On reasonable fears and confirmed suspicions, walking and writing, and nasal discomforts revisited
July 10, 2020
Dear Eva,
I am writing today from a fairly frantic head space after finding out a friend I walked with one week ago has tested positive for covid-19. Right now I am preparing to head off to a nearby small town that has more testing availability. I couldn’t get one closer to home until Monday, and I would prefer not to wait all weekend with this on my mind.
I have been congested the past few days with a slightly scratchy throat, but I had been assuming it was allergy related. Now I’m not so sure. As evidence of the power of the mind, I will note that I physically felt drastically different after I got the call about her results last night. Suddenly aware of every tingle, ache, and pain in my body. I was awake much of the night, experiencing that kind of half sleep/half awake consciousness where the mind buzzes about in a dream-like flurry.
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At this point I’m sitting in the parked car at a hospital 60 miles from home, waiting for them to bring out the nasal swab and jam it up as far as it will go. As we have discussed, I’m not too concerned about the test since it can’t possibly be worse than two hours of having a doctor poke and prod your sinus cavity like I experienced last fall. I am, however, quite worried about how we will manage if I test positive. We can’t send the kids to family because at this point, I would have already exposed them. On the one hand, it seems like a stretch that I would have it—we were outdoors on a walk. On the other, it is certainly not implausible—we didn’t have masks on, and we were fairly close to each other on the sidewalk. Time will tell. On the upside, my friend who has it is doing well so far. She barely had symptoms at all, and I thought she was being paranoid for getting tested after finding out she was near someone who was exposed. I guess it is not paranoia if your suspicions are confirmed? I’m not sure. It is something I have thought a lot about actually, how we draw lines socially around which kind of fears are reasonable and which ones are not. This time period seems to be blowing up some of those lines, or at least shining a new and different light that exposes how little we ever really know.
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Several hours have passed. I am back home, and I am needing to wrap up this scattered letter before the precious one hour of Quiet Time for the kids comes to a close. I can now confirm that the nasal swab test is, in fact, quite uncomfortable! I think perhaps I was acting a bit tougher than was warranted going into it; it turns out just having someone invade your sinuses once does not make you immune to discomfort when it happens again.
I am puzzling now over how to handle this weekend. I won’t get the results until Monday at the earliest. We had been thinking that even if I do have covid, the kids and Bill have already been exposed. I am hearing now from some friends that perhaps it may still matter how much they are exposed, so I should retreat to your old guest room in our house? But I may also not actually even have it! Ack! This is all very stressful. Today when I stopped Simon from hugging me, his eyes welled up with tears and he whispered, “But you’re my family.” He was playing back the refrain he has absorbed these past few months about how we are only hugging the family we live with right now.
Even the new normal is tenuous. I knew this, of course, but I feel slightly blindsided nonetheless. It truly had not occurred to me that I might be endangering myself in the limited outings I have made. As I type those words, I realize how naive it sounds.
No matter how old we are, no matter how much we try to have a sense of perspective, no matter how much we know about where we sit in the world—we can still be shackled with a faulty sense that we are somehow special, sitting outside the action, immune. This feels like a weird spot to end the letter, but it is a weird day heading into what will undoubtedly be a weird weekend here. It is eerie to consider what next week’s letter may look like, but we can never know what tomorrow holds anyway.
My hope is that you are winding down this week without any of this sort of stress and can enjoy some cocktails and delicious cooking tonight and into the weekend. It makes me happy to visualize that kind of pandemic normalcy right now. I will keep you posted in the days ahead!
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday July 10 2020
Dear Sarah,
This week I thought I might reflect further on the fourth of July holiday, but that wasn’t the case. I’m not sure there are many holidays that I celebrate from the root of their origins or intentions. I suppose I am largely in it for the days off and the related foods! I briefly thought of running down a list of U.S. holidays and then decided that was a bit too boring — my boring enumeration of the ways that I don’t spend time thinking about the meaning of holidays, and instead just enjoy my free time away from email. Holidays are days away from work, days to reflect; I reflect often anyway. I suppose I will point my reflections in the direction I desire on any given day! I will say this: there is a small sculpture of a rabbit that sits at the end of a sidewalk on my running and walking loop around our nearby lake, and on the fourth of July the rabbit was dressed in a jaunty little red-white-and-blue frilled Peter Pan collar, which was promptly removed the following day. I appreciated that household’s tidy acknowledgment of the holiday!
I looked back at our letters from this set of Fridays last year, the week of the fourth of July and the week after, and I was struck by the simple differences of our old lives, when we were out in the world doing this and that. Last year in your letter dated July 4 you were in Brooklyn, having spent a day on subway rides, hot meandering walks through Central Park, wading through crowds in the Natural History Museum. I wouldn’t have thought that crowds would evoke a feeling of nostalgia, but here we are. Last night I joined in the online kickoff event for Headlands’ annual benefit art auction, an event I’ve attended many times in the past, where people get together and bid on artworks to support artists and Headlands. Photographs of the past events made me feel nostalgic, too — look at all those people standing close together, talking freely, eating and breathing and laughing together. We remember crowds in a museum, people showing with their bodies that they are interested in being out in the world, being together, maybe learning something about natural history or anything, seeing and being seen, proving that we all exist. It can be satisfying to hear one’s voice among other voices, to listen together with people to a performance or a reading, to be physically present in any number of experiences that make up a life. Tomorrow M and I will drive to the Walker Art Center for the first time in four months; we have reserved a time slot and we will wear our masks and see art in a space where building visitation has now been limited to 25% capacity at all times (among other virus-related remediations). I am a little bit nervous and a little bit excited; it won’t be quite the same as before, but it will be something.
I read an article this morning about a man who was reconsidering his finances in light of the pandemic, and he was talking about retirement, and I clicked on a link to figure out how much money I might eventually be eligible to receive via Social Security benefits. At first I thought about how if I considered my Social Security eligibility age to be my retirement age, then I would be in a working state for essentially the next thirty years… which feels long. Then I was thinking about the other types of savings M and I are gathering for our retirement, and I had the realization that you don’t have to wait until you are of the age to withdraw from Social Security to start accessing other retirement or savings funds (I know there are some retirement funds you do have to wait longer to use, but there are others that will be accessible sooner). Then I just started to think in general about “retirement.” I am working now but the pace is pretty manageable and as we’ve discussed in the past, it can be nice to have some obligations to structure the day. Will I “retire”? What do I think retirement is or will look like? Will I be able to keep doing the same work as I get older (I don’t see why not, though things could change on all kinds of fronts), and will I want to? I assume the pandemic won’t be with us forever, but will there be other pandemics on the horizon; will our ability to travel and to visit other places and cultures be curtailed in a long-term kind of way? In other words, how will I fill my time in retirement? Will it be similar to how I fill my time now, or different? There’s nothing particularly time-sensitive to worry about here — it is just making me think harder (and I already think pretty hard) about what I do with my days, what I hope to do with my future days, and if I am enjoying the days in a regular way. I say yes. Our days are what our lives are built from!
I went out for a walk this afternoon and thought about the writer David Sedaris. A good friend of mine is a fan, as am I, and she sent me a couple of Sedaris articles in recent months. He’s always out walking, racking up steps and miles and picking up trash. As I walked I thought that I, too, would be satisfied to spend my days walking and writing (I suppose I could make an effort on the trash, too), which is essentially what I do anyway. I’ve been making my way into my own sprawling writing project, going through stacks of looseleaf pages, reading and annotating, starting to put things in a loose (very loose!) order, drawing out some threads and themes to think and write on further. I’m invigorated by our conversation earlier this week about your project in progress.
On Wednesday this week, after an odd, adrift kind of day, I sat outside in the yard and drank a cider and read short stories in the heat, and I am thinking about doing that again this evening. I was not adrift today, but the pleasure of that kind of evening applies to any day. I am thinking about you after our text exchange, and awaiting your words later today! Wishing you a Friday with as much peace as can be wrangled!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva