COVID-19

I haven’t been to school in over two weeks.

The last day of school before spring break was March 6th, which isn’t that long ago but feels like a million years ago. We had spring break. I wanted to have a low-key, relax at home spring break – I really just needed to get some rest and clean my house.

Everything lurched out of normalcy on Wednesday, March 11. I was talking on the phone with my mom, and she said that there were two people who were confirmed to have COVID-19 in Michigan, and one of them was at the hospital where she works. That made it real, suddenly – instead of seeing the number of people who have it in New York, it turned into the number of people who have it at home, in the hospital that’s thirty minutes away from my house. There was a confirmed case in Mississippi the same day. That weekend, we found out that school was going to be cancelled for Tuesday – Monday was already supposed to be a professional development day.

Tuesday turned into the whole week. The whole week turned into two weeks. Then the governor ordered school to be cancelled until April 17, waived the 180 day requirement, and cancelled the state test.

It’s weird, because this time is a mix of terrifying and boring.

Terrifying, in the sense that I could get sick, and that my grandfather who is in his 90’s could get sick, and hospitals might not have enough ventilators, and there aren’t enough tests so we don’t even know who has it and who doesn’t. I don’t know if things will be back to normal in time for us to go back to school at all this year, or if things will even be back to normal for us to go back to school in August, and the economy is crashing and a lot of people are losing their jobs.

Boring, in the sense that I haven’t left the house for days at a time and I’ve put off doing my taxes, because if I do my taxes now, what will I have left to do next week? I started my vegetable garden and started vermicomposting, but that really only took a few hours. I’ve started knitting a sweater, and I’ve made very fast progress on it because I’ve had unprecedented amounts of time with not much to do.

I’m trying to keep in mind that none of us know what we’re doing right now. This is the first time for all of us to live through a global pandemic – none of us know the right way to handle it. We have to give each other grace here – we’re all new to this, and we’re all trying our best to handle huge changes that have hit us over the course of several days.