Covid Diary #1154

5/12/2023

Covid Quarantine started March 13, 2020. I started a Covid Diary that very day. I wrote almost daily for several months, until we all realized this was not going to end soon.

This is from Day #1: “I’m looking forward to a week or two at home writing, reading, and sorting things out.” (Read that first diary here.)  We thought Covid would affect us for a week or two? !!! 

Writing so much so often was a lot of work and also stress release for me. I was able to say, and many of you did, too, what we were seeing and experiencing.

Those first few weeks were weird. When I’d go for walks there was so little traffic I seldom had to wait at corners. No one was coming. The world was quiet.

Today is the first day we are officially out of the worldwide Covid emergency. This is a worthy moment to acknowledge what we have come through, people we’ve lost, lives that have profoundly changed due to long covid.

These last three years have affected and changed all of us. I’m less social now. I experienced how much more centered I feel when I’m not responding to people too many times in a week. There are a lot of jokes about introverts who went into lockdown and never came out.

We order groceries more often, mostly because it's more convenient and now we know that. We wear masks without thinking much about it, have them stashed by the door, in our pockets, in the car. Nose tests aren't fun but they are also not the worst thing (they looked like it in the beginning!).  

Does it feel as if the world became meaner? Whatever was holding angry-fragile people together before is not holding them now. Are we just more aware of the violence, discourtesy, and dysfunction around us because we spend so much time on social media? Is there more awfulness going on or are we just more aware because people are photographing it with their phones and then sharing it?

In honor of the official end of this Covid Diary – I’m transitioning to a new diary called Grownups Noticing Their Lives.

I’m going to continue the Alphabet Soup of essays. I have some more M is for Mother columns to post. Next week we will move to O and since no one suggested a topic I’m thinking about it. P will be Procrastination. I’m skilled at procrastination.

But Grownups Noticing Their Lives begins right here, right now.

Last night: I was sound asleep when suddenly the rocking chair in the corner of the pitch-black room started creaking and rocking.

Woke up immediately, heart racing.

It was Dawn Cat who apparently thought 3AM was a good time to try the chair she’s never tried before. She scrambled, she thumped, chair rocked, she meowed, and then she jumped down and left the room. I fell back asleep about an hour later. 

This morning I was sitting on the edge of the bed getting dressed. Gordon Lightfoot was singing “If you could read my mind, love / What a tale my thoughts could tell / Just like an old-time movie / ‘Bout a ghost …” And right exactly then Dawn, who was not even in the room when the song began, bumped my back and I about jumped out of my socks.

I have seen death by terror twice already today. How’s your day going?