Except it wasn’t a Sunday. It was a Tuesday. Or was it a Wednesday? I can no longer tell the days apart as they all seem to be slightly different versions of the same day lived repeatedly. The streets were only empty because everyone was safely ensconced inside their homes, hiding from an invisible virus that is preying upon us all.
As I continued on my run, more and more people came outside for a breath of fresh air. Some were also on a run, others were out walking their dogs and many were in family groups slowly ambling around the block. My run quickly transformed into a type of video game where the goal is to keep at least six feet of space between myself and everyone else. This often meant jumping onto a sidewalk to avoid a family on bikes or quickly darting around a parked car to give an elderly couple additional space. A game of chicken was played whenever I found myself heading straight for another runner and one of us inevitably had to move aside to avoid violating social distancing rules.
This is the new normal.
I returned from my run to what would normally be a quiet house but instead was bustling with activity. My young girls were both busy with their online schooling. Between the two of them, they somehow need a Chromebook, an iPad and two tablets just to get through the day. One was on Zoom with her class (an app I had never heard of until last month and now is my main means of socializing) and the other was FaceTiming with a friend while also working on her math homework. My husband was in the kitchen pouring himself a second cup of coffee before returning to his new office, which could also be described as a card table in the basement. My son, who should have been in his dorm room all the way across the country, was sound asleep upstairs in the tiny room that became his a few months ago when we thought he would never be living at home for an extended time again. The only thing that wasn’t out of the ordinary was my sweet old chocolate lab, Ivy, who was snoring loudly in the living room. Unbeknownst to me at the time, we would have to put her down within a week and the last sense of normalcy in my life would be gone.
I wonder if my son will return to school in the fall. I wonder if he will get the chance to study abroad like he had planned. I wonder when the girls will start playing soccer again. I wonder when they will be able to play with their friends. I wonder when my husband will go back to his real office. I wonder if the grocery store will still be out of toilet paper and flour. I wonder when I will get to hug my parents. I wonder if any of us will get sick. So many unanswered questions.
So far, we are among the lucky ones as we live in a place where the governor took quick and decisive action in shutting down businesses, closing schools and enacting a shelter-in-place order earlier than other states. However, even with our relatively lower risk of coming down with dreaded COVID-19, going to the grocery store still feels a little like going into battle. We are all prepared with our face masks, gloves and Clorox wipes for the carts. We dodge and weave through the aisles as we try to avoid one another and patiently stand six feet apart in the crazy, long checkout lines that are the result of the stores closing every other register in hopes of further spacing people out from one another. When we arrive back home, after we diligently scrub our hands and sing the happy birthday song twice, we set about disinfecting the food appropriately or quarantining the non-perishables for a week in a little-used corner of the house. Social distancing, flattening the curve, N-95 masks, novel Coronavirus...these are all terms most of us had never heard of a couple months ago but are now a part of our regular lexicon.
Someday this will all be behind us but, for now, all we can do is take each day as it comes and do our best to adapt to this new normal while we wait for something resembling our old lives to return. In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy the empty streets and the quieter sounds of my neighborhood as I reacquaint myself with my love of running.
- Kristen
