Love, Life, and Art in the Time of Quarantine

Sitting outside in my tranquil backyard under a warm sun listening to birds sing you wouldn’t suspect the world is in such turmoil.  The tiny purple and lavender wildflowers sprouting through my shaggy grass don’t seem to care much about the politics of the land.  In my neck of the woods—Southern Indiana—everything is starting to green up wonderfully and the days are finally starting to warm up.  My fruit trees are blooming, bees are hard at work and my regal Black Oak, the queen of my yard, is standing peacefully in her spot on Mother Earth.  Yes, nothing looks or feels wrong in my backyard at all.  That’s why I try to spend as much time as I can there.

In the first weeks after the new year, I heard of some virus outbreak in China.  I didn’t think too much about it—after all, it was so far away and we were in the middle of a brutal presidential primary season that seemed to suck the life out of me emotionally.  Worry over having decent health insurance (or any health insurance if my husband were suddenly unable to work) ate away at me.  At 52 we aren’t old, but we aren’t exactly young, either.  My husband and I are pretty healthy and we eat a clean diet for the most part, but you never know when you’ll get blind-sided by an injury or illness and the coverage of our high deductible Health Savings Account (the only policy offered by my husband’s employer) wasn’t making me feel very confident.

However, I was excited about the presidential candidate of my choosing and I got behind him 100%.  Growing up in the environment that I had, I was never political before so this was all exhilarating, uncharted territory.  I was excited and energized by Bernie Sanders’ policies and message of hope and change.  I was also enthusiastic about the new focus we were taking with Raven’s Roost Boutique, an online business I started with my sister and youngest daughter.  It seemed like I could be optimistic about 2020. While I worked away with my sister and daughter on our business I was also doing my part helping Bernie’s campaign…and then this strange sickness started to spread.  Suddenly it was in Washington state and I cried as I heard about the seniors dying in their nursing home.

As the weeks passed the future didn’t look so bright any longer.  We were all distracted with the spread of COVID-19 and we didn’t get much work done and I couldn’t write a cohesive sentence to save my life.  Life seemed to both slow way down and speed up simultaneously.

Around this same time last year, I starting having little nagging feeling that something not so friendly was on the horizon.  I dismissed it as my over-active imagination.  But by last summer it was starting to grow into a purple knot of worry.  So much so that I started buying a little extra food and supplies every week when we went to the grocery store.  I joked around saying it was for the zombie apocalypse.  I affectionately called my tiny stockpile “zombie food” one day while our 9-year-old grandson, Bryar was here.  His eyes got huge and round as he asked in an alarmed whisper, “You feed them?”

February turned to March and I knew that time of dread I had feared all year long was upon us.  I was glad that I had saved a tub of food but suddenly I realized that was not going to be enough if this thing gets as bad as the media says it could.  The next time we went to our local Kroger it looked like they had missed a few truckloads of supplies.  I grabbed the last can of Lysol and hand sanitizer.  That was the last time I have seen a full shelf of toilet paper, or any Lysol or hand sanitizer.  The next week we returned to our store the shelves were even barer and the week after that looked like the store had been looted.  Distress was in overtime. 

At my urging, I talked my husband into helping me prepare some of our backyard for a garden that we would hopefully be able to start planning at the end of April.  No, my little larder of stockpiled “zombie apocalypse” food was not going to be enough (and I hadn’t had the forethought to buy extra toilet paper…I mean…ZOMBIES, who cares about TP!?).  I started and then killed little seedlings in all my available windowsills.  I currently have a new batch (doing much better this time) waiting for a few more weeks before I can plant outside to be safe.

At this point, it had been weeks since we had been out to eat and we hadn’t seen our grandsons at all.  Our daughter was too afraid to inadvertently bring anything over that would hurt her dad.  My husband was still going to work (for some reason a new car dealership in Indiana is considered an “essential business”) and it was well known that people with pre-existing conditions (like the asthma my husband has) made them more likely to die of this novel coronavirus.  My husband, Richard, had previously been hospitalized twice with pneumonia that nearly killed him so he was already in the good habit of handwashing, using hand sanitizer and avoiding sick people. Still, his boss—who never missed work—had been out for some time and was now having his breathing monitored. 

A few more people got sick at his work and I was at the point of a breakdown.  No one could get a test in our area of Indiana unless they were very lucky or on the way out of this world.  His boss finally came back to work but the wife of one of Richard’s co-workers got very ill and the co-worker was told to go home (she has since tested positive for COVID-19).  That was it.  People needing the oil changed in their cars or their radios fixed wasn’t worth my husband’s life even if the dealership owner disagreed.  My husband’s immunologist saw us immediately and gave us a letter ordering a 3-month long quarantine.  Unrestrained capitalism can be damned. 

I am grateful beyond words to have my husband home and not risking his life every day by being forced to go to work during a deadly worldwide pandemic.  Living in a red state I can say that a lot of people are not taking this seriously at all.  As of writing this on April 9^th, in my tiny county, we have 96 confirmed cases and 7 deaths.  We are still woefully short on tests so that number is actually much higher.  Still, people aren’t paying attention.

The mellow dis-ease over possibly never seeing a roll of toilet paper again seems comical at this point.  Beyond the anxiety of not having an income and the fear of getting sick and not being able to afford hospital care, the crushing emptiness at suddenly not having my grandson’s in my life is eating away at me.  I miss Bryar’s incessant pleas to watch him dunk another shot or to watch him play his favorite new video game.  My youngest grandson, Luther, is only 13 months old and is growing like a magical beanstalk.  He’s learning new things every day.  This is time we will never get back and the reality of that is mournful and dark.   This is the messy, sticky, dirty parts of sping in 2020.

We are living in a unique time in history.  Corporate greed, political corruption, climate change, rabid nationalism, religious anti-science ideas, and a deadly pandemic have all been making their rambling way down their prospective crooked paths and now have converged upon each other laying waste to the landscapes of our lives.  How far and long-lasting the fallout will be is still to be determined, but with the last hope of change disappearing with Bernie’s suspended campaign, I think this Dark Age will last a lot longer than any of us know.

We have decided to put Raven’s Roost Boutique on hiatus for now since we can no longer get supplies from our wholesalers.  With about 10 million people suddenly out of work in the US and almost 100,000 people dead worldwide of this illness, closing a tiny business like ours seems so insignificant in the tremendous swells of despair in the world today.  However, we poured our heart into this business over the last year and it’s heartbreaking to see it die.  We plan on opening a brick and mortar business when all of this is finally over, so there is hope.

At long last, I’ve been able to sit down and pen these words—weeping every time I think of Bryar and Luther—but it’s progress.  I’ve cut out social media and more than about 10 minutes of news a day.  I’ve started to listen to my favorite podcasts again and I’ve picked up where I left off plotting away the rest of Queen of Fire, the romantic sci-fi I started last year.  I painted a picture of a bee tea party (I saw the image on Facebook and tried to recreate it, being such a HUGE bee lover) and left them on the doorstep of my grandson’s house with a freshly baked batch of cookies.  My daughter told me Bryar told her how much he loves to look at the picture and think about grandma (weeping again…).  My husband and I walk around our back yard holding hands like teenagers checking on our fruit trees and our growing compost pile (NOT like teenagers…lol). Last night an awesome thunderstorm blew over our town sending out white-hot fingers of lightning fracturing the quickly cooling night.  Mother Nature is magnificent and loud and will not be quieted.  She is telling us she is still alive and giving us time to ruminate on what is really important to us.  She is encouraging us every day to be thankful, we too, are still alive.