There was the time I didn’t know anyone who’d had it. When it seemed like getting vaccinated meant you wouldn’t get it. When you would take your toddler to the hour-long line at the testing site every other week only to learn that it was in fact just a cold. Then there was a case in the daycare class, then another, and another and another and sure enough it was eventually our turn.
If Covid itself didn’t make that much of an impression, it’s because before and after this were a string of other viruses, or ones that were also Covid but not testing as such. There have been subsequent Covids, maybe. Maybe? There was the time when I had a cold and realized I was, for one evening, unable to smell, as had been the case for about a week and a half during the original. There was the time when I had a cold but it was just a cough, no other symptoms, and it lasted for a couple weeks. What there hasn’t been is a time when no one in the family had so much as a headache or runny nose. There is, not infrequently, a perhaps falsely reassuring negative rapid test lying on the kitchen counter, giving a je ne sais quoi to our decor.
Ethically, if not legally (and the rules themselves keep changing!), I sometimes wonder whether I should ever leave the house. I get into that mindset I would, long before kids, where I’d wonder if it was bad that I was buying out-of-season strawberries. (The in-season ones taste do better but I now cannot imagine summoning the energy to think about this.) At exactly which degree of household snot is one exactly how locked down? What merits not going inside anywhere, or ramping back up the masking?
But if I’m blogging about this, from this blip between communicable infections, it’s because I’m curious exactly how society is going to deal with this. Because plainly people are not all isolating ala April 2020 every time they or a member of their household has sneezed. Yet house-leaving remains fraught. Playdates and birthday parties, outdoors. It’s like things are before-times normal in a restaurant but not on a subway but here yes, there no. Some places require masks some don’t and it changes every day. It’s the chaos and scolding converging, this sense that you are doing it wrong. And I am, without a doubt, doing it wrong.