Isolation Observations
The crickets are still chirping here in Florida, although I suspect they know something is going on. They have to realize they’re creating the bulk of the evening noise right now. They don’t know the economy is in the garbage and that jobs are at risk. They don’t know store shelves are empty and the airplanes flying overhead are carrying only a fraction of the people they carried a week or two ago. They don’t know there are white triage tents set up outside of hospitals.
My orchid has no idea anything is going on—the orchid I faithfully fed ice cubes right up until the point the stem turned brown and the last petal dropped onto the bathroom counter, the orchid YouTube suggested I move outside and simply ignore, which I’ve done. That orchid just sprouted a new stem with tiny buds on it. My orchid didn’t get the memo about this pandemic. Or maybe it did, and it’s a masochist.
My husband and I are working from home. Our pug is annoyed that her room is now a makeshift office complete with video conferences every few hours. She paces around the house, trying to find an acceptable combination of the darkest dark and the softest soft, wondering what we’re both doing at home in the middle of the day.
The news is relentless. There’s talk of bailouts and vaccines and the stock market and Italy and ibuprofen. All the while, the numbers are ticking upward like the counter at a Jerry Lewis telethon.
I had to Google the difference between a respirator and a ventilator.
They’re threatening $2,000-$5,000 fines for anyone found on a public beach, and now—despite the fact we almost never go to the beach—I want to go to the beach. I am craving the feel of sand beneath my feet.
I refuse to go to the store. We ate tuna for lunch yesterday—on crackers, because I don’t want to waste our bread. Our bread will likely start growing mold before I decide we’ve waited long enough to eat it. We’re saving the box of spaghetti noodles for another day. We still have three frozen pizzas.
I take my temperature every morning. I analyze every sneeze, cough, sniffle, and tickle in my throat. Is the tightness in my chest anxiety or a virus taking root in my lungs? Maybe it’s a heart attack. Heart attacks haven’t been put on hold just because we have this new virus to contend with. I worry about stomach issues now, too, since reading an article on Facebook noting that some patients started with gastrointestinal issues.
I wash my hands.
I found a bottle of hand sanitizer under my kitchen sink. It expired in 2017. I Googled “Does hand sanitizer really expire?” It does, and mine surely has been rendered largely ineffective. But I couldn’t bring myself to throw away that mostly-full bottle.
The characters in the book I’m reading went to the movies last night, and I felt angry at them for being so irresponsible. Did the author not even consider the need for social distancing when she was writing that novel ten or eleven or twelve years ago?
My inbox is full of emails advertising “work-from-home styles.” Meanwhile, I’m wearing hot pink shorts and an orange shirt, and I haven’t washed my hair in three days. I don’t need new clothes to effectively work from home, but nice try.
Our weather is beautiful right now, and I am grateful for that. We spend every evening on our back lanai contained in the false security provided by our screen enclosure. The alligator that lives behind our house could push through those nearly invisible barriers in a second, a deer could dash through our patio and not even notice it had run through anything. This virus that can apparently pass through the average surgical mask surely doesn’t care about our metal screens.
But that’s where we can hear the crickets. That’s where my orchid lives after behaving so poorly inside the house. And that’s where you’ll continue to find us until the news tells us the outside air is no longer safe to breathe.
We crawl into bed at night without Stephen Colbert or Seth Meyers to deliver our news, so we scroll through Netflix in search of familiar movies to distract our thoughts. We fall asleep not knowing exactly what to expect from tomorrow—other than crickets.
