Coronavirus Diaries: Day Five — A Forced Recovery From Our Disco Lives
By: Nicolle Sloane
Tags: Diary, Journaling, Isolation, Memoir, Coronavirus

I don’t know how this is will all go down. No one does.

Kevin is still able to work. So, he calls mid-day to check in with me.

“Everything okay there? All good with the chaos?”

I shrug, “No chaos here.” I want him to know that we are fine. The kids aren’t succumbing to fits of rage because they can’t go anywhere. Not yet anyway.

“We’re playing Scrabble.”

And we are. And mostly it goes okay. On our big dining room table, we have a family Monopoly game going at one end and the Scrabble game at the other. Scrabble gets cleaned up daily. Monopoly, so far, stays.

And as I’ve said before, I love to be home. I’m not stir crazy. Even though our house is tiny, we have two dogs and a cat (and a turtle) I’m okay.

Let It Go

The icicles hanging from the eaves of the house are dripping, the late afternoon sun shines through the window and accentuates all the dog slobber on the sliding glass door. This tends to make me crazy. But something in my brain has maybe softened and I let it go. Crumbs on the coffee table, stray pens and pencils on the recliner? I’ll get to them. Nothing feels urgent. Nothing ever was, right? Nothing like that. But now I just feel that it’s all not a big deal. Crumbs, dog slobber, untidiness. Let it go. The anxiety I had around these things has almost vanished.

We’re sleeping in. Even on the weekdays now when they’re to be on the screen with their classmates by 9 a.m. they sleep until 8:30. This weekend? Forget it! We all just sleep. And sleep. And sleep. It’s like the character Jenny in Forest Gump who sleeps for days on end when she returns to him from her disco life. It’s like our bodies are in this re-set mode.

I do another weird thing I’ve never done before. I’m suddenly taking Winston Churchill’s advice (I’m reading The Splendid and the Vile right now so I’ve got Winston on my mind) and I’m writing from my bed. If the kids are going to sleep in, what do I have to get out of bed for? Why go sit in a hard cold chair when I can just be where it’s most comfortable? At least for a little while! My cup of coffee, my books, my phone and my computer all here with me. I’m good.

Comestibles

Kevin keeps stopping by the filthy grocery stores to stock up on canned foods. I’ve said it before, the man cannot sit still. It’s like the stores are his last bastion. I’ve told him to please not bring home the canned goods as we don’t have room for any more food. We’re okay! But he’s beginning to hoard as his mother did (she lived during the Great Depression) and I’m worried.

Our beautiful friends at the Tahoe Food Hub are busy, busy, busy supplying us all with local fruits and vegetables, meats, grains. Every week I can still pick up a box of goods from them. That’s my go-to because HAVE YOU BEEN TO A GROCERY STORE LATELY? I went to Safeway one day this past week. The shelves were a little bare, but not to the degree that I’d imagined they would be. The problem was that the store was business-as-usual, they were taking absolutely no steps toward extra sanitizing or social distancing and honestly, that bugged me.

Speaking of comestibles, we’ve been eating non-stop. I’d originally planned on going on an“elimination diet” right now, but that’s not happening because a.) it doesn’t seem like the right time, b.) I want all the food (and let’s face it, wine too) right now. We’re baking up peanut butter cookies and baked zitis, soups, and stews, and coq a vin. And I don’t care. None of it seems to cause me an allergic reaction, at least not in the sneezing, eye-watering, itchy skin sense. So, if I’m a little puffy and feeling inflamed I’ll deal with that when this pandemic breaks.

A Drive, A Walk?

I asked the kids yesterday if they wanted to go for a drive.

“A drive?” Maddie asked, “What do you mean? Where would we go? We’d just drive somewhere and then drive back home without getting out of the car??”

I told them that when the snow melts, we can go for drives and have picnics! But for now, we can drive to the lake or out to Sierraville and just see something different. The kids didn’t bite. In time, I think they will.

So, instead, when Kevin got home from the grocery store and was hosed down, we all went for a walk through the neighborhood. Amazingly lots of other families we know were taking a jaunt too so we stopped 6+ feet from each other to say our hellos.

The kicker in this is that the kids (all four of them — our friends two kids and our two kids) were seemingly terrified that we stopped to talk, “You can’t congregate mom!” my friend’s son whispered while trying not to catch my eye. “We should go, mom,” he murmured and was clearly irritated and started down the hill on his skateboard. Maddie stood a good six feet from everyone except me.

My kids (and all the kids we know) are justifiably terrified of catching Covid-19. I just hope they don’t hold onto this fear forever.

And that’s all I have for today. Be well.

xo, N