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Life is so odd right now. I’m not saying anything new. Even to me, someone lucky enough to maintain something of the same daily routine as pre-isolation, life is odd. Dan is home all day every day, compared to previously leaving for work by 7am and getting home by 6:30pm. We’re in temporary housing as we wait to close on our new house—quarantine is a challenging time to buy and sell houses, let me tell you. And Finn and I can no longer take aimless trips to the bookstore, to Target, to Michaels to kill time during the days. He’s still not quite big enough to “play with,” so to walk around shops with him was such a great way to keep him amused and to keep us from getting tired of our surroundings. Now, we’re lucky if the weather is good enough to go sit outside because even that’s been off the walls lately.
Saturday, we woke up to snowfall. Sunday, we went on a hike. Mostly, though, my time has been spent knitting and watching Finn and reading and playing with Finn and watching BuzzFeed Unsolved videos.
Rinse, repeat.
I did finally switch to audiobook for my current read—Kendare Blake’s Three Dark Crowns—because I just can’t seem to tear myself from my knitting enough to focus on a book. This will be a problem once I finish the second book in the series because the library only has the first two available. Maybe, by then, I’ll be a little past my current knitting obsession. I go through phases, knitting a lot, reading a lot, writing a lot. Lately, I haven’t had it in me to write at all. I haven’t even journaled since before isolation began, which is absurd because this is exactly the kind of incident that journaling could help me to get through. And aside from that, shouldn’t I want to “chronicle this historical moment”? To be honest, not really. I’ve seen a lot of scrapbookers on Instagram talking about documenting this period and the potential for future relatives or others looking through their albums, and it’s an interesting idea, but I don’t do my journaling or scrapbooking for anyone but myself and maybe my immediate family (in the case of Finn’s baby book).
On the one hand, it’s been nice not to think, “I need to document this,” but I also wish I felt that desire to journal. Scrapbooking is more of a challenge in between houses, but I have my notebook and I have a pen. I just don’t have the interest at the moment. I’m not sure why not, and I know it’ll come back; I often go through these kinds of waves. For now, though, it’s been simple living in quarantine: baking bread, knitting, and appreciating nature as best we can.
I’m grateful that my life hasn’t been in total upheaval throughout this and I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve tried to do what I can with my privilege and power: buying from small businesses (and avoiding Amazon as best I can), staying isolated and socially distancing, and being grateful that my child is too young to remember this even if he has to live through the aftereffects. There’s a constant undercurrent of worry to my days, as someone who feels deeply for so many; even if I’m unaffected in my day-to-day life, I worry about my friends and family, about the vulnerable populations, about how those in power are handling (or not) this entire situation. I worry about the people who don’t seem to understand what’s going on—or maybe they just don’t care—and how their actions can hurt others who are just trying to get through it all. It seems trite, but I just want everything and everyone to be okay.
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