The homebodies will inherit the earth

Every spring the Bradford pear explodes in celebration of the season, raining white petals like confetti. Walking the greenway, seeing the confetti in the mud, this year’s celebration feels a little melancholy, like a birthday party no one came to.

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To slow the creeping infection of COVID-19, we’ve been asked to keep to ourselves, a kind of radical version of my own natural inclinations. Stay in your house as much as possible, and if you have to venture into the world, stay away from places where people congregate, keep six feet between yourselves and other humans, wave from afar, mind your own business.

Don’t mind if I do.

I find it delicious to kick around my house all day every day. To be surrounded by the creature comforts I’ve collected and brought back to the nest for decades. To rise at the same time as always but instead of the two-hour rush to make breakfast, get dressed, wrangle the boy, get into the car, and get to our destinations on time, there’s an eight-pace commute awaiting me from shower to office chair. I can take that first call of the morning with wet hair piled up in a clip, coffee and banana at the ready. All day I watch the way the light moves through the house, how the plants stretch for it. I let the dogs out and sit in the sun with them.

It feels perverse to take pleasure in even this one aspect of the complete upheaval of Life As We Know It, when so many find themselves dropped from payrolls or working in situations where being on the front lines and possibly exposed to the virus is part of their job requirement. When so many are sick. When so many will die.

It’s not lost on me what an immense privilege it is that I can work remotely with relative ease. I have a home, for one — a thing many just up the road from us lost not so long ago. My job allows me to work from that home, as does my internet connection. I have my health, my husband, my son — all healthy so far. I think that’s part of why instead of feeling trapped, I feel a strange and grateful version of freedom.

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The hope is that this is all temporary, that we collectively will take enough extreme measures to flatten the curve, as the saying goes, so that our healthcare system can manage the inevitable wave of illness that will come as a result of this new virus and we can go back to whatever new normal waits for us on the other side.

Everything in daily life has become an exercise in calculating risk and responsibility. Is it better to stay away from the grocery store and have things delivered to us instead? Who is it better for? Am I helping a gig worker make ends meet by ordering through Shipt? Or am I potentially exposing people to the virus who are already more vulnerable because they have to be out and about? Is it irresponsible to order things online because the warehouse workers are still having to come in to fulfill the orders?

It’s the trolley quandary and it’s hard to feel like any choice is the right choice.

I am carrying a not small amount of guilt over how easily I ignored these same ethical quandaries just a month ago.

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Things are mostly fine here in our little corner of the world. Some days there are tears of anxiety, tears of survivors’ guilt, tense moments of listening as my husband — a man who radiates self-aware positivity more than anyone I’ve ever known — downloads his existential fears and frustrations to me so that they don’t overwhelm him with their weight. There is worry about the future, about what happens if the center doesn’t hold, about what we do if it all goes south. The beans-and-rice-in-the-basement plan.

We are a team, we repeat to one another. What matters now more than ever is kindness and teamwork. This was our job from the moment we said our vows, but this will test our mettle in ways we can barely predict. Things change quickly and inexplicably and everyone everywhere has emotions that are raw in new ways. We have no idea how we will be, much less how the rest of the world will be, in a week, a month, two months, six months.

I think about all the time I’ve spent in my life watching and reading zombie, apocalyptic, dystopian fiction. How the thought of an uncontrollable viral outbreak sweeping the globe and obliterating our humanity is probably my most sincere mortal fear. I’ve been trying to tame that fear with ongoing exposure therapy for most of my life, now that I think about it. Funny to think that this time last year I was getting my jollies by listening to an exercise podcast called Zombies Run. Yes, funny. (I really should finish it but I’m not sure now’s the time. Or maybe now’s the best time.) All that macabre research has made the narrative arc of our potential reality feel a little less far-fetched, at least. Not easier. Just easier to believe.

“If the hospital calls me to come back,” Richard tells me earnestly, “I’ll go.”

I want to forbid him, to tell him he has more to think about than just himself, but I hear myself think it and I realize he’s right, and he wants to do right, and that’s why I love him so goddamned much.

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For now, we’re still allowed walks. The dog parks and playgrounds have been closed to discourage people from congregating, but the greenways and open-air parks are still open. My fingers are perma-crossed in the hopes that people will maintain distances and not congregate in these areas either, or else they will be closed down and inaccessible too.

In many ways it’s madness to be stuck inside and away from other people during this time of year, when all of nature is screaming its desire for closeness, community, propagation. But then I think about how different and difficult it would be to weather this crisis in the winter, watching in horror as the sun disappears before five o’clock each day, before the last conference call or reply-all email. I remember the sinking feeling I had every evening as the mother of a winter newborn, as the light escaped round the curve of the globe and we were stuck in the house, with the drafts and the uncertainty. The loneliness.

But for now there’s light bookending the day, and not the blazing light of the summer that just wants to crisp up your skin and suck out your fluids and give you a headache. Right now, we have light light. This single random kindness of circumstance might be what keeps me from taking a twisting platform dive into depression before this is all over. Can’t say for sure but it’s sustaining me for now. The open windows, the blinks of new color everywhere you look, the birds speaking their strange spring languages, the smells on the wind that hit me like spiritual CPR, the bees and, yes, even the damned red wasps.

It’s all of it, all of the hope a person can muster, packed tight in a bud that is waiting for the right time to open and receive the sun, to harness the energy and magic needed to make something new out of what’s already been spent.