I found out about a week ago that someone I know has it.  She is a sweet vibrant Mom to two young children.  That doesn't matter, though. This is a virus, after all. It could give less than a shit about who you are other than if you are host material - and that is all of us.

She has been communicating with the other Moms on FaceBook Messenger. 
She has been in bed for days. She went to the doctor. They said they were saving the tests for people "who have underlying conditions." She was diagnosed based on her symptoms. I find myself wondering, morbidly, if they counted her in the daily tally of new cases if they didn't do an official test. Will they count her in the official daily death tally if she dies?

I remember her mentioning a few months ago that their house has mold issues.  To me that is an underlying condition that compromises lung health and health in general. Did anyone think to mention it? Would anyone even put any weight on it if it was mentioned?

Tonight she said that the shortness of breath she has been experiencing is getting worse. I urged her to not wait to go to the hospital if it's getting worse. I am scared for her and her children and her husband. I had the thought today that we might all end up knowing someone who has died from this. That made this whole thing that much more real.


In her words:

March 26, 1:56 PM
"Hey guys, I just got back from the doctor, and I do have COVID-19, but luckily it seems to still be a mild case.  They're giving me an inhaler.  I hope everyone is feeling okay - and definitely don't disregard any mild symptoms! xoxo"

"...So far the other symptoms have been bearable, but last night I started feeling sort of a tightness/pressure/burning feeling in my chest so (her husband) insisted I go to the doctor today.  Hope you all are well!"

"...There's a good chance it was from the fateful trip to Target last Wednesday. 😂😷"

- Someone asked, "Did they do the swab test or did they diagnose based on symptoms?"-

"Based on symptoms because they're saving the tests for those who have underlying conditions, etc."

March 28, 4:16 PM
-Another Mom in the group updated with, "She said she had had more chest tightness last night but the inhaler had helped some.  She was going to focus on getting more rest today."-

7:16 PM
"Yeah, still rather crappy, but resting seems to help.  Thank you so much for checking in!! Hope you guys are well.💗"

"Earlier (her child) said, 'Oh, it's 3 PM, thank goodness this day is almost over and we can just go to bed soon!' 😂😷😜"

March 30, 7:22 PM
"I've been in bed the past three days, which seems to help, but, as soon as I get up and move around at all, the chest tightness/shortness of breath comes back.😞It really does take a while, I guess, but will just be grateful if it doesn't get worse.  The achiness, headaches, fatigue, etc. I can deal with, but the breathing issues are scary.  I feel terrible for the people with severe cases.😖"

March 31, 9:31 PM
"The shortness of breath is getting worse unfortunately.😞"

Sprouts are the new lettuce in our house until we start growing lettuce in the garden. Sprouts are pretty much THE salad vegetable in our house at the moment (we have onions and a couple of red peppers) since we stopped going to stores. I look forward to more vegetable options, hopefully soon, but for now I find joy in sprout salad with red onion, chickpeas and homemade dressing.

I have never been way into sprouts - definitely not enough into them to keep a constant production line going. Now I do my multi-jar sprout maintenance every morning and every evening, watching for their first tiny white tails that aren't there the night before and magically appear by morning. I feel a certain amount of affection for their promise and potential and their cute earnest need to grow. Then I and my family kill them with our teeth.

For a while we have been buying a lot of our packaged/dry goods from online markets, so I have just kept that up as needed. They, of course, are being inundated with people stocking up. The things that were out of stock seemed odd - hot sauce, pickles, certain kinds of tea. I couldn't help but assume that whatever was out of stock was related to this virus thing and people going wild to stay as connected as possible to their normal - to the apparent privilege they have been accustomed to. That is definitely why I was looking at the hot sauce. We use a lot of hot sauce. I was way too excited to find Cholula brand original hot sauce was still in stock on the second site I went to. Then it proceeded to go out of stock before my eyes. "Shit!" I said. Shit! My ability to sit all cozy at home and buy random shit online is being hampered! Don't worry about me, though.  I'll be okay. Another brand of hot sauce is on its way, but thank you for asking. These are such tough times, though, you know?

I have always liked to think about being ready for a catastrophe - a trait I picked up from my fruit canning, food dehydrating, wool processing from start to finish, wood stove cookbook writing, hiding under the bed from the Mormons at the front door mother). How to prepare? How to survive? It was exciting to think about being ready for...something...anything.

People around the world are living in a constant catastrophe of poverty, famine, war. Having the time and leisure to think about planning for hard times is fun. It is fun to have privilege. Everyone should have time to think about things aside from immediate daily survival.

How have I been keeping sane? It has been less than two weeks since we decided to isolate. As I have lightly mentioned, one might be wise to question my sanity on a good day.

A friend asked me today how I am staving off insanity. So far I have spent every fucking day with bouts of wanting to run. I want to run away from parenthood - run away from spousehood. I want to escape the kitty litter box, dishes, laundry and impending spring yard work. That's my fairly normal existence, though, so this should be no problem - just carry on.  Our schedule, though, the one that did keep me more grounded and normalish looking to the untrained eye, completely and instantly fell away last week. Our Monday homeschool co-op, Tuesday acting, Wednesday horseback riding, Girl Scouts and ballet and Thursday handwork (knitting, etc.) all disappeared.  All of that farming out of responsibility, as I prefer to think of it, came to an end. I was left with my own self-loathing over never quite feeling ready to take on the responsibility of being my child's everyday companion, time manager, educational accomplice and guide (even though I have been all of those things for her, for her entire nine years of out of belly existence).  I see myself as a determined parent with strong, clear feelings on child rearing, and, hypocritically enough, a complete and utter slacker in the actual implementation of all of these things.  That's why I do the farming out.  I know I can't  handle constant all day long interaction.  I love my kid so much, and yet, under these current circumstances especially, I am always feeling the need to escape her and hide. I am just not a big people person anymore. 

My daughter's outgoing nature is exactly me until I turned six and my parents' marriage got stupid and everyone got stupid about it and everyone forgot to invest deeply in the children's emotional well-being because they were being stupid and selfish.  My sister told me several years ago that, when our parents told us that they were, in fact, getting a divorce, I changed and was never the same again. I had, at some point, made my Dad promise me that they wouldn't divorce, so when that reneging shit fell from his tongue, my sense of trust and my equilibrium were shattered. I have struggled with those initial emotional fractures, along with other later ones, ever since. I look at my child and, at the same time that her outgoing, people loving nature is completely familiar to me, it only feels familiar at a distance. I now only pretend to be open - pretend to not hate people.  The only time being open and loving feels like part of my nature is when I get to connect with my few chosen people.  It has taken me so long to find good friends in the world, and I love them. 

As I was floundering in this abrupt end to normal, others were thinking and planning, and this week we started finding routine again purely through the grace of others.  Some co-op stuff has begun via video conferencing. Girl Scouts and ballet will do the same shortly. We are starting to see friends through video chat that we barely ever get to see. Video can't be the same as in person interaction, but, fucking hell, it's something, and I already feel it saving my and my child's sanity.  

In my quest for emotional balance I am now searching for a sense of, if not purpose, at least productivity. If my pottery studio had been brought into existence by now, I would likely be toasty warm with the sense of creation. As an alternative to the studio, I have started to write again, take ukele classes on YouTube with my kid, and sometimes I work on finding imagery to put on my hopefully future pottery.  My current favorites are images from airplane safety cards.  "Be sure to put on your own mask before helping others."

It rained.
I felt more trapped.
I could have gone out anyway, but I was already too far gone inside.

It Will Be A Bit Longer

All I can think of are dominoes falling. Rapid and deafening and terrifying. Their sound separated from them like a jet's engine roar from above the clouds or lightning cracking the atmosphere. I couldn't see where the dominoes were or what path they were taking. They approached quietly and just so shockingly fast that I couldn't connect the sound with the physical until I could only look back at what had just happened. The inevitable trauma.

I am stuck in some space of, "Wait, we were JUST going out, doing things, congregating just because we wanted to."
So very suddenly everyone and every surface feels suspect. I get the mail and wash my hands. If there's a package, I open it, wash my hands, and only then take the contents out. Then I wash my hands a-fucking-gain. I washed my hands so many times yesterday just dealing with mail - and food packages, because MAYBE they had been touched by someone at the grocery store who has it. I think I might be just plain going overboard with this. I am going to stop myself short from talking about how maybe I have actually been a bit overboard for a lot longer than this whole thing has been going on...eh-hem.

A few years ago I tried cabbage

I think of the future, when we all finally get the go ahead to see each other in the flesh again. I imagine a slow, skeptical collective creep. We won't rush to hug each other. We will not know what reality to trust anymore. We will have waited so long, in confinement, to be set free. In the meantime, our perspectives and perceptions will have altered at an imperceptible rate. The dominoes falling in our fragile psyches - the sound only to be heard in the aftermath.