Battered

The first day of voluntary confinement, which looks and feels like most of our ordinary days, but nevertheless has a thin film of strangeness over everything. You have to consider things you’ve never noticed before. Obsess. I meant obsess, not consider. For instance, there is an upcoming doctor's appointment. We will have to violate the isolation order, and I am already picturing a safe way to approach the waiting room, to ask to wait outside until it’s our turn, to hope it doesnt rain, to hold my breath as we run to the examining room. Oh, and don't touch anything.

It’s not isolation that’s a hardship for us, as we dont go out a lot anyway and we are easily amused. Remind me of that in a few weeks. For sanity, we are talking about establishing some kind of routine where we get outdoors a couple times a day and have an excuse to get out of our jammies. Getting out of jammies is not one of my strong points. Structure. It’s called structure. 

But how to pick the perfect person to do your shopping, someone deeply capable of choosing your carrots, selecting the exact loaf of bread, understanding the subtle differences in price vs preference. I want to squeeze my own avocados, weigh the possibilities of cabbage as opposed to kale, analyze whether the current price of asparagus warrants grabbing a bunch or whether broccolli is really okay again. We shop for groceries almost every day in real life. I used to plan for the week a long time ago, maybe even a month at a time to make things stretch, but those skills are long buried.

We did have S and R here for dinner last night, corned beef and cabbage, and how good it was, and how much fun we had. They sat at one end of the six foot table, and we were at the other, but then they did the dishes, joking that we would have to do them again later by ourselves. Do we? They touched our surfaces! Nobody wants to get sick or spread this to others. I have to stop thinking of the poor vulnerable seniors as an alien group—we are them!! 

Was that the last time we will have people over? Is this what they mean by living in the moment? Treat each encounter as the final one. Is that liberating or terrifying?


We are getting ready to go for a walk, hoping that this doesnt violate our confinement. It seems that being out in the open, exercising, would be a good thing, but nothing is what it was. Making choices based on experience isn't really possible any more, so how do you decide? 

Day One