Covid Letters, No. 7

Here’s a letter from Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough. More than once during the pandemic I have dreamt of a newborn, that I was nursing a newborn. That peculiar calm that descends when there is nothing in the world to be done except this  ….

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I recommend weathering a pandemic with a three-month-old. I have one. He keeps my focus exceptionally small and immediate.

In the past couple weeks, for example, stuck at home following the California governor’s orders, I have caught myself spinning out about any number of adult-sized worries. Medical professionals working to save lives without protective gear to save their own. Why a grocery shopper buying oatmilk, instead, wears an N95 mask. Why my neighbor leaves each morning for her nonessential job. Why some of the most essential jobs, including the people who deliver toilet paper and pad thai to the rest of us at home, are the lowest paid and the least protected. How we will pay rent. If we will run out of bourbon.

I look up from the coronavirus headlines. My son watches the philodendron growing along the walls of our reading nook. He is also very entertained by shadows. For a rather long time, he’s been at it, kicking his legs and babbling to himself while my head’s been elsewhere. I return, and it’s time for a nap, or a new diaper, or to venture out into the neighborhood for a walk.

On that walk, people cross the street to put distance between each other. This doesn’t feel like community. It feels like a rip in the social fabric—though I practice the same precaution. Each of us has become a potential threat to the other.

I see a video online of a celebrity offering a pep talk from a gleaming kitchen in a cyborg drone. We would, “get through this together,” she said, and “discover our shared humanity.”

Those moments, when another walker won’t even look at us—a baby in a sunhat, slung on a new mom, huffing and puffing up the same hill—do not feel fundamentally kind. What is shared is not our humanity but our fear.

One day, headed back down the hill, baby and I saw a strange sight. The day was overcast—already eerie in Los Angeles. Dark storm clouds cloaked mountain peaks. A woman stood at the doorway of her house wearing a blue surgical mask. In everyday life, even as a necessity, the masks retain their strangeness. A whole swath of context is missing. She watched us, and I couldn’t read her. Was it curiosity or suspicion? After all, there is a world of difference between the top of the hill, where she lives, and the flats, where we are.

I raised my hand to wave. She waved back, eagerly.

I keep thinking of the advice a friend’s father used to give. Fight back with normal life. This is not to say we should not fight back in the specific and singular ways the moment demands. My aunt sews face masks, an artist friend offers online drawing classes for children. Those who can, give money and blood. A man calls into the radio, asking where he can donate his dead father’s ventilator.

But collectively, I’m not sure we’ve ever fought a crisis quite so normally. Not in my lived memory, anyway. Not since victory gardens or make do and mend.

It’s the end of March. We soak the beans and visit the neighborhood cherry tree. The bread rises. A neighbor leaves a bag of rice on the porch. I trade with a friend, Chlorox wipes for wine. We make the hand-off via the mailbox, and wave to each other through the closed window. Baby is growing! she texts.

It’s time to nurse. Baby and I sit in the creaky rocking chair in the nook. Together we watch the philodendron and the shifting end-of-day shadows.

There are moments when I remember I have everything I ever wanted. Now, I just wait to have it all taken away.

And then it’s bathtime.