in quarantine she turned to ice cream making. it lacked the charm of baking, the age-old feel to it, the word knead, the angle of elbows, the flour and yeast and crust and rise. but it was a labor of attention like baking, and carried with it a sense of excess the way bread never could. excess was what she needed right now, these dim days in her tiny basement apartment, days when everything from door knobs to oxygen carried threat. disaster has no space for luxury, so to create such space was to negate disaster. she was aware of the rich luck of it—while others drowned in the sea of their own lungs, she simmered cream. the jug of milk in the fridge was a gift. and so she would make use of this gift. would watch close the custard pan, bring it to the edge of boil. she has learned to pay for her distractions. has learned that if she reaches the point of froth and burn there is nothing that can be salvaged: the only thing is to empty, scrub, begin again. so she tends the simmer like a child. the slow honey drizzle, rosemary steeped in cream. the work of parting yolks from whites—yellow sacs slipped shell to shell. her biceps strain when she pours hot milk into yolk. slowly, slowly, so the eggs don't curdle. then, after, the ice bath, a night to chill before churning. a labor of patience. while she waits for thickening there are people dying. while she watches the roil of cream there are others staying curled in their beds for days. the loneliness. the suicides. she too has been wounded. laid off from her job at the nursery. rent will be due in a week and she will be unable to pay. she thinks of the plants left to die in the warehouse: pink hollyhock wilted and bleached. peonies dropping heads with the weight of flesh. thinks of her aging mother two towns over, who on the phone said be patient. this too shall pass and thinks then also of patience, what about it feels like virtue. what about endurance, what about acceptance, is sweet. the phrase when this is over loops itself in her mind. but the phrase never blooms into sentence. making ice cream feels expansive, open: time stretched wide as prairie; a slowness other than struggle; a wait that needn't simply be borne. the cream firms up, the scoop is perfect and round. she spoons it cold and sweet into the hot hole of her mouth—tries to stay caught in that moment before melt. and for a brief slip she does: the seconds unthread. months from now she will remember this day, a blurred glow in an unshaped year, and feel unable to claim it as her past. she will feel herself grown illegible in this swath of illegible time. but for now, there are still hours to stretch out in. still this rhythm of simmer—freeze—melt.