Dispatch From Under my Bed

Nope. Nope, nope. Not going to talk about the state of the world or all the craziness going on right now. I’ve focused on the crazy already, elsewhere, and I’m going to let this blog be a place of refuge from turmoil, strife and fear.

I found no blackberries in our yard this morning, and was only able to find a few golden raspberries, but there are bushes out in the neighborhood that are producing and I’ll probably hit some of them later. Our bushes are still heavy with not-yet-ripe berries, and we are getting a bit more rain lately, so maybe we’ll have more blackberries soon. Our staghorn sumac is finally producing! I was able to harvest 7 berry clusters this morning and they are now soaking in cold water for a day so I can make my family some pink “lemonade.” I can’t drink it because I am allergic. Sad story, I am allergic to lemons but in a Wild Foods class I took I learned that staghorn sumac tea was the original pink lemonade. It tastes just like it! I got to drink it 2 maybe 3 times before I became allergic to it. I was so excited to have lemonade again… a major letdown, but my family can still enjoy it so I make it.

Got through book 3 of the Demon series: Secrets of the Demon; by Diana Rowland. Really loved it as I have all of them so far. A little iffy on the ending but I am willing to see where the author takes it in the next book: Sins of the Demon. I love her books for many reasons, but the best thing for me is that I haven’t unraveled her endings before I got to them, not in any of books 1, 2, or 3, and that is a rare and happy event for me. I mean, sure, there’s something ego-boosting about figuring out whodunit all the time, but it’s also kind of tedious too depending on how early I’m sure I’ve figured it out. I don’t know why but I’m good at figuring these things out and it makes me appreciate writers who can surprize me, especially when I can look back over the story and actually see the hints that were so skillfully obscured. Suddenly seeing the red herrings for what they were is wonderful. Her white Trash Zombie series is wonderful too, I should get back on that, I think I’m on book 4 or 5 of that one.

Here at the homestead we are focusing on our many games. We’ve started to split off from each other a bit, which is weird. The girls are in games with friends, my eldest even dropped out of the family game, our boy dropped out of the circus game too which means my husband and I are in/running 2 games with none of the kids involved. It’s probably a good thing. Someday things will be more normal and we’ll leave the house for jobs and school and social stuff and it’s good the kids are taking steps and branching out before we get to that. We should encourage our boy to join a game with friends online too.

The reopening of the library continues. It looks like the trustees have approved opening for August 1st. We will start allowing a maximum of ten patrons at a time in to use our computers. Supposedly there will be no browsing allowed, not sure how that’s going to go over. Hopefully it will go well. There are still some layers of approval to get through, the Board of Health and the Select Board must approve the plan before we go forward with it, so it might not happen the way it’s written right now. It seems fairly reasonable to me, if the plexiglass is in place and I am not expected to leave the staff area to interact with patrons, I think I can handle it.

For all my worries about the virus, I am also stressed with the tons of extra work I’m now expected to do. Patrons can’t come in and browse and many of them can’t figure out how to properly reserve things online, so they call us with lists. That’s fine when it’s a few patrons a day but right now it’s many more than a few, and it’s overwhelming. I’m enunciating through my mask into the phone, trying to type or write with one hand, the computer is slow, the patrons are often incorrect that their searches have verified we have the item in our collection, and I have to apologize constantly, explain constantly, etc. After all that, I have to enter everything into the new curbside pick-up spreadsheet we’re supposed to keep. Pus the near endless procedures of quarantining and disinfecting every item coming into the library, all the doors, and everything we touch during our shifts. It’s a lot. I get it, I know it’s all for the best, but we are not working a single extra minute on this stuff. We have the same shifts we used to have only now we’re supposed to add in all this extra stuff and that is just going to get worse for a while as we slowly open up.

After each patron’s computer appointment we are going to have to sanitize the computer, mouse, desk, and chair. We are going to have to field all the phone requests by patrons who haven’t had access to a computer in months, collecting information like name, age-range, phone number, whether they will need to use the printer, etc. We will be enforcing 30 minute limits for the first time since I’ve been working there and requiring patrons to leave the building when they are done. They can’t pick out a book or movie while they are there, at least I think that’s how we’re planning on doing things at first, so we have to enforce that as well.

Lingering, nagging doubts about reopening are with me constantly. The emphasis from my boss is; “if you don’t feel safe with the way we are planning on opening, tell me what concrete steps I can take that will make you feel safe with reopening.” But the only thing that would make me feel safe would be not opening. At this point we are looking at pretty flat numbers in the state, which is lovely, but a lot of people were really stupid only about a week ago, around the 4th, and we won’t see if we will get a spike in cases from that for at least 1-2 more weeks. Add another week onto that to see how bit that potential spike will be. The crazy thing is we’ve been loosening restrictions across the state without pausing long enough to see how that loosening is affecting the infection rate. I’m afraid by the time we see the spike, and even later when officials finally admit that it’s a problem, and even later when they Hopefully lock things down again… it’ll be too late. It’ll be a disaster we can’t hope to contain. We’ll be utterly fucked.

Limiting my exposure to the news isn’t helping. I can be adequately informed as to what’s going on or I can be calm, I cannot have both. I very badly need both somehow. It doesn’t help that my husband feels a need to stay up to date with the news, or that his brother calls and fills him in on any horror he’s happened to miss. It doesn’t help that ignoring all the horror doesn’t make it go away and i know that. I need a break. I need 2020 to give us all a break, to give us something good, something really, really good, something helpful, something hopeful, something less stampede-toward-total-dystopia-ish.

So here I am. Here we are. Tonight will be the last cool night for quite a while. So I think I need to sleep in the fort tonight. In an ideal world, I would arrive home tonight to find a note from my hubby saying “meet me in the fort.” and I would get out there to find a nice dinner, lit candles, jazz playing, and wine. I know, that’s the date I put together for him a while back, it’s the date I need tonight, but I have to go to work. Maybe I can pull it off somehow? I’m having trouble seeing how.

We need to be grown ups and we need real Leadership.

We’re bombarded by news from all sides all the time. When I was a kid news was non-alarmist. It was actually neutral. You could turn on the news and the reporters would make their report without drawing many, or any, conclusions. They generally didn’t takes sides, didn’t use sarcasm or other ploys to undercut one side of an issue or the other, and just reported facts as they understood them. There were weather segments, sports segments, human interest stories, reports on political things, like bills going through the house or senate, reports on campaigns and such, but it was all handled in a pretty grown-up way, neutral. If a big-ass storm was coming they said so, looked at projections and passed along whatever warnings or advisories were coming through official sources. Somewhere along the line ratings became the all important thing, I suspect capitalism is behind it, rich men bought news stations and wanted to get more and more money, maybe there were shareholders who wanted the same thing.

So now we come to today and the news cycle is 24/7 and everyone from everywhere is desperate for ratings and we have the insanity of alarmist headlines, misleading BS being shoveled day and night. We stress out about threats both real and imagined. Everyone is so overwhelmed and confused that they don’t know what to believe. We’ve all heard weird conflicting stories that something like Kale, or milk, or toothpaste, causes cancer and then we’ll hear down the road that it actually prevents cancer, or that yoga will both cause and prevent migraines. Then we get walloped with a global pandemic. Actual medical experts are telling us to stay away from each other because symptomless people can spread this, and this virus is a BEAST. Covid-19 is an insidious, treacherous, murderous, monster of a virus. Some people have it and don’t get sick, that is, they don’t develop a fever, cough, shortness of breath, and don’t wind up on a ventilator fighting for their lives. Or they have a super mild case, hardly felt a thing. But, well, a few things:

This thing is Contagious. Really quite contagious, and there are people who get it, suffer almost unimaginably, suffer it all essentially alone, and DIE.
Some of the people who don’t get sick initially are suffering a massively aggressive clotting condition that is causing murderous strokes in people way younger than usually get them, needing amputations because of these clots.
Some of those symptomless people, as well as people who manage to survive through a near fatal bout of it, go on to suffer organ failure, heart attacks, and so on.
Some of the people dying of this are children. Seemingly healthy children who might have some symptoms, but not alarming ones, who develop a terrifying syndrome involving inflammation of or around their vital organs. Some of these kids are dying.

When we are being asked to stay home, it isn’t about our “freedom” it isn’t about that at all, it’s about public health and safety. If you are a parent, caretaker of children, other people, pets, or even plants, please imagine there is a viable threat to that being or beings that you care about. Let’s imagine this theoretical threat is something outside and that the best and safest thing to do is to stay inside the house until the threat is over. There is some toxin in the air, do you leave your kids out playing in the yard? Do you leave your dog outside in their run? It’s a plant devouring insect swarm, do you leave plants in pots out on the unenclosed porch? No, because you are not a monster. So you bring the kids inside despite the fact that they want to stay outside. Are you “restricting their freedom?” Technically, by definition, but what a wrong-headed way to frame the situation. You are saving their lives. You are “restricting their freedom” as much as a lifeguard restricts someone’s freedom to drown while being dragged out to sea by the undertow.

We really all need to look at this whole situation like grown ups. We are adults, hopefully compassionate, empathetic adults, so that we can see that even if we might not feel under direct threat from this virus, even if we imagine our immune system would kick Covid-19’s scrawny ass, we understand that there are a lot of people who aren’t that lucky. There are people with conditions that suppress their immune systems, are obese, elderly, have lung issues, or are otherwise vulnerable to this thing cannot afford to get this. We need to protect them by curtailing our behavior. I know there are people, loads and loads of people who have lost their jobs because of this shut down. They are in trouble now, they are suffering and it is very, very real, but the answer is not reopening the country. Because we are here right now, with the infection rate still climbing, we cannot go out and mingle, that will just cause another massive spike and another shutdown of everything. Not to mention all the suffering and dying it will bring to many of those who get infected. We need a massive, measured, thoughtful response from our government. We need proper, comprehensive support for all who have lost jobs, we need proper support and protection for medical professionals, PPE, we need housing protection for all who can’t pay mortgages and rent, we need food distribution so people are not going hungry, and on and on. To those who immediately want to say: “How will we pay for it? Seriously? HOW? Do you know how much money that is????” I want you to think about the word “Emergency.”

When there is an emergency, you do what you have to do to get through it, and you worry about how much it costs after the emergency has passed. Think about a bad accident. Someone is badly injured, losing blood, you go to the ER and worry about how that gets paid for later. The most important thing is to preserve life, stop the bleeding, repair the damage. You deal with the cost later because it is an Emergency. A less immediate example, my husband and I saw this pandemic coming. That is, we started hearing about this weird virus in Wuhan in January and we thought of the H1N1 flu, SARS, etc. As we started to hear it was spreading we thought, huh, I wonder if China will be able to contain this? What if it starts spreading to other countries? As we started to hear it was “all under control” but saw China quarantining cities, provinces etc, quick-building 1,000 bed hospitals, sending folks in HASMAT gear to disinfect the streets… we started to think this virus was definitely going to spread, that is was quite dangerous, and that my husband is pretty vulnerable to it. In case this became an emergency I more than doubled my grocery budget. This is not something we could afford. It ate away at our savings quite quickly and that made me feel uneasy, of course, but I told myself if we ended up sticking things out at home I’d be glad I’d done it. If the virus hadn’t come here then we could always just eat the food, use the daily supplies, and cut our food budget in the future as we did so. Our government should be bending over backwards to protect the lives of its citizens. Our lives should be the first priority and money should be something we worry about later. Yep, the bill will come due and we will have to deal with it, but the alternative is utterly unthinkable.

Day 44: Anxious Thoughts

Watching the news feed is depressing. I stopped reading the news for a couple of days and I felt better. It was nice, I might go back to it. Does anyone else feel like they have to choose between mental health and being informed? I don’t want to be ignorant about what’s going on but at the same time things are bad in so many ways and it drains all the joy out of my heart to keep up with it.

The miles long lines of cars for food banks. I just can’t bear to think about it. I can’t help but put myself there, waiting hours in my car, desperate for the food to feed myself and my family, dying of anxiety that it would run out before I got any, riddled with guilt knowing I might get some and the many cars behind me might not even though they might need it just as much. I feel guilty just knowing I have food and other people don’t. I’ve gone hungry at some points in my life, I’ve not starved for days on end or anything, but I’ve lived on one scanty meal a day, sipping water near constantly to try to fool my stomach, for weeks. I’d eat anything anyone offered me while hiding my situation because I thought it was my fault. For me that was a long time ago and over the course of the past 3 decades, through planning, action, and luck, I had made it to a point where food scarcity was no longer an issue of mine. I keep telling myself “we’re still ok, we’re still ok.” It’s a mantra of worry, a spell to keep the spectre of hunger at bay. If something like this pandemic had hit back when I was struggling so hard I don’t know how I would have made it through.

Even now I don’t know that we’ll make it through. We will be ok as long as we still have our jobs and keep getting paid but how long will that continue? My husband’s job is actively planning for the survival of the school through several scenarios of full enrollment, 3/4, 1/2 etc. all the way down to no enrollment. They are planning for how many could they still employ in each scenario, who is essential, who would be cut, or given less hours, etc. At my job I’m not sure what’s going on exactly. I know it all hinges on the budget for the next fiscal year which starts July 1st. The budget had been settled, before this happened, with raises and everything, but the town is going to have to reshuffle things because of the economic hit the businesses are taking, and how much the pandemic costs to fight. I’m not super clear on how it all works but I know my boss will focus her fight on keeping our jobs and the services we provide intact, and cut our materials budgets and extra projects etc to keep those jobs and services. Which mostly assumes we’re reopening as a physical place. I don’t know if my job exists if everything we offer has to be provided online. Maybe. Parts of it for sure but other parts for sure not. I don’t know how long it will be allowed to exist if the building stays closed.

I don’t think it will be safe to return to anything approaching normal in early may. I heard our area isn’t expected to hit peak infection rate until then. How many weeks after that peak will we need to wait so it will be safe to go back out? Some colleges are considering staying online only through the end of 2020 and maybe starting physical classes for the Spring of 2021. Why does that sound both crazy and not crazy at all to me? Everything in uncertain.