Life in a COVID-19 Hot spot – Week 17 : the Doldrums
I’ve hit the wall. I feel as though the General Confession I learned in my innocent childhood has come to fulfillment: I have left undone those things I ought to have done (like getting this blog entry out on time) and I have done those things I ought not to have done (like completing 199 rounds of Word Play in three days). And there is no health in me (although I passed my Covid-19 test with flying negatives.)
Maybe it’s Post Project Depression – I had been working on a fun project for one of my favorite little girls (see below), and happily I was able to gift it in person last weekend,(socially distanced, air hugs, but in person!) and see the gleeful reception first hand. Now it’s finished, no more figuring and contriving and eking out, and there is a vacuum where that flicker of creativity glimmered, and no glee to look forward to.
Maybe it’s the general flatness of my social life. Other than the week-end’s distanced visit, my calendar is a panel of blank days punctuated by periodic Zoom and Skype encounters. The trouble with Zoom and Skype is that they are so darned flat! No body language is visible in those postage-stamp-sized video clips, no signals that the other person has something to say, it’s like being in grade school where you have to raise your (digital) hand to be recognized. By the time I figure out where the Hand icon is, I’ve forgotten what I meant to contribute to the discussion.
Or maybe it’s those rounds of WordPlay and Spider Solitaire that are slowly eating away my brain. Even with a sparse calendar, I find myself forgetting Zoom meetings and Skype appointments, doing my classwork (yes, I’m taking an online class) haphazardly at the last minute.
July is a big Birthday month in my family. I have eight birthday cards to mail. Hope I don’t forget anyone!
An article in the paper gives me some hope that it’s not just me; even people who normally have proved to have total recall are finding it difficult to distinguish one lockdown day from the next. If only, like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day”, I could feel that I was learning to live my day better with each repetitive cycle. At the moment, I don’t guess that I could say I am.
Before the Lockdown, we lived in six of the rooms in our nine-room house. We slept in the bedroom, and used the adjoining bathroom. We watched TV in the TV room (den, to real estate agents.) We cooked in the kitchen, ate in the dining room, read and had our pre-dinner glasses of wine in the living room.
The TV room is still where we watch TV, but it is also my exercise studio, as my thrice-weekly exercise class has moved to Zoom. And it also serves as a chldren’s library, as I have collected all the children’s books in the house and spread them out on the sofa as resource for my bi-weekly Skype Story Time with my toddler grand-daughter.
classy trade paperbacks which look like they were originally purchased for a book club. Another features a variety of interesting non-fiction.
Of course, anything you put out for the public is liable to malicious abuse. A neighbor had worked with her daughter’s Girl Scout troop to set up a Little Free Library in front of her house. The girls decided it would be good to make it into a food pantry during the Lockdown, and stocked it with canned goods and dried pasta. The next morning the door had been ripped off and the canned goods had been scattered around, dented, wrappers ripped off. The debate began – was it vicious mean-spirited teens, or was it racoons attracted by the food? A neighbor’s security camera settled the question several days later: it was a person, not an animal. Maybe he was crazy-mad because he was hoping to find a book? New hinges were bought, and the Little Free Pantry is open again, fingers crossed.
What can you do when you are in lockdown mode: all restaurants, libraries, schools, and museums closed. No non-essential travel. Social distancing (no one closer than 6 feet) enforced, so no neighborhood potlucks, no coffee klatches, no bridge or mahjong or chess or poker. The streetside kiosks that normally are covered with announcements of events sales, and meetings are stripped bare.
From Caernarfon Castle we moved inland to Conwy, a walled market town with some beautifully preserved Elizabethan homes. I could imagine the burgher who lived in Plas Mawr inviting other village citizens to dine, quaffing local ale and bemoaning the unreasonable demands of the lord of the adjacent castle. Meanwhile, the servants in the adjacent kitchen would be skinning the local game and trying to keep drops of sweat from dropping into the soup.
Allyson Johnson 