Watermelon on Marais

It has been four months that we have been in quarantine. It feels like much longer. It feels like it has always been this way. Then, there are moments that catch us unaware, moments that awaken a sense of how things used to be.  

It was a few weeks ago we sat around and decided to screen a movie at the garden property. The meeting was full of hope, as planning meetings often are. Things were starting to open up around the city. The stay at home orders were being lifted. Early July seemed like the perfect time to plan a small, outdoor event. We wouldn’t know about the resurgence of the virus until later. That, and life circumstances, caused us to scale back the size of the event. Now, we hope to have a small gathering of family and friends at the property. We hope to play some live music. We hope to screen a movie. We hope to eat watermelon. We hope it doesn’t rain.

And so, we had a dry run of the movie screening last night. Dry is an understatement as we had to put boards on the ground to stop the chair legs from sinking into the mud. It was the perfect rehearsal in that many things went wrong. The sound system was the biggest headache. But when we connected the right cords, the speaker hissed to life and, suddenly, the garden was a theater. And, for a moment, in the semi-dark of a full-moon night, the world was normal again.