Two Months Of Fridays

Last Friday afternoon, Jeremy and I were sitting by the pool while the kids swam talking about how long the pandemic was lasting and the different ways you could measure it. In a song from the musical Rent that I sang in high school choir they measure a year "In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee. In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife." I lost count of the number of daylights, sunsets, and midnights ages ago, and laughter, strife, and especially cups of coffee are at this point uncountable. We ended up calculating how many Fridays we'd had of pandemic life, and the number we came up with was sixty-eight. One year and four months of pandemic life is more than a month of Sundays - it's two months of Fridays. 

Since Jeremy and I got our full doses of the vaccine and it had time to do its work in our bodies, in mid-April, we had been slowly loosening our grip on strict social distancing. I started going back to the office two days a week, and didn't have to wear a mask because all my coworkers were vaccinated. We spent time with family members. I organized playdates for the kids so they could see friends they hadn't seen in over a year. They went to a week of art camp at the local library and theater camp a few weeks later. I went to a meditation day at a nearby Buddhist retreat center. We were slowly, cautiously extending ourselves back into the world. 

William's art camp chameleon.

Taiya's art camp dog. 

And now the Delta variant has filled all the hospitals around us, and cases are almost up to January levels. I'm not afraid now like I would be if I wasn't vaccinated, but we're back to being super-cautious again. On Saturday I got a text from someone in my office that they, though fully vaccinated, had tested positive for COVID. We had been in the office together this past week when they would have been potentially "shedding" the virus (what a weird word for it, like Daisy shedding her winter coat). So I had to set up an appointment on Sunday to get a rapid test done. 

This was my first COVID test! I made two months of Fridays without a known direct exposure to the virus. But thanks to the Delta variant, I now had to make sure I didn't get a breakthrough case from a breakthrough case. I went to a drive-through pharmacy testing site, got the swab through the little drawer in the wall, dusted out the cobwebs of my sinuses, put the swab back in the plastic package, and back in the drawer, and then drove off. I checked my e-mail when I got home, and my test results were already there: negative. Thank goodness. I was not worried about myself getting very sick, but I was worried about passing it on to Taiya and William. 

It is two weeks until school starts. We are sending the kids back to in-person school for the first time since March 2020. They need to be there, we need them to be there, and every reliable news source I've seen says the risks are low. There is no mask mandate but the Prater mask mandate (thou shalt wear a mask whether your school requires it or not). Taiya is excited, William is upset and says he will run away if we make him go to school. Jeremy and I are too worn out to be excited. Relieved and terrified and excited and exhausted would be a better way to describe our feelings in anticipation of school starting. The start of the school year feels like both a finish line and a starting line. And that's the reality of this pandemic. There is no finish line, just new starting lines drawn in chalk arbitrarily, no matter how far we've run. And then they're redrawn, and redrawn, and redrawn. 

It can be mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting, but I have gotten better at not looking too far ahead, not looking for things to stress out about, but instead embracing moments of joy when they appear. A weird piece of joy happened today while processing a batch of chickens we raised this spring. It's not a fun job, but Jeremy and I were working side by side, the smell of wood smoke in the air, John Hiatt singing, and we were making meat for the freezer and talking about nothing... it was oddly satisfying, weirdly peaceful. And I'll take that sense of satisfaction as it comes, and be grateful, and just keep moving.