A Pandemic Upshot
Ninety days in
isolation!
Ninety days of
house arrest!
Can I stand
this any longer? Being a senior citizen, I have to.
I used to think that living away
from society would not bother me a bit. I was raised as an only child after
all—sheltered and hinted once as provenciana.
Father, Mother, and I lived in a household with aging grandaunts temporarily
staying with us until they went back to their Creator. My old grandfather later
left me grandfather-less.
Living alone would not bother me, so
I thought. I could be a hermit, be stranded on an island, be in prison, as long
as I have a book to read, paper and pen, yarn, thread and needles, I can survive
that kind of life, until Lady Corona came. She came silently and devastatingly
and all my confidence of surviving a life of seclusion drastically changed. I
guess, it's just human nature to want the opposite—the poor wanting to be rich,
the rich giving away their riches, the ugly wanting to be beautiful, the
beautiful marring their faces with unnecessary contraptions, the blind wanting
to see, the seeing being blind to the afflictions in the world, the deaf
wanting to hear and the hearing being deaf to the clamor of the oppressed.
Ninety days indoors and had only
gone to town three times for something emergent. For one, I had to buy a
hairband because my hair is getting long because the beauty salons were closed.
Only Ron goes to the store and it would be ridiculous of him to buy a hairband.
Now I feel so confined and could not stand anymore breathing the same circulated
air in the house, but I also fear inhaling the air that people had exhaled, and
so I don't take a walk. I have started to develop a phobia of being near
people. Although I go to the yard to pick strawberries or cut roses for the
vases, I do so on occasion because it is cold and wet outside in this Bremerton
weather. However, I busy myself with indoor activities: finished three knitted blankets,
which I started months ago, read four books, sewed forty-five facemasks, cooked
and baked, at last finalized my second book after several revisions and three
professional editing, and occasionally played the piano. Then there is the
unnecessary eating and my stomach now walks in front of me—there is the
treadmill that stares at me and I stare back at it. Ron finds excuses to go to
the store and I try hard to keep him indoors, but in spite of my nagging, I see
him open the door to the garage.
I imagine Lady Corona in red,
fleeting from person to person, lurking around me, silently devastating our
lives and our souls, and leaving us fighting an unseen enemy.
