Tales from a Quarantine
By Eric Hughes
April 15, 2020
BoxOfficeProphets.com
There are bound to be things you overlook, initially. For example, before today’s daily cleaning session I never thought to include window blind wands. On my way from the kitchen to the south-end of the house, I had looked up and over to the left and -- a-hah -- spotted the ones attached idly to the blinds adorning the pair of windows on either side of the radiator by our dining table.
The key is to not get discouraged for not before including household items like window blind wands. Clean it now, and clean it again the same tomorrow and the next day. Window blind wands are on the list now -- it’s going to be okay.
I’m so new at this routine that I’m not even sure as of yet what’s in the solution my husband Thomas poured into an empty bottle of 409. Is it only bleach? Was it mixed with anything -- maybe some water? Who knows. I certainly don’t. But Thomas should know these things. He is a nurse at a medical facility with patients and employees infected with Covid-19.
Thomas went back in to work this past week after a two-week self-quarantine -- we were out of the country -- and since that work shift and every work shift since then we’ve deployed some additional safety measures within our shelter-in-place. We brush our teeth and knock back shots of mouthwash from separate bathrooms now. We sleep in our own beds in different bedrooms.
We say goodnight in this way: I enter into the room about as far in as the spot of the carpet the door swings to, we tilt our heads back and kiss the air in each other’s direction. We make that quick sound with our lips a couple times that sounds like a kiss. I tell him I love him (“I love you”), he tells me he loves me (“I love you”) and then I shut the door and head on over to the bed in the other room on the opposite side of the small landing. Another day done in this brand new world.
Workday mornings are less taxing than I remember them being. Before my office job was remixed to work from home, I’d rise before 5 to walk and feed my pair of Shih Tzu mixes, pick out some work clothes and iron them, change into workout clothes and into my Brooks, pack a lunch and an apple for breakfast and that morning’s Chicago Sun-Times into my gym bag, then walk or run depending on how I was doing on time the two city blocks and a shortcut over unused train tracks to the Metra stop (local Amtrak train) across the way that would take me into Union Station in downtown Chicago.
A quick exchange of “hellos” between me and the gym employee who scanned my ID at the front desk -- it’s been years and I still never learned her name; an everyday interaction I can confirm through a Covid lens was taken for granted -- before bounding up the staircase to deposit my bag into an unused locker, then out to the line of treadmills on the gym’s main floor. I’d claim mine by dumping a white hand towel in a machine’s left cup holder.
Small visit to the steam room, a shower, a change of clothes, then a zig-zag-zig from the gym to my office building, a 20-floor ride up the elevator, before logging in to tend to some unread client emails.
Five days a week. Monday through Friday. Every day just like this.
Now? I walk and feed the Shih Tzus still, but a good hour later than I used to. Then I fix myself a cup of coffee, plop down on an armchair in the living room and read the Sun-Times. After I’m done I fix another coffee and some homemade oatmeal with a mix of nuts and dried fruit and brown sugar tossed in and then where-has-all-the-time-gone it’s 8 and time for work. My daily run is now hours later in the afternoon, and outside.
Working from home I’ve stationed myself facing south at the head of the dining table, the one by the radiator with the pair of windows on either side of it adorned by the blinds and the idly attached window blind wands. At the opposite side of the table is an as yet unfinished 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a mountain range on the top half and its reflection in a pool of water on the bottom half.
Puzzles are having a moment, aren’t they? The Marshall’s by us is closed and at last check puzzles were next to impossible to find anymore on Amazon. The mountain range one I’m working on now was listed on Etsy before I snapped it up on March 31. It got here quickly on April 2 and I’m still working on it. It’s a challenge and I love it. According to its box it was packaged in 1997 and was never opened until now by me, in 2020 during a pandemic.
I puzzle to informative podcasts like The Daily or FiveThirtyEight Politics or Office Ladies. I’ve spent whole afternoons puzzling and listening to music catalogs of artists who happened to die during Covid-19 (Bill Withers), or died due to direct complications caused by Covid-19 (John Prine).
I puzzle and I listen to John Prine and I get emotional sometimes. I just feel sad, I think, or grief, and I briefly start to cry. Not something I intentionally plan to do, and not just for John Prine either.
A few days before today I was re-reading to Thomas an email to staff written by my company’s CEO. Towards the end of the email, the CEO provided his cell number and encouraged any of his hundreds of employees to give him a call if they needed someone to talk to. That was the part where I stopped, because I had to, because that now familiar wave of emotion came up from somewhere all of a sudden and stopped me.
Same goes for my recent attempt at explaining to Thomas a sweet feature story I had listened to about a young writer who’s learning to cook in the here and now by calling her grandmother and talking through their family recipes. I finally just threw up my hands and said, “You’re just going to have to go and listen to it!”
It’s okay to feel this way, I remind myself. Over a hundred thousand people have died. Tens of thousands of people in this country alone in about a month and a half’s time. America’s first Covid-19 death was on Leap Day. Beginning April 7 and on every day since then, as of April 15 anyway, at least one human in the USA dies every minute of every day on average from complications caused by Covid-19.
The pandemic’s grim destruction continues to escalate. I’m finding that to be true even within my own house. In the span of time between when I started writing this column yesterday to now, as I’m typing this out, Thomas has come down with a fever. He won’t report to work this week and has quarantined himself in the bedroom we once shared.
In my new household role, I’m hauling up liquids and foods, magazines and newspapers, and leaving them just outside the bedroom door. As soon as I’m back in the kitchen, safely, Thomas swings open the door and quickly collects the things I left him now at his feet.
We say goodnight in this way now: We FaceTime each other from within the same house. We tilt our heads back and kiss the air in each other’s direction. I tell him I love him (“I love you”), he tells me he loves me (“I love you”) and then we end the call and head off to sleep, already in our separate beds.