In the darkness, the walls reverberated, and I stirred in my bed. In the dark, I could hear my son’s soft breaths. His mouth hung open, his head heavy on the pillow beside me. My husband, quarantined after returning from abroad a few days ago, also lay awake in our son’s room next door. The storm had arrived. Gusts whipped across the dark mountainside. Through the night, sleet splattered the windows and slid down the pane in heavy clumps.
The grey morning was no better. Inside the shuddering walls, I sat with my son at the dining table, which was now my work desk and his classroom. The virus had crammed us all, together with our collective work, school, and study, into this box together. Through tired eyes, I struggled to negotiate Zoom, Messenger meetings, email, intranet, YouTube, Showbie, Facetime, Facebook groups, flitting from one online platform to the next, retrieving home schooling instructions, links to online tasks, meeting requests. The online classroom seemed even more chaotic than sitting in an actual room full of children. I sorted through the pile of schoolbooks in three languages, matching them with the videos and links, and online worksheets. Art class for the day was a photography project. My son should take pictures with different themes – stillness, loneliness, emptiness. That shouldn’t be too difficult, I thought, looking out the window at the empty street. Barely a car had passed on the normally busy road into town. In the background continued the cacophony of twenty online children, like a flock of birds, as I looked out the window at the stillness that pervaded the world outside. I hadn’t stepped out there for days. It was raining now, fat drops exploding tiny craters in the mound of snow on the balcony.
Between full time work from home, part time studying, and part time home-schooling, I’ve never been so busy without leaving the house. The first few days were the hardest. Now I’ve given up expecting myself to teach for five hours, work for eight, study for a couple more, and spend time with my family. We all do what we can. And the routine is beginning to flow. We get a bit of everything done and don’t worry as much about all the things we don’t. We speak to our neighbours from a safe distance. We talk to our friends online. We wash our hands a lot.
“Have you washed your hands?” I ask four or five or six times a day.
I’ve tried to stop obsessing over exponential graphs of death and disease. The statistics will play out. We just have to do our best and resist anxiety.
Finally it stopped raining, and blowing, and sleeting. The greyness lifted and everything was white again. The street was quiet and empty and I stepped out to embrace some cool fresh air. But while everything looked normal – a wintery garden of light – the shimmering edges on each mound of snow by the roadside or on the snow draped over the stair railings, the surface of the road glistening in the new sunlight, hinted at hidden danger. After days of sleet and rain, just teetering around freezing point, every surface was encased in an invisible layer of ice. I stepped back inside and closed the door again.
