2020, so far, has not been kind to me. At the end of January, I fell down most of a flight of stairs on my way to my office where I teach, my journey ending in a mild concussion and a badly broken wrist. On the 31st, I had surgery to repair my wrist, and only now am I getting back to two-handed typing, handwriting, and –just in time to arm myself against anxiety caused by the recent global pandemic– knitting. And now, we’re stuck at home as I’m trying to write in the corner of my bedroom, wondering how Virginia Woolf would’ve fared under the circumstances, when the “room of my own” is routinely invaded by my kids wanting to flop on the bed and tell me they’re bored.
But today, I’m sitting at home on a Sunday morning, all of us together –my college daughter included. I’m writing while they make homemade donuts that we’ll enjoy while we’re watching the video of our church service. It could be worse. Much worse. Here we are, together, all of us relatively able to live together in fairly close quarters without becoming dangerous to each other. We have enough toilet paper, an online calculator tells me, for another eighteen days, and enough food in the pantry to feed us for over a week, if we’re a little creative once the cheese is gone. Because it’s always the cheese that goes first, of course, and cheese is literally and figuratively the stuff that holds together about 90% of our family’s favorite recipes. May God help us if any of us ever becomes lactose intolerant.
As educators, my husband and I are also blessed with jobs that translate fairly well to being done online, at home. Of course, he’s taught online for over ten years, so he’s the resident expert. I, in my first year of teaching, am still figuring everything out, and now that includes the intricacies of Canvas and Zoom and Microsoft Teams in addition to general pedagogy and how to keep a mid-day core level English Comp class engaged enough to not fall asleep during a fifteen minute lecture (still working on that one). Still, I figure, I’m only teaching one section this semester, and I have my two hour commute time back, so I have plenty of time to figure all this out. We’ll see how Tuesday goes. At any rate, we’re feeling pretty blessed in this little house this morning, especially since my son, who got the hazmat-lite treatment earlier this week at the clinic, tested positive for Influenza B and not Coronavirus. He’s mostly back to full functioning, just in time for his school to start e-learning next week. So, the count at our house is two teachers doing their teaching jobs online from home (one high school, one college), one temporarily online college student, one temporarily e-learning high school student, and one high schooler who normally does her schoolwork online. It’s going to be interesting around here next week.
So, a quiet Sunday, nowhere to go, a book or two to read, and my work is set out for me tomorrow. If it warms up, I might venture out for a walk, since they say that’s allowable, given sufficient distance from anyone I might run into outside with the same idea. For now, I think my coffee is done, so I’ll go pour myself a cup and enjoy one of my daughter’s homemade donuts while we figure out whether we can put a facebook livestream recording onto our TV. It can’t be any more difficult than setting up a Zoom meeting, can it?
*photo: view from our front yard, September 2016
