Alleluia for the online Easter service to be offered by the church where my husband is music director, it was hard to beam the joy of that word through my being to the camera.
I am going to keep working, though, with as much kindness to myself as I can muster. And I’m going to keep singing, each day, with a search for honesty — and joy, as I am able to find and share it.
AddieRose Forstman
Good Friday, 10 April 2020
Red Hook Cottage
Minuit is skeptical of greenscreens.
Sunset on the east cornfield
Morning’s golden hour over the south cornfield & weeping willow