Quarantine Diary #15 3/28/2020

The Long-Awaited Groceries (The hymn “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus” is in my brain right now) came last night at 9PM – when it was raining. A woman named Sarah, late 30’s, brown ponytail, not-posh sweatpants and hoodie – carried ALL our groceries across the street from her car to our porch. This included 8-packs of Gatorade plus boxes of seltzer water, plus lots of other heavy stuff. Did I mention it was raining? Yes, we had tipped her well when the order was placed but still- that was hard work and she and all the other gracious delivery people out there are the Empresses and Emperors of quarantined Americans.   

This morning we had whole wheat pancakes with yogurt and raspberry preserves and an egg.  Plus I ate grapes, one by one, while I was making the pancakes. Nobody in a thousand-dollar suit brought me my food. Just one strong woman who smiled and said she is kind of enjoying the deliveries; “Gets me out of the store sometimes.”

Also, after I slid my egg onto my plate I forgot to turn the burner off. Len noticed it 20 minutes later.  Wasn’t someone just writing about Safety at Home?

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I’m talking with my adult kids more than I used to. It’s not every day, it’s never long gabby conversations. But things come up and we communicate a bit, and this means everything to me. Almost every conversation eventually touches on these three topics.

• What we are cooking.
• We are going to stay separate from each other except if one of us needs help, then we are all going to towards the fire.
• What we are eating.

(Honest to Pete, two of the kids are, right now, baking bread together while 100 miles apart.) 

If you have adult kids, nieces, nephews, grandkids, adults you knew when they were children – isn’t it powerful to watch them now? Did you read the comments from yesterday? Chris’s son is an EMT without enough PPE (personal protective equipment). Franc’s sister (he was a teenager when she was born) is going back to work in a hospital this week after her vacation.  These adults we know and sometimes raised are holding the world together. They are trying to protect us. What we did, raising this generation, was good.

I don’t want to hear any of us judging others on the basis of what decade they were born in. That’s lazy, stupid and divisive talk. Being a Boomer or Millennial or Gen X’s might explain the music we like or the TV shows we remember. It says nothing about the content of our character.  

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We bought a whole chicken to cook. I asked Len how he was going to cook it. He said he was going to simmer it and then …  I stopped him. “You’re going to just start out boiling it in water?”

So that conversation got real right away.  If the wife wanted roast chicken, she was welcome to do it.

This is a picture of me rubbing poultry seasoning onto and into the cold, dead bird. It was impossibly intimate and the next time we get a whole chicken (we don’t often) I will eat it boiled with cornflakes if that’s what I have to do to avoid ever again sticking my hand where the chicken’s toilet paper should go.

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Laughing is good, isn’t it?

Here are “the best women’s tweets of last week.” RIGHT HERE. They are very, very good.