We’re Only Two Months Into Lockdown
Don’t tell me you’ve got virus fatigue already.
Note from the author: I’m adding a note to this story. I wrote it when the pandemic was new as it were, back in April. Somehow, seven months in, it feels as fresh (not in a good way), as ever.
When people caught the poliovirus in the 40’s and 50’s, they ended up living in an iron lung. Talk about social distancing.
My sister got rheumatic fever when she was a little girl after our brother died from it before the invention of penicillin. She had to stay home for a year.
A woman recently wrote, I think in the NYT, about living in isolation in her house for 18 months because she had TB. She had food and essentials delivered outside her bedroom door, and friends waved to her from her lawn.
In February, before we knew COVID-19 was a thing in the US, I had lunch with a dear friend I hadn’t seen in a long while. She was in remission from a cancer that had taken two people close to me. She‘d had to isolate for almost a year because her disease and treatment wrecked her immune system.
In 1946 or thereabouts, a friend of the family visited from Boston with her young niece and nephew. She was taking them back to England, where they would be reunited with their parents. They had lived with…
