The New Normal

The terrible news continues to pour in every day, making my own recent posts, "Tales of the Coronavirus," seem like minor inconveniences.  How quickly we have all come to adapt to the "new normal!"  Latex gloves worn by grocery store and post office workers, closed restaurants and hotels, shuttered movie theater, and empty shops all over Highlands.  The new normal:  when I return from the post office with magazines and mail, I give everything a once-over with a Clorox wipe, trusting that thoroughly sanitizing everything, together with "social distancing," will keep us protected. 

I am glad that we do not live in a large city, where we might have to depend upon things like public transportation and elevators in office buildings.  We can walk down Main Street, careful to maintain a safe distance from other pedestrians, and not feel in any danger.  We drove up to Highlands yesterday and ran with some of our friends, avoiding handshakes and hugs.  "I saw you running an hour late last Saturday," I scolded Vicki.  "So you either forgot to turn your clock ahead or you were practicing extreme social distancing."  But what a ghost town Highlands was, on a Saturday morning three weeks before Easter, when there would normally be plenty of traffic and the parking places would be rapidly filling up.  The new normal.

Martha and I both completed six miles, and I ended up running/walking most of my miles with Fred and Karen; we took a lot of walking breaks.  Fred does not normally take walking breaks, but I think he just wanted to talk.  The Methodist Church is a big part of his life and it has been closed down for a week, with virtual services taking place on-line.  When we finished running, some of us just stood around and visited just a little longer, satisfying that need for human contact.  Perhaps that will be the most difficult safety measure for some people:  to stay home, to avoid social contact, that powerful glue that binds us all together.

The pollen count was in the medium-high range yesterday, and we could both feel it in our lungs, especially after an afternoon spent working out in the yard in warm sunshine.  The yellow, sticky stuff is coming down hard, visibly coating the glass top of the outdoor table on our deck from one day to the next.  But it felt good to be outdoors, spreading pine straw and hauling compost from the compost bins to the garden with the wheelbarrow.  Our neighbor Daniel was out working, too, just a couple of hundred yards from my compost bins.  And later in the day he posted this picture on Facebook of a copperhead he killed with a shovel, lurking under an old tire.  It's that time of year when one has to be wary when working outdoors, socially distancing one's self from venomous snakes.

So as the new normal continues, we are doing the best we can against the perils all around us, armed with hand-sanitizer in one hand and shovel in the other.