The Quarantine Diary 1
Day 1
This isn’t the first day of the quarantine, but the first day I write about it.
It’s hard to say exactly when this started, since the changes and challenges have steadily aggregated over the past month. The kids were on Spring Break as soon as school let out on Friday, March 7. They were supposed to return on Tuesday the 17th, but on March 15th, the order came down to stay home for two more weeks. Soon thereafter, it was extended to April 15, and the virtual school instructions started coming.
Now we’re looking at May 4th (at the earliest) for their return. In the mean time, most businesses have switched to work-from-home, and at least 43 states have issued stay-at-home orders altogether. And while the definition of “essential businesses” shifts like a house built on sand, there is no denying that the world is now very different. By and large, only first responders, grocery stores, businesses related to health care, and the businesses needed to support those are operating at full capacity. In the mean time, we watch a horrible stream of numbers — illnesses and deaths around the world — get worse every day.
About the time that the first school closing dates were announced, Isabella and I went to do our daily grocery shopping, naively expecting nothing out of the ordinary. After all, there were zero shortages, and no reported changes in supply chains. Three weeks later, there still aren’t. But then, as now, rice, chicken, dairy, eggs, and paper product hoarding persist.
Now we lock arms in scrum formation while grocery shopping. Sometimes, one of us runs to the aisle for needed supplies while the other shouts, “There’s a new shipment of toilet paper over by the deli!”
So, little by little, by the end of March, we were able to acquire a reasonable amount of food in the house, without hoarding more than we could use.
The weekends have been filled with board games and movies. Those, along with streaming TV, have been the saviors of many households, no doubt.
So now, we work and study from home, and wait for those horrible numbers to go down.