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| Wednesday Morning Walk - Bridge over the Cottonwood River Gloomy morning, but the company was good! |
When R and I lived in Houston, we had the pleasure of living there through one significant hurricane watch. It was fascinating to me. They gave away hurricane tracking sheets at the grocery store checkouts, and we watched the grocery store shelves empty in the week leading up to landfall. In the end, the hurricane resulted in a lot of rain for us, some flooding in the downtown area, and things returned to normal fairly quickly.
The whole experience was so bizarre to me. This sitting and waiting and worrying for something that was on the way, and might or might not hit us hard. I told my co-workers, who were terrified at the thought of a tornado, that I'd take a tornado over a hurricane any day of the week. In the days leading up to a tornado, life goes on as usual. Sure, the storm itself can be spooky. Terrifying, even, depending on how close it gets. But we didn't worry ourselves into a frenzy over it. Fast-forward 24 years and social media makes a lot of storms feel more like that hurricane watch in Houston than the tornadoes of my youth in Kansas. And this... pandemic, which still sounds like such a storybook word, though my goodness how our language has changed in the last 24, 48, 72 hours... this is like that hurricane watch, but on the big screen.
Stay at home-social distancing guidelines, in theory, shouldn't impact my day-to-day life all that much. The office is just us, the same people who live at home, so going to work doesn't generally involve hanging around with others. On a full day, I might visit the post office and the bank, hit the grocery store on the way home. I did all of those things on Monday and Tuesday looked somewhat similar. Today I ventured off to Lawrence to bring the big furniture back from K's dorm room. The entire drive, I kept thinking about how normal everything looked. The grass is getting green, the days are getting warmer. But when I got out of the car--to get gas, to help my son carry his stuff to the car, to grab a drink for the ride back from the grocery store--it was so clear how much has changed in such little time. It's mostly an internal shift, a state of mind (though there were far fewer people out and about than I would usually see in Lawrence on a typical Wednesday afternoon).
I am so rusty--or maybe it is that the distractions are coming fast and from so many directions--that these few paragraphs have taken me most of the day to construct. I'm not seriously calling this a quarantine journal, but when I made a list of self-care possibilities, the daily, or near daily blog post kept returning to me as something that I once found very satisfying. It was also very satisfying to spend some time on my long-neglected website, tidying things up for a few hours.
No promises. I am here today. We will see what becomes of it tomorrow.
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