The police report from that night states, “Mrs.

“Hm-m-m,” I said, because as luck would have it, I had chopped wood and carried water just a few minutes earlier on my way out to get the paper off the drive. (Well, I carried a watering can and sprinkled that pumpkin vine at the back of the yard, and I broke up a fallen branch lying on the lawn, so… yeah, close enough.)

Now would I say something that wasn’t true?

I’m asking you sugar

Would I lie to you?

— Would I Lie to You, Eurythmics

The world lies to us. 

We accept these lies as truth, even when evidence points to the contrary.

This point was driven home over and over when our family moved into our little house.

-You don't need "as large of a house as you can afford." 

Oops, sorry. Sometimes I wax poetic when I doze off.

Anyway, the tapping was so soft I wondered who or what might be gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

When I got there, of course, there was nobody.

“Maybe that woodpecker,” I thought, the pesky critter that came around last summer to bonk his beak on a porch pillar.

But no—she wanted a sleepover. A run of the mill stay-up-late-giggling-and-gossiping overnight with a handful of her besties. 

It reminded me of sleeping over at friends’ houses when I was growing up in the 80s: greasy pizza, hours of watching MTV or playing Pac Man.

I fall into that category. Although I was able to stay virus-free long enough to get the vaccine and become bullet-proof, the pandemic did horrible things to me.

And maybe the worst of all is that Covid drove me to turn on the TV.

Oh, it didn’t happen right away. Early last year, as infection rates slowly crept upward and it became clear that this might be a long, lonely slog ahead of us, I resolved to turn my lockdown time into unforeseen opportunity.

Well, at least not until recently, thanks to that video camera I recently bought, so well-camouflaged that those who are being peeped-upon don’t have a clue that I’m watching them.

I’ll get to that, but first a bit of background.

The term “Peeping Tom” dates back almost a thousand years, to a time when a lady named Godiva married a greedy ruler named Leofric in 1040, and urged him to reduce the severe taxes that he had levied on the poor townspeople of Coventry, England.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

My husband is out of town with our two youngest children, which means I’m alone for a few days.

The house is eerily quiet. It took me a little while to adjust to the idea that I was the only person in the house. I walked through all the rooms, seeing the wreckage of two teens who quickly packed their duffel bags a few minutes before leaving; I crossed my fingers that they at least grabbed their toothbrush and clean socks before they went out the door.

I have been a big fan of Nana’s Hot Dogs since they opened on Irving Park Road in Streamwood in 1973, the year I moved to nearby Schaumburg.

My husband grills old-school. He swears by his little Smokey Joe and refuses to upgrade to anything larger, and especially wouldn’t entertain the idea of a gas grill. When he grills, it’s an event; that grill is filled up with meat, and the smell is sublime. He’ll walk back and forth between the kitchen and the backyard, grabbing tongs and hot pads and platters with a sly grin on his face; I watch him, trying to gauge whether the side dishes I’m preparing will be ready at the same time the smoky meat is deemed edible by the grill-master.

Because Leyden kids dressed differently than we did at EP, I endured taunts and jeers as I walked through the halls on that very first day.

You’ve got to believe me.

You’ve maybe noticed how I trip over my words. Or I say things that seem to meander on a disjointed path, bereft of any point or story.

When we were told not to leave our house in order to stop the coronavirus from spreading, I wanted to leave my house in the worst possible way.

Now that restrictions are easing up and we’re slowly leaving our house again, going back to work, standing a little closer to others—close enough to have an actual conversation—well, I’m not sure I’m ready.

Of course, when he said it eight or nine months ago, the words rang hollow, as all lies do. If you spend eight months rounding a corner, that’s known as going in a circle.

But now, with vaccines abundant and with sensible citizens rolling up their sleeves to get poked, and with infection and death rates falling, it seems we’re actually rounding the corner and seeing the light at the end of a tunnel.

That’s the beauty of traveling miles away to a foreign country. You can always come back home if you don’t like it.

I get a text like this most days from my son. Reese is 16, and he was right in the middle of taking his drivers ed course when school closed because of the pandemic. Now, in what is turning out to be the slowest year of our lives, he has ample time to practice his driving. 

The funny thing is, Reese likes to text me, even if he’s just sitting across the room: “Wanna go driving?” This has become our secret signal, the unspoken get-out-of-jail-free card we have during these lazy days when COVID-19 makes it difficult to go anywhere.

But more than a half-million Americans have died of the Covid-19 virus in the past year, including a nice lady I knew.

Without warning, the reviewer compared the new novel to a previous work by the same author—the very book that I had on my nightstand!

Take a gander at my cluttered bookshelves sometime and you’ll wonder what possible value some of the items there could have to any sane, sensible man. The answer is “none,” but then we’re not talking about sane and sensible in this case, I guess.

Most of the items cluttered in front of the books are rocks.

But I’m raring to go. It’s officially spring. We have a vaccine. (Several vaccines, which is nothing short of miraculous.) Stores and restaurants are opening up, loosening restrictions. The latest question folks ask each other is, “Did you get the vaccine yet?”

This week, my kids headed back to in-person school. It felt like a momentous occasion, a celebrated return to normalcy from the “before times.” Even though I’ve loved having the kids home during remote learning, it’s been an entire year of barely going anywhere.

“Yeah,” he said, “I hated seeing all those left-wingers posing as Trump fans smash up that building.”

“Wait…what?” I said, struggling to believe that my new friend could say something like that in anything but an ironic, joking tone.