Thirteen Weeks In

On Friday it will be thirteen weeks that I've been at home. The first couple of weeks it felt sort of like hunkering down in a fortress against a siege. There was a weird unreality about it, as if I were in one of those post-apocalyptic movies. Do I have enough food? What is my back-up plan if it gets so bad no one is operating the water treatment plant? Do I have a good supply of books and puzzles at hand? It was right at Passover, and it felt as if I should start painting lamb's blood on the lintel. I did a bit of research on the Spanish Flu and watched the news a lot and wondered what was coming.

After a couple of weeks there was a brief period (about a day) when I was really irritable. The people in my house wouldn't stick to the rules; they kept going out. Nothing was exactly how I wanted it. I harboured unworthy thoughts of wanting to move into the pool shed to get away from everyone. I found it exhausting having to join video-conferences every day. I had no interest in any of the things I'd thought I'd accomplish while in quarantine. I couldn't settle down with a book, and all I wanted to do was eat chocolate. My dog turned into Velcro and couldn't be away from me for more than a minute. I noticed a more desperate tone on social media as well -- people expressing things about having chosen the wrong person to quarantine with and joking about knitting a noose. A video of a teacher screaming went viral.

And then people around the world started doing creative, crazy things -- clever videos and home haircuts and singing from balconies and putting on concerts and holding "Living Room's Got Talent" contests and rewriting the lyrics to musicals. It was hilarious, watching some of the things people came up with. It was as if everyone's latent creativity just burst out and went haywire. Shy, ordinary people became movie directors and comedians.

As the days passed and the sun started coming out, I got into more of a routine, and working from a laptop all day became easier. I saw that we weren't, in fact, going to run out of toilet paper. And the water treatment plant was still running. We became a nation of bread bakers and gardeners. We figured out how to do things we never thought we'd do, and we found we could trust ourselves to learn them. We learned we could find instructions for anything on Youtube. We discovered we're pretty resilient. Things seemed to snap into priority and perspective, and people started talking about realigning their life with their values once things returned to "normal." My husband and I went on a couple of short drives in the countryside, but it didn't feel like escaping. I started participating in regular guided meditation and yoga sessions on line.

Now we're heading into week 13, and I have to say, it feels like normality, as if we've always lived this way. I don't find as much funny and creative stuff coming out of people's homes into social media lately. It's as if we no longer need to make jokey videos and laugh about home haircuts. There's nothing left to gasp or groan over, really; we just quietly adapt and groom our own dogs and sew our own masks or whatever else needs to be done. I am filled with comfortable contentment.

I ventured out today to Walmart to buy much-needed shoes (my only pair developed big holes in the bottom, so I was walking the dog basically in my socks). And I found the whole process of shopping annoying, not a relief at all, and I really don't want to ever do it again. I am content to live small, stay local, be more self-sufficient. I want people's distress to end, of course, and for no one to die of Covid, but I am not at all eager to get back to life BC. I prefer this new normal.