Six Months Later

From the New York Times Business Section April 4, 2021

"We Have All Hit the Wall," by Sarah Lyle.

"What time is it?  What day is it? What did we do in October?  Why are we standing in front of the refrigerator staring at an old clove of garlic?  Just recently I spent half an hour struggling to retrieve a word from the faulty memory system that replaced my prepandemic brain? ('Instituion.' That was the word.)  Sometimes when I try to write a simple email, I I feel like I am just pushing words around, like peas on a plate, hoping they will eventually coalesce into sentences."

My husband gave me this article a couple of weeks ago and said, " you could write this."  Obviously I could not--for all the reasons suggested in the above quote.

About six months ago, we left Lake Medora and returned to Louisville.  We have been here about six months--the longest continual time spent at home (and I do mean at home) since I retired.

These are some of the many things I did NOT do:

• Blog (except for the annual Best Books of . . . ).
• Read anything that required a lot of concentration.  My fallbacks were mysteries and books I had read before and had always thought I might want to read again. (Sometimes true; sometimes not so much.)
• Go out of the house except for Physical Therapy and walking in the neighborhood.
• Go out to eat or drink--anywhere.
• See friends.
• Super clean my house.
• Organize my closets.
• Work on my book.
• You get the point.

It was the weirdest experience.  When I was working, had someone told me "you have a year to yourself, with no work-related responsibilities," I would have been thrilled.  While I am more than glad not to have had to work, I wish I could have somehow found  another purposive activity to take its place.

Now, none of this is news for most of you, I am sure.  And for the record, I COMPLETELY admit I had it easy.  No children to entertain or home-school, no money worries, no major health issues, no work-related issues.  However I did slip into a kind of despondency that went deeper than my usual medically controlled depression.

Again from  "We Have All Hit the Wall."

"Natasha Rajah, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University who specializes in memory and the brain, said the longevity of the pandemic--endless monotony laced with acute anxiety--had contributed to a sense that time was moving differently, as if this past year year were a long, hazy, exhaustive experience lasting forever and no time at all. The stress and tedium, she said, have dulled our ability to form meaningful memories."  

This makes sense to me (and I am glad I am not alone.)  In narrative terms, my life became a chronicle without a plot: no purposive movement towards. . . .  

So how exactly did I spend my pandemic?

We tried, in so far as possible, to structure our days.  We either walked outside or went to Physical Therapy (more below) sometime in the morning or early afternoon.  I had coffee at 4:00 (while watching Nicole Wallace).  This marked the commencement of the evening.  I made lots of dinners.  Each night we would sit down in the dining room and have a nice dinner.  (The dining room wasn't used daily before the pandemic).  I did a lot of cooking.  I subscribed to the New York Times food app and tried out a lot of things I had not cooked before. For example, because a blog has to have pictures,

I learned how to roast a chicken.

I experimented with new dishes containing vegetables I had never cooked before, such as this vegetable stew called Kaddu. or Sweet and Sour Butternut Squash).

I made various versions of Pasta Putanesca.  

I made lots of curries from leftovers.

I cooked a beautiful beef tenderloin in port cream sauce for Christmas Eve dinner.

I made Quiche Lorraine (also from Julia child).

I cooked scallops in several versions.

And sometimes we ordered out or just ate "tapas"

 

Putting a pleasant meal on the table, sitting in the dining room having a conversation (oddly we had no trouble finding new topics to discuss) became the highlight of our days. 

And although I did not succeed in thoroughly cleaning my house, I did rearrange my major cooking cabinet.  (See pictures at the top of the blog.)

After dinner we would watch a DVD from whatever series we were watching.  This took us til about 9:00 when we would retire to our respective TV for background noise--me to Rachel Maddow, Tony to a wide variety of generally re-run shows he'd never seen before and sports.  (We don't have WIFI except with our hot spots, so we rarely stream.)

Of course, a lot stuff was happening outside our pandemic-enclosed home.  First and foremost, there was the election.  I am a political junky, and this election was so important because I believed our country could not have survived another four years of Trump.  MSNBC helped me get through that, as it later helped me during the Capitol insurrection, and now the trial of George Floyd's murderer.  

It was a tough six months for all of us.  Covid surges.  The gun violence.  (At the time of this writing,    there have been over 45 mass shootings in this calendar year, and, per The Washington Post, over 200 people shot  killed by the police thus far in 2021, and 982 over the last 12 months.)

The last six months put in sharp relief the inequities and divisions of life in the US: who gets shot, who get a vaccine, who supports human rights.  I am gladdened by Biden's presidency, though I know there are terrible and real challenges ahead.  However, I think Biden is absolutely the right person to lead the country right now.  For me, he has the right values, the right temperament, and the right policies.  How much he will be able to accomplish in the end remains a question mark.  The Republicans in Congress have no shame. 

But life does change, for us, in some ways.  Tony and I are fully vaccinated (Pfizer).  We are tentatively moving out of isolation.  We are seeing friends in small groups and venturing out to carefully chosen restaurants.  I have regained my concentration enough to read complex books, as I used to.  At the end of May, we are going back to the lake. I am dealing with lower back issues (hence the PT) but swimming should be really good for me.  Also I can be outside, with a lake and a yard and a deck.  I will also have more contact with people, good friends who also live on Lake Medora.  And I've made a pledge to myself to blog more often.