Shots!

8:45 and I join the line of maybe 100 people shuffling along outside Ohio State's old basketball arena. No time at all, and I'm inside, flashing my driver's license, waved forward by one of the many National Guardspeople who are directing traffic, keeping things orderly and all of us socially distant. If not for them, this could be the line for a basketball game 

or a rock concert. There's music playing. "Life in the Fast Lane" of all things, blasting out of the loudspeakers. Shuffling along inside and I spy the weight room, college kids working out. The people in line appear to be the 50-somethings, (the vaccine's open to our age group now) and this music feels appropriate.

I'm taking notes on my phone so I don't forget this experience. Profound thought this moment: 

life in the fast lane/surely make you lose your mind

My appointment's at 9 am and I'm sitting at a registration table by 9:05. My registration person is a part-time pharmacist at Kroger, she tells me. She usually works 20 hours a week but this week she'll be working every day, 7 am - 8 pm. This is it, she says. How do you feel?

Good!

She types in my information on her laptop and I type notes on my phone: now they're playing "Thunder" by AC/DC. 

9:10 and I'm in line again, moving past the National Guard and the row after row of registration tables to line up once more behind the other 50-somethings. Everyone is quiet. Are we the lucky ones who never got sick? A few days ago I was teary-eyed making this appointment. An end in sight and I was overwhelmed-- elated and anxious. Now, I don't know what I feel. 

9:13 and a National Guardsperson waves me toward a nurse with an open seat. She fills out my vaccine record and gives me the shot. I don't feel anything. Not even a pinprick. Thank you, I tell her, and then I'm moved along again, this time to a waiting area in a hallway. We're supposed to sit here for fifteen minutes in case we have an allergic reaction to the shots, but nobody seems to be timing us. 

The music is still blasting. We've moved onto Guns and Roses, "Paradise City." Is this 1980's music a conscious choice? I ruminate over rock concerts I've been to, sneak looks at the people sitting around me, everyone scrolling on their phones. 

I text my husband, who went through this same process at the same place the day before. What was your nurse's name? he asks me.

I realize I don't know. Hannah, maybe? 

He says, Mine was Emily. And you should know. This person just saved your life. 

Hannah, definitely, I tell him, even though I'm not 100 percent sure. Next time, though, next time, I will make a note of it. 

9:28 and I'm walking out to my car. It's a sunny cold day and I live only minutes away. My arm doesn't hurt and I want it to. 

Not numbers

March 13, the day we shut down in Ohio because of the global pandemic, I recorded in my planner the number of Covid 19 cases in the state and in the country. 

4, I wrote. 

1,015 in the US, I wrote. 31 deaths. 

And then, I just kept doing that, the squares on my planner, which used to have how many pages I'd written each day or how many words, appointments, meet-ups with friends at restaurants, writing workshops I was teaching, school visits-- became an exponentially increasing list of virus cases, a catalog of deaths. I don't know why I felt compelled to do this, but once I started, I couldn't stop. I wanted to know. I wanted to see it, this slow-moving tragedy, distilled down to numbers. 

And the numbers quickly became horrifying. I remember back in the spring hearing the president brag about how he'd saved the country from 2 million deaths, and now, because of him, we'd only have one hundred or two hundred thousand. The day he said this, March 30, 2020, I wrote in my planner:

2,314 deaths in the US, 

so, 100,000, the lowball number that he was bragging about (remember, at the time, he was saying "it will all go away by Easter") was incomprehensible to me. 

For the record, we reached that number less than two months later on May 29. 

We passed 200,000 dead on September 22.

We passed 300,000 dead on December 14.

I read somewhere that when we hear about mass death, humans tend to go numb. Show us the picture of one dead child, the toddler in the firefighter's arms the day of the Oklahoma City Bombing, for example, the bloodied body of that one precious little girl, and we are gut-punched by horror and grief.  

But, tell us that 230,000 people died in the tsunami in December 2004 

tell us 500,000 people were murdered in Rwanda that same year 

tell us that yesterday alone in the United States of America 2,624 people died of Covid, 

and while we feel awful, of course, our minds can't seem to handle what that means, each number a person, precious and individual.

I started a new planner on January 1, 2021 and I am no longer writing the numbers of cases, the numbers of deaths. 

Instead I am reading stories about the people who died. I'm following a project put together by my writer and artist friend Josey Goggin. She calls it the Art of Death and each day she paints a watercolor picture of one American who died of Covid on a page in the soon-to-be-former president's book The Art of the Deal. 

Follow along with her project here --if you want to stop thinking about numbers and remember the human being who is behind each one.  

The last time it was Friday the 13th

was March

and I went to work at the library. It was the day before the lockdown in our state. Only for two weeks, the governor said, just to calm things down. Which was weird because we only had four confirmed cases of Covid, but we at the library were going with the flow. Helping the mass of people streaming in to check out books and movies. Something to pass the time during quarantine. 

That was the last time I was in a crowd.

Flash forward eight months, and our library branch doesn't allow people inside the building. Now we help patrons at our walk-up window. Talk through our masks. Slide books and movies through the slot along a six foot long board, positioned there to keep us at a distance. 

November 13 Ohio had its highest number of new cases in one day: 8,071. And 40 people died. There's a fear we'll have to lock down again. But kids are playing in the park. People are walking their dogs. That's a thing I've learned about this slow-moving tragedy. How easily most of us have adapted.  

March 13 my husband and I didn't have any hand sanitizer in our house. Except for a couple of n95 masks bought for a painting project, we didn't own face masks. We had one nine-pack of toilet paper tucked under the bathroom sink. I didn't know what Zoom was. 

November 13 and we have hand sanitizer and masks scattered all over the place. I can't stop buying packs of toilet paper. We're planning a Zoom Thanksgiving. Our daughter is helping us set up the link. 

March 13 she was living on her own in London, going to grad school, planning for a summer of travel across Europe. Now she's living at home, back since May. She finished up her dissertation in her bedroom. Spent her summer helping me in the garden.

Now the weather's turned cold. Outside at night you can smell the smoke from neighborhood firepits. We set ours up in the center of our driveway, spaced the chairs a safe distance apart. This is a lost year, I've heard people say. We're all itching to go back to normal. But sometimes, sitting around the fire with friends, 

it feels like we have already made it through. 

Fall Gifts

My son sent me a picture of the sky outside his apartment. Smoky white and a small orange sun. Another picture of his girlfriend sitting out on their balcony. She’s wearing a purple flowered mask, the sky behind her orange. I am thinking about the end of the world, 

or what feels like the end of the world. 

How we keep going, even during plague and fire. Only a few months ago we browsed in stores and sat together in darkened movie theaters and ate in crowded restaurants. Now we order what we need online and stream movies and pick up takeout. 

I’ve been sending books to friends. Stories I liked that I think they might too. Sort of a Pay-It-Forward Amazon book club. The other day someone sent me a book and it made me absurdly happy. The book is about the restorative power of nature. I believe in this. 

Six months ago we had an overgrown patch of ragged ornamental grass in our backyard. I spent most of the early part of lockdown yanking it out. Another week literally jumping up and down on a shovel digging up the matted root clumps. The dirt left behind was rocky and probably not right for a vegetable garden, but I planted one anyway. Lettuce. Spinach. Beets. A few weeks later, tomato plants and zucchini. My daughter, who’d fled London and quarantined in our house for two weeks, ventured outside and planted marigold seeds. 

Now the marigolds are thigh high, the garden still producing so many tomatoes and zucchini that we are giving them away. 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg died, and I didn’t cry. Distraught friends reached out and my daughter cried on and off all day. But I had used up my tears four years ago after Trump won the election and then surprised myself by crying again two years later during the Kavanaugh hearings, both times a stark reminder that there are some men who see women as lesser, who give no thought at all about hurting us. 

An old self has resurfaced, the eight-year-old who figured out fast that the people in charge either don’t know what they are doing or don’t care or are actively trying to harm me. If I want to survive, that is on me.  

I did. 

And then I went with my daughter to a candlelight vigil in front of the Ohio Supreme Court for Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Mostly women there, of course, moms with their daughters, a little masked three-year-old dancing around the fountain. A woman offered my daughter candles, and we lit them and walked over to where people were signing their names and writing about Justice Ginsberg and what her work and her life had meant to them. We are Ruth-less, one of the signs said. Today we mourn, tomorrow we fight for your legacy. 

My son told me the smoke is better out where he lives. The heat broke so he and his girlfriend can open the windows. This week we passed 200,000 Americans dead from Covid 19 and the Republicans are gleefully rushing to confirm a justice to fill Ginsberg’s seat, a person who will likely work to overturn everything she fought for. 

Do the people at the end of the world know they are living at the end of the world? Or do they just keep going 

one gift of a candle 

one tomato

one book at a time? 

Pandemic Diaries, Summer Covid-ition

Friday, July 3, 2020

I keep thinking of 9/11, all of those firefighters climbing around the fallen twisted pile that was once the World Trade Center, the toxic dust in the air and the authorities assuring everyone that it was fine, safe. Don't worry at all about what you're breathing in, they said. Flash forward and those people are dying, have died from cancer and long-term respiratory problems. 

When we get past this, assuming we do, it will be the same thing. People will wonder how we allowed fireworks and parties and parades and campaign rallies and packed bars. They’ll think we were nuts for sending kids back to school and college and football practice. It’s like a slow moving train wreck every day. 

Four months into the pandemic and there's so much we don't know. How much spread is caused by asymptomatic people and how kids are affected. How to properly quarantine. And all the people catching this--the ones who seem to have gotten better... Have they, really? 

Cases in the US: 2,754,000

Deaths: 126,000

Cases in Ohio: 51,581

Deaths: 2,653

Thursday, July 16, 2020

Watching too much news and eating too much food. Listening to an audio book about how to talk about race and how Not to talk about race. The voice reading the audio book is soft and angry and I don't blame her. Taking long walks, and somehow, even after a year living in this neighborhood, I'm discovering new parts of it. A path that leads to the river. A long trail that spills out into meadow. Some days I feel more dread than others. 

About the virus and about humans in general. Writing seems so pointless then. I have to remind myself that it’s always been like this. The people in charge, floundering. Worse, the people actively disseminating false information or spreading confusion. The willingness to put other people’s lives in danger. Someone on Twitter talked about how a lot of public schools are closing, but rich people want their private schools to stay open. As if their kids won't catch the virus. 

Cases in the US: 3,581,000      

Deaths: 135,000    

Thursday, July 31, 2020

I got an email yesterday from the human resources person at the library letting me know I’ll be going back to work the week of August 10. At that point it will have been five months since my last day working. March 13. Back then, the original plan was a two-week shutdown and opening back up April 1. But it quickly became clear that we wouldn’t be going back any time soon. 

Still, I don’t know if I would’ve imagined then that it would be five months. 

The library isn’t open to the public. We’ll just be shelving and pulling requests. Maybe Curbside checkout. I’m ready to go back, I guess. It’s hard to imagine. I had a fear this week that I had caught the virus. It’s because I have allergies. And the fact that I’d been around all of those ding dongs at jury duty. The three maskless women. The elevator rides. The bunched up line in the hallway. The multiple times in the public restroom. And all of us being in the same room for so many hours. I read somewhere that because of our high community spread, the odds are, if you go into a random group of 100 people, there is a 99 percent chance that one of them will have Covid.                      

Cases in Ohio: 86,333   

Deaths: 3,222

Friday, August 14, 2020

Back to work and it's familiar and strange at the same time. Hard to wear a mask for 4-5 hours. The quiet of the library. Weird, too, being around other people. There are only three or four of us working at once, so it seems safe.

I checked in books for an hour and found a couple that looked interesting. That’s a nice part of the job. Also, being forced to write earlier and not waste too much time reading news. I went down to the youth department and shelved all of the middle grade books. We’re running out of shelf space. They have overflow tables set up in the unused-for-now-and-in-the-foreseeable-future meeting room. 

Cases in the US: 5,220,000      

Deaths: 163,000

Sunday, August 30, 202

There's a homeless woman living on a bench outside the Starbucks at the end of my street. She's set herself up surrounded by her things. Two rolling suitcases. An umbrella. Yesterday I drove by her multiple times and at all different hours. It was a scary day. My husband had a kidney stone but we didn't know that. All we knew was that he was in pain. 

I drove him to the hospital at 10:30 at night and basically left him at the curb outside the emergency room. I drove home and worried with our daughter, watching dumb TV to keep our minds off what might be happening at the hospital. It all turned out fine. Pain meds. Instructions about kidney stones. 

I picked him up at 1:30 in the morning and there was the homeless woman, still under her umbrella. Now, this morning, groggy from my late night, I'm sitting on the porch and watching the moms walking with strollers, heading toward Starbucks to get their coffees. The couples holding hands. A little boy on a bike. The church bells up the street ringing their usual hymn.  

The absurd flowers I planted back in May are chest high and swaying in the breeze. The homeless woman's still on her bench under her umbrella and I can't make sense of anything.

Cases in the US: 5,894,000  

Deaths in the US: 179,000

Cases in Ohio: 115,806                                                                                                                            

Deaths in Ohio: 3,844

Back to work

What's the same:  

The quiet in the library, the books, the beep of the check-in sensor, but not the check-out, not yet. That is part of what is different. We have no patrons now. And likely won't have them for a while-- not until the virus numbers in our community come down.

Also, different: the masks, the daily temperature checks, the sanitizing wipes station. 

Five months ago I walked out of this place thinking I'd be back in a few weeks. First day, and it takes me a minute to orient myself again, remember my log-in, but then I quickly fall into my old groove, shelving, checking in, the feel of the books in my hands, the shush of pages. Fun fact: these books have been quarantined for 96 hours, stacked in our (un-used-for-the-foreseeable-future) public meeting rooms. 

Down in the youth department, alphabetizing the videos, if I can forget for a moment I'm masked and the toys have been put in storage and there won't be any kids spilling out of the story-time room, 

life almost feels 

normal. 

(Not a post about covid)

Okay, I am lying. It is a post about covid. How can it not be, when it's pretty much all I think about-- when I'm not reading about it or talking about it.

My daughter has had enough. On the chalkboard in the kitchen where we keep our family To-Do list (paint the porch, for example, and make a Tic Toc video) and the running Bananagram family game night total (I am winning, comfortably, thank you very much), our daughter has written Days w/o Talking Rona. 

The tally for that is always Zero.

(Note: I am "M")

It's all me,

I fully admit to this. Back in March I started writing the cumulative case total every day. And then, the death toll in my planner, the same way I used to write my daily writing word count. It is sobering to look back at the first day, March 13, with five cases in Ohio and zero deaths, to July 13-- 62,913 cases and 2807 deaths. These are not numbers. I know some of these people.

And everyday I read the latest updates in the newspaper, follow the conversation of epidemiologists on Twitter, what they know about the virus, and what they still don't know, all of this unfolding in real time, which makes the reaction of some politicians and weirdo anti-maskers/science deniers baffling to me. Why don't they get how dangerous this is? Why would they think, for example, that it would be okay to send kids back to school?
 
But then, I do understand. Because it's scary, all of the Unknown, the world we thought we knew and understood shifting out from under us, the world where you could dash out to the store without donning a mask, where you could meet up with a friend for lunch inside a packed restaurant, go to a concert, travel on a plane--

Even as much as I read about it and think about it and talk about it, I realize that I need the number on the chalkboard to occasionally say One.

So here is a story that has nothing to do with it:

Last year when we first moved into our house, I took long meandery walks with the dog, both of us nosing around the new neighborhood, admiring (or in the case of the dog, peeing on) the lovely unfamiliar front yards. One place we both liked to stop had these large, absurd-looking flowers, huge balls of blooms that seemed like they were too large to stay on their stalks upright without tipping themselves over.

But they didn't tip over and I was obsessed by the physics of them, the bees always buzzing around nearby. So one day when the owner of the flowers came out to water them, I struck up a conversation with her. She told me they're called Cleome and then she did one of the nicest things anyone's ever done for me: she dropped off some seeds.

This year in April at the height of our lockdown I planted the seeds, first in small pots, and then transplanted the seedlings in several places around our yard, and then thinned them, which broke my heart, but you have to do it, and then stood back and watched them grow.

This week they are just beginning to bloom those absurd blooms. My plants are smaller than the ones up the street, but I have high hopes that they will grow bigger. Now, as I sit outside on our front porch writing, I can see the patch of cleome I planted and a woman walking by with her dog, stopping to take a look.

She moved past before I could offer her seeds, but next time, I promise.

And just for today, a promise to my daughter and long suffering husband:

1 day without talking Rona.

Pandemic Diaries, Month Four, Spikes

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

The world feels like it's on fire and I am up too late reading twitter. 

It's a surreal thing to read about how police are attacking people in my own city, while at the same time listening to the helicopters whirring overhead. It takes me all day to settle my head down to write, but I do it because it's what I do. Still, when I hear about a protest in my neighborhood, I walk down by myself, masked, afraid, 

and then, not afraid. 

It's a socially distant crowd of mask-wearing, mostly white people holding Black Lives Matter signs. I hold my sign over my head and ignore the sweat dripping under my mask. My phone pings and the pings echo all around me. All of us in the crowd getting our notification from the city at once:  

We're under curfew tonight. 

Cases in the US: 1,822,00
Deaths: 104,000

Monday, June 8, 2020

I go to the grocery store in the morning, a little earlier than normal. It's quiet, only a few other shoppers, the workers reshelving, everyone wearing a mask except for one old man getting a coffee at Starbucks. 

Yesterday Colin Powell endorsed Joe Biden, and Mitt Romney walked with a thousand Evangelical Christians in a Black Lives Matter protest march. Maybe we have turned a corner in our country. Maybe we haven’t. People are still dying from Covid. We’re up to 109,000 deaths in the US. Almost 2 million cases overall. Also, everything is open now.

Cases in Ohio: 36,097

Deaths: 2177

Thursday, June 18, 2020

I'm listening to the book White Fragility by Robin Diangelo and it's making me sad and anxious and disturbed, which, I guess, is a way of saying that I am experiencing white fragility. I don't know what the answer to this discomfort is except to listen. Speak out against racism and injustice. Push back at white people who reflexively get defensive. 

I would say that this is exhausting, but that in itself is privilege. Black people don’t get to take a break from it. I think about friends I have who are Black and our sometimes awkward conversations about race. Maybe a lot of it was me trying to show them I wasn’t racist. I’m sure they can see through it. The thing is, I don’t have a lot of Black friends. I didn’t grow up in a place where I would even come into contact with many Black people. My first real interaction was my freshman year in college when my roommate was a Black girl. 

I know I was awkward around her, and again, I kept trying to tiptoe around race and prove to her that I wasn’t racist, even as I had relatives yakking to me, saying shit like, Why did the college stick you with one of those people.

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Yesterday it took me forever to settle in and write. Finally, I got into the groove and then I had to stop to make dinner. I was ten minutes short of my goal and vowed that today I’d get started earlier. What kind of writer am I that I don’t make my work my focus? 

Whenever I do end up going back to my job at the library, I'm afraid that all of my good habits are gone. Or maybe I’m not remembering it correctly. My writing habits were always kind of crappy. 

Last night my husband said, This year is a total loss. 

We were sitting on the couch, and I suddenly remembered that only six weeks ago he had a beard. It was such a weird time, those weeks when we were first locked down and our daughter was locked down in London. It feels like so long ago. Like the world stopped on March 13. Anyway, we were watching the movie Passengers, 

which is about two people who were supposed to be in a state of induced hibernation for 120 years on their way to a new planet. But the guy woke up because of a malfunction and then he spent a year alone and lonely and finally decided to wake a girl up. And then the two of them are stuck, alone, on a sleeping ship, barreling through space.

I said, This is like us. Except we're trapped in our house. 

Cases in the US: 2,314,000

Deaths: 118,000

Cases in Ohio: 42,767

Deaths: 2497

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Woke up early with a splitting headache. I think it's just allergies. That, or it's the weird dust cloud from the Saharan Desert that's hovering over our part of the country for the past few days. Yeah. I can't believe I just wrote that sentence either. 

A friend's son is being tested today. Two of my daughter's friends are waiting on test results too. One in Florida and one in Texas. It takes several days for the test results and in the meantime all of them are quarantining inside their homes. 

A writer friend started a social media campaign to highlight the importance of wearing masks. My daughter posed me outside in front of the sunny garden, all of the herbs coming in where only a few months ago there was a muddy pit. 

Cases in the US: 2,575,000

Deaths: at least 124,000

Cases in Ohio: 48,222

Deaths: 2615

Please please please wear a damn mask.

Pandemic Diaries, Week 10, Opening Up

Saturday, May 16, 2020

We go to the farmer's market! Back in the pre-plague days we walked down the street with our cloth bags and ambled along, browsing the booths, chatting with the farmers.

Today, we order on-line, drive ten minutes away to the parking lot where they're holding the market, tape our order number on the windshield, open our trunk, and slowly drive past the booths, where the farmers, masked, find our order and drop it into our trunk.

Cases in the US: 1,252,000
Deaths: 76,908
Cases in Ohio: 22,560
Deaths: 1214

Sunday, May 17

Our daughter, back from London, is fully integrated into the house. The upstairs opened up and aired out. The mattresses, where my husband and I have been sleeping for two weeks while she self-quarantined, are back up in our bedroom. We spend the day outside planting, our daughter painting rocks with herb labels to put in the garden, and for just a little while, we forget there's a global pandemic.

They're opening up Ohio this week. Retail stores, restaurants. The employees are required to wear masks but the patrons can choose not to. Because, freedom.

I am not going anywhere.


Monday, May 18

Except to the grocery store.

Everything I read about this virus points to the fact that it spreads via other people, in enclosed spaces, over an extended period of time. So, I am all about the fast, once-per-week grocery trip. At 8 am in the morning. When hardly anyone else is here except for the people personally shopping for others.

I'm masked. Sanitized. Holding my paper list, cruising the aisles in the properly marked direction. Food seems abundant. A sushi chef making sushi to go. Grab-and-go taco meal kits. But still no hand sanitizer. No wipeys. No liquid hand soap. One toilet paper per household limit. I buy one, even though my household is probably reaching hoarding level now. Please don't judge me.

Cases in the US: 1,338,000
Deaths: 80,000

Tuesday, May 19

It rained four inches last night and we brace ourselves going down to the basement, but luckily, we are dry. Other people in Columbus, not so lucky. A friend posts pics on Facebook of her and her son paddle-boarding in their backyard.

Did I mention that I applied for unemployment after being furloughed from the library? Did I mention that after spending hours on this process, I was denied? Did I mention that I applied for the federal Covid relief? Did I mention that the site where I spent more hours typing in all of my personal information had some glitch where everyone's personal information was compromised and now it's suggested that I put a fraud alert on my credit reports and also, no word if I'm approved for the Covid relief?

Wednesday, May 20

It is raining, day three, but still the basement is dry so thank God for that.

The big outing for the day is Go to the bank to meet up, socially distanced and masked, with the person who has taken over my position as Regional Advisor of SCBWI, so I can transfer all of the financial documents to her and get my name off the account. We have to do this by appointment. Wait outside the bank for the banker to unlock the door, and then I hand over the paperwork and leave.

My daughter comes along for the ride, probably to get the hell out of the house for thirty minutes. We drive through the town where we used to live, pass her old elementary school, our old house, a side trip to the bookstore to do the curbside pick-up of an order of books.

On the way home, almost feeling normal, we go through the Starbucks drive thru, and I promptly spill half of my hot coffee on my lap and my daughter laughs and laughs.

Totally normal.

Thursday, May 21

I keep trying to get through to the credit report companies to put the fraud alert on my account that was hacked when I tried and failed to get unemployment, and I can't get through and I am annoyed but trying not to be a karen about it.

Indoor dining at restaurants starts officially today and it's all over the news, people out and about as if there isn't a global pandemic. We order in take out and our daughter teaches us a card game called Shithead and I don't want to play it because I hate card games, but I rally, and learn it, and win a few games and feel ridiculously gleeful.

Friday, May 22

After thirty minutes on hold, I finally reach a customer service agent at the credit report company and he doesn't believe I am Me and I go full blown karen on him, much to my husband's and daughter's amusement.

They want to order Chik-fil-e for dinner and take it to my mother's to eat outside with her, socially distant on her patio. I don't like chik-fil-e for a variety of reasons. One, I'm sort of a vegetarian, and two, I'm still mad at them for supporting anti-LGBTQ causes, but we go to Chik-fil-e and there are lines of cars wrapped around the building two or three deep, but impressively, moving at a fast pace,

masked workers scurrying around taking orders, so that the whole process takes less then fifteen minutes.

Potential business plan for Chik-fil-e: denounce your anti-LGBTQ bullshit and volunteer to help the trump administration with their pathetic Covid- testing program.

Side note: dinner with Mima turns out very well and the chicken is good.

Saturday, May 23

Back to the farmer's market drive-thru and I love the efficiency and organization (The farmer's market in Clintonville. Ohio could also do a fine job taking over the covid testing program if the chik-fil-e thing falls through.) but I miss the chatting with the farmers, the browsing and impulse buys.

People online posting videos of white people spitting and coughing in workers' faces when asked to wear a mask. The president demanding churches be opened, but he will not be going to church. He will be going golfing. I find more bamboo shoots in my flower beds and I want to set the backyard on fire.

A walk at night with the dog through our quiet neighborhood. Children biking in the street. A socially distant gathering on someone's front lawn.

Christmas bulbs hanging from the trees, shining like stars.

Cases in the US: 1,620,000
Deaths: 96,000
Cases in Ohio: 29,288
Deaths: 1756

Pandemic Diaries, Week 8, Isolating in the Home

Friday, May 1

I have been up since 5 am worried about our daughter who's on her way home from London.

The first part of her flight looks good, she assures me. She's got a supply of masks and hand sanitizer. There are fewer than 25 people on the plane. All socially distant. I try not to think about re-circulating-airplane air as my husband and I put the finishing safety touches on our home for the Two-Week-Isolation to come.

We've decided to tuck our daughter away upstairs, giving her full use of the bathroom, so we drag our mattresses down to the living room. Pack up our clothes and toiletries. (not hard. I literally wear the same two shirts and alternate between sweats and pajama bottoms.) Clean and paint the gross bathroom in the basement. Borrow a small fridge and put it in our daughter's room, stocked with drinks and treats.

I haven't seen her since Christmas and I am so focused on not crying when I roll up to the airport that I forget to put my car in park and nearly crash into the car in front of me.

"Mom!" my daughter admonishes as she loads her suitcases into the trunk. I slam my feet on the brake and laugh like a crazy person.

"Welcome home!"

US cases: 1,066,000
Deaths: 62,653
Cases in Ohio: 17,962
Deaths: 922

Saturday, May 2

Morning and I leave a cup of hot tea for her on the stairs.

It's 70 degrees and we take a socially distant/masked walk as a family through the neighborhood. Our daughter tells us about the Chicago airport, only one restaurant open, McDonalds. No one masked. A crowd of people, one of the women wearing flip flops. What the hell, my daughter says. I made it two thousand miles from Europe and now I'm gonna get Covid at McDonalds in Chicago?

Customs waved her through. All they wanted to know is if she'd been to China. The Chicago fire department took her temperature and gave her a pamphlet suggesting she quarantine herself for two weeks, but no real guidelines about how to do that. Take your temperature two times per day, it says. Wash your hands.

Sunday, May 3

People are protesting in front of our state medical director's home, blaming her for Ohio's stay at home orders. I plant herbs in the garden/formerly-known-as-the-koi-pond. Leave meals on the stairs. We face-time with our daughter and it's like she's still in London instead of in her bedroom.

Her temp is normal whenever she takes it, but what if she's one of the asymptomatic people? What if one of those idiot Chicago-airport-McDonalds-flip-flopping-wearing people was infected?

I'm still not used to seeing her in a mask. I want to hug her.

Monday, May 4

I'm swearing off the news again. This time I really mean it! Protesters at statehouses. Trump sitting like a child in a chair that's too big for him in front of the Lincoln Memorial, talking about how he always knew more than 70,000 people would die, but he's doing a great job.


I set a drink on the stairs and send a picture to my daughter like I'm a delivery person. Your Mom-Azon Prime Order has been delivered, I text her. She rates the order 5 stars.

Later, it's so nice out, we work together in the backyard, me on one side mulching the ferns, my daughter on the opposite end wearing a mask and pulling up weeds and bamboo. 

We eat dinner on opposite sides of the patio and our daughter tells us that back in early March her roommate had a fever and cough and was joking that she thought she had corona. What if she really did? Then, it stands to reason that our daughter had it too. Never mind all of the traveling she did back then. Multiple European countries and riding a packed London tube twice a day every day.

If she had it, she’d be done with it and we wouldn’t have to worry about catching it from her!

But we can’t know that because we can't get tested. The only people who get tested are the very sick and the very rich and the very trump.

Oh well.

Tuesday, May 5

I make chocolate chip scones with friends via skype. One friend reads the recipe and we all follow the instructions. It takes two hours and we have to keep pausing to search for pans or to figure out the substitution for cream or to mute because my husband is on a conference call in the dining room. The scones are freaking good though.

I sneak a peek at the news and immediately wish I hadn't. They’ve upped the death totals. Another 100,000 people by August. Do people actually want to eat at restaurants?

Our living room has become a dorm room.

Wednesday,  May 6

Our daughter takes her temperature twice a day and it’s always normal. But then I read things about people literally drowning in their own fluids. Little kids getting weird organ diseases. Can you smell things? I text her frantically. Do you have a sense of taste?

Don't worry, she tells me. I've been eating the peanut M & Ms you bought me. They taste great!

An article in the Guardian talks about plagues through literature and I come upon this quote:

"The primary lesson of plague literature, from Thucydides onwards, is how predictably humans respond to such crises. Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behavior during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine."

Yeah. Sounds about right. 

Cases in the US: 1,197,00

US deaths: 70,588

Thursday, May 7

People on Facebook are sharing a video that says the virus is a conspiracy and don't wear masks? and something something about vaccines? and Dr. Fauci is evil? 

I gently tell a friend it's disinformation and probably dangerous to share and she immediately unfriends me. 

I set out more mulch and bake another batch of chocolate chip scones. The Republican representatives in the Ohio Statehouse vote to strip our medical director of her powers and the governor, also a Republican, but one of the rare ones who still believes in science and facts, says he'll veto. They're phasing in opening the state and people are excitedly talking about dining out and getting their hair done. 

Nearly one full week down and one to go for our daughter's quarantine. We face-time while I make her a bowl of popcorn. Set it on the stairs. 

Cases in US: 1,250,000

Deaths: 75,000

Case in Ohio: 21132

Deaths: 1153

This is hard, and you're not even doing the hard part

Watching a loved one die via your phone. Working in a hospital. Cashiering all day behind a screen guard at Kroger. Losing your job. Trapped at home with an abusive parent.

No. You're eating too much ice cream and not dyeing your hair. Your husband's grown a beard and looks like a stranger. Still, you have moments of panic that take your breath away. Last night you dreamed that a woman dared you to catch a baby she was about to throw, and then she threw it before you could react. It's a corona dream, your friend tells you,

it's a thing now. 

Bamboo has taken over the backyard of your new-old house, and every afternoon, you dig and pull. The roots stretch and crisscross. When you yank them up, the weedy grass peels up in sheets. It's a decent workout. Okay, you lied before when you said you didn't lose your job.

You weren't surprised when you got the email, but still, it felt like a punch in the gut. Pulling bamboo is a multiple step process.

1. You find where a shoot is coming up and position your shovel under it.
2. Jump hard on the shovel.
3. Lift. (It helps if you position a rock under the shovel for leverage and you've got plenty of those!)
4. Here's where you'll also lift up the root.
5. Pull the root until it breaks off somewhere ten feet away from you. 
6. Find another shoot. Repeat.

Why do people plant bamboo? How long will the library stay closed? How many bamboo roots are there in this yard? What about that elderly woman on the last day the library was open, the regular patron who came in every few days to check out one book and who usually chatted with you, who saw the chaos of the library, the people clearing the shelves of videos and carting baskets of books to the checkout counter, the woman, who when it was her turn, came up with her one book and asked, softly,

What's going on here?

We're closing for a few weeks, you told her, just a precaution, because of the virus, and then in your brightest customer service voice: Why don't you check out a few more books, just in case?

She didn't.

The bamboo runs under the fence into the neighbors' yards. You have no idea how you will stop it. 

Pandemic Diaries, Week 3, Shelter in Place

Friday, March 27

In the alternate timeline to the one we are now living, my husband and I would be going to the car show downtown tonight. It's my annual Christmas present to him because he loves cars. I hate cars but the car show people do this silly scavenger hunt thing, and weirdly, I get into it. Anyway, the car show's cancelled.

I take the dog for multiple walks, crossing the street to keep my 6-feet of social distance from the hundreds of other people out walking in our neighborhood. Everything is closed except grocery stores and pharmacies but our governor tells us it's okay to go outside, so everyone and their mother is outside.

Speaking of my mother, I drive out to see her. We're doing a puzzle exchange and I've brought her some groceries, a few rolls of precious toilet paper. It's raining and she sits at her kitchen table and I talk to her from the doorway.

At night my husband and I order dinner from a nearby restaurant, a fried mushroom appetizer and fish tacos and wine. It almost feels like a normal Friday night.

Cases in the US: 69,120
1045 deaths
Cases in Ohio: 704
10 deaths

Saturday, March 28

I write two pages in my book and then go outside and move rocks around in the backyard. The big on-going project in our new-old house has been removing the koi pond. This seemed like an easier project in theory when I started on it last fall.

Step 1: Empty all rocks out of koi pond.
Step 2: Pull out liner.
Step 3: Push rocks back in.

But somehow we end up with more rocks than we started with?

Step 4: Put leftover rocks in driveway.

The virus is exploding in New York City. The governor of Florida is blaming New York for his state's cases. Meanwhile, he still won't close the beaches in Florida. Has this man not seen the movie Jaws? Meanwhile, trump is mad at the governor of Michigan because she won't be nice to him.

My husband and I have a virtual cocktail party with our friends in North Carolina. We sit out on the porch until it gets dark and talk about our far-flung kids, everyone safe and well for now.

Sunday, March 29

I paint the drawer handles on a dresser and think about designs for the herb garden I'm going to put where the koi pond was. Trump thinks we should open the country by Easter. The Lt. Governor of Texas says grandparents should sacrifice themselves for the good of the economy.

Here’s a funny thing going around online:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November,
All the rest have thirty-one
Except March which has 8000

Cases in the US: 130,478
2314 deaths

Monday, March 30

I do a morning writers meditation with Laurie Calkhoven through the Highlights Foundation and feel amazing for about an hour. Trump says okay, maybe he won't open the country by Easter. He brags that there could have been a million deaths, but now there's only going to be one hundred or two hundred thousand.

I dig through my daughter's old beanie babies in the basement and find three bears to put in our window for the bored little kids in our neighborhood who are going on bear hunts.

Tuesday, March 31

I am addicted to watching Dr. Amy Acton, the Ohio Director of Health give her address each afternoon. She has such a calm, sweet voice even as she is giving us the bad news, that in two or three weeks, Ohio will reach our peak and 10,000 people each day will be diagnosed. She praises us for staying in and helping to push the peak out so we can get our hospitals ready for the influx. What you're doing is saving lives, she says.

I write 750 words and have another Zoom meeting with my writers group. I wear a mask and gloves to the grocery store and feel like I am living in a dystopian novel.

My husband said something to me about my anxiety as if it is strange. But how can you not be anxious right now? I ask him. People are dying alone in hospital hallways. At the same time, the mail gets delivered. We can order pizza online. I take walks in the neighborhood and people are working on their porches or riding bikes, doing lawn work. There’s always a line of cars at the Starbucks down the street. Sometimes I feel like I’m on the verge of tears.

Cases in the US: 164,435

3175 deaths

Ohio: 1933
39 deaths

Wednesday, April 1

A little girl from the class I taught at Thurber House a million years ago in February, emailed me a 50 page story she's been writing. I read it in the morning instead of reading the news and marvel at how good the writing is. Scene development, dialogue, a large cast of characters, an authorial voice. This kid is ten years old!

A writer I know who was sick in the hospital in NYC was released today. I get in a facebook argument online with a friend of a friend who insists this is just like the flu. While I'm having this argument, trump says in his daily address that he's number one on facebook.

The library where I work is closed until May 4. I have a panicky feeling thinking about growing up in a crazy household and how familiar this present anxiety feels—not knowing what’s going to happen next and feeling on guard and vigilant and just a steady level of stress with no control over anything going on. Over the past thirty years I worked to teach myself to be more trusting and feel safer. And now, here I am back to my original self, like everything in between wasn’t the real thing after all,

but This is.

Thursday, April 2

I refuse to read the news. 

I write all day. There's a scene in my book where everyone's gathered together at a restaurant and clearly not social distancing and the whole thing is making me nervous for them. 

Meanwhile in the backyard, now that the koi pond's filled in, I decide to tackle the overgrown chunk of out-of-control ornamental grass. A few weeks ago my husband sawed it down to the roots and we filled up 15 yard bags of grass. Today, I'm digging up the roots, which involves jumping up and down on a shovel. It's a good workout.

Kids in Ohio send videos of themselves dressed up like Dr. Amy Acton. A little girl builds a scene out of Legos of the daily Ohio press briefing.

My husband is growing a beard. 

My artist friend Jan Benham sends me a coloring page of a bouquet of flowers and I color it in. 

Cases in the US: 236,000

5600 deaths

Ohio: 2902

81 deaths

Impossible decisions in times of plague

A million years ago we were on a sixteen-hour car trip and our son was playing the video game Oregon Trail in the backseat on an old laptop.

I didn't know what the game was. It was something his second grade class had been playing. He was quiet back there, but every once in a while he'd ask my husband and me a question. Should I ford the river or should we go around it? How many supplies should we buy? At one point he told us he had bought a 25 pound bag of cinnamon and my husband and I cracked up.

That’s enough cinnamon to last you for the rest your life, we said. A little while later my son piped up that my husband and I had both died of dysentery.

Twenty years later my son is hunkered down outside San Francisco with his girlfriend in an apartment that’s smaller than our living room. Our 22-year-old daughter, in London working on a masters degree, called us the other day in a panic. The UK, which is roughly a week behind where we are in Ohio, as far as taking Covid 19 seriously, had just announced that the country was about to lock down.

Should she come home? Or should she stay?

My husband and I brainstorm the options with her. And none of them seem good. Stay in London, a city of 9 million people on the verge of an exploding pandemic that will rival New York’s?

OR

Try to leave now, possibly get stranded in a foreign airport, contract the illness? (This is assuming we can find a flight, and understanding that when she gets here, my husband and I won’t be able to hug her while she self-isolates in her bedroom for two weeks.)

Our indecision does not make our daughter feel better. We're supposed to have the right answers, but what IS the right answer?

We call our son. Maybe he can talk to her? He’s more logical than we are. Would he stay or go?

What are her supplies? he asks. We joke about 25 pound bags of cinnamon. But the truth is, she has supplies. For some reason she has a dog-food size bag of oatmeal. She has plenty of toilet paper.

I don’t know if she should get on a plane, my son says. He jokes about being stressed out going to Trader Joe's...

We all waffle back and forth for another day, realizing even as we waffle that we may be running out of time to make this decision.

Meanwhile I have visions of London as a dystopian hellscape, my daughter in her apartment sick with fever. I see a mass of bodies at an airport crammed together trying to get through customs.

I wake up in the middle of the night with a moment of clarity. She is not sick. She’s in an apartment, with her boyfriend. They are smart, cautious people. They have enough oatmeal to last many many weeks.

We talk to her the next day, running through every permutation of options again, and in the end, she decides to stay where she is.

These are the things I know for sure: There is a wave coming at us. It will get worse, before it gets better, but I have to believe that it will get better.

So here we are now. Our son in San Francisco. Our daughter in London. My husband and I in Ohio, all of us hunkering down. This is not a game, but like a game, we have to play it, remembering why we are playing.

Make it to the other side. Stay safe. Stay well.