Quarantine Diary #93 6/14/2020 What happens when life goes on hold?

Since I stopped writing every day the Quarantine Diary number no longer precisely matches the number of days since I (we) fell into this pandemical rabbit hole. I just calculated. I started intentionally quarantining March 13th – which means I am now on day #93.  From now on, I will label the days since quarantine started, not how many diary entries I have written.  It’s more relevant to consider how long this has gone on. Your tally might vary by a few days, depending on when you realized you were in quarantine also.

March 13th was a Friday. I had gone to a school board meeting the Wednesday evening of that week. It was dull and frustrating as I watched an immense amount of power being handled by pleasant people who were never going to try anything new or different.  IMHO. 

Thursday Len and I began to talk seriously about what was going on around us.  On Friday, our church was deciding if we would have a service on Sunday.  The service was cancelled; it's been a virtual service and zoom coffee hours since that weekend.

Quarantine hit that fast. Wednesday night I attended to a public meeting. Friday morning we were on lockdown. 

I realized today that I can actually list pretty much all the places I’ve been and the things I’ve done in the past 93 days.

• We drove to Milwaukee twice on errands too plain to describe. Actually, there were crazy clouds over Lake Michigan the second time we were there so we sat a half hour to watch them. Woohoo! Social Life away from home!
• We’ve been on several hikes within an hour’s drive from here. Scuppernong. The Drumlin Trail. The Monches section of the Ice Age Trail. See? I can tell you.
• We drove once to Madison to bring some tools to our son. Yesterday we drove to Chicago to spend some (wonderful) hours with our daughters.
• Len rode his bike 500 miles in May. I have walked A LOT.  We replaced our back fence, extended our garden, and transformed the cement apron of our garage into an ersatz French bistro, which I will show you one of these days.
• Once we visited with friends on their deck. We went to our nephews outside birthday party and our grandson’s zoomed birthday party.
• We Facetime-read storybooks to our granddaughter most weekdays.

Maybe I missed something. In 93 days which is three-plus months – I can remember and list the stuff I’ve done.

People with kids and people with jobs will not have been living this quietly or close to home. I get that. But I bet all of you, if you thought for 20 minutes, could list the traveling and visiting things you’ve done since quarantine started. 

This massive hiatus fell into our lives in just two days and I still can’t quite believe how much changed that fast. On a Wednesday I went to a meeting. Two days later the ordinary world quit.

Driving home from Chicago, Len and I talked about what’s changing.

Our grandkids are bonding to each other in a way that will last all their life.

It is crazy that adults with kids and jobs have to work this hard to keep their lives going – but most are doing it and will come out of this with closer and stronger bonds to their closest people. I understand that for those living in acrimony, this is dangerous, fraught, and hard. But for those in okay relationships, I think there is something very powerful in becoming closer to the other people in one’s own home; it's opening one'seyes to the very good gift of one's very own people.

There is this powerful reality for people living with - pets.  My daughter has a new kitten! (See the opening pix!) Pets are not just the pets in the house; they are antics, neediness, and love. Are we realizing how essential they are to our sanity and happiness? 

The protests are at day 18 or 19; for three weeks we’ve been relentlessly barraged with racism and this time, racism feels like more than a political word. We’ve marinated in those phone videos of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and in the social media footage of protests everywhere all the time. We pull back at those devil videos of racist people saying and doing crap to people of color. We aren’t talking about a concept this time. We are dealing with the shockling images we are seeing.

Three months of un- and under-employment is giving a lot of Americans a lot of time to consider what’s going on. There's such anger against the oligarchs who are cheating us of our right to live stable lives. We are angry at politicians who serve money instead of us. 

So much energy is going on at home and in society.

We are changing. We have changed.