I took yoga classes on Zoom, played scrabble with my granddaughter on something called WordFeud, and learned to play bridge online with robots. All weird substitutes for live human interaction, but something.
I took a long beach walk at low tide on the morning we decided to leave our rented Florida condo and fly home to Canada. My husband and I were halfway through a six-week stay and loving it – the balmy weather, the surf rolling onto the beach just steps away, the shorebirds skittering in and out of the waves.
There in the southern light, we were pretty much in the dark about the coronavirus pandemic. News was reaching us slowly, mainly through our adult children urging us to get home. We are, as they pointed out, in the at-risk demographic. But, in those moments, which now seem like a century ago, life seemed blissful on the Gulf shore of Florida … the beaches lively, restaurants in full swing, and that nation’s leader, who normally thrives on creating anxiety, was assuring people that all was well.
From the moment we decided to leave, the situation morphed quickly from blissful to worrisome to truly scary. Disney World was shuttered, yellow police tape cordoned off the public beaches, shoppers at Publix began filling their carts with toilet paper. At the same time, other Canadians were packing their cars to head north. News reached us from the road of closed restaurants and barricaded public washrooms. Then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadians to get home and WestJet was about to suspend all flights in and out of the U.S. We booked seats on the last flight out of Tampa on March 22nd.
The plane was, surprisingly, little more than half full. We were asked at boarding if we were feeling sick and then handed wipes to clean off the trays and armrests. I wore latex gloves, a few people had masks, but nothing else was out of the ordinary. In Toronto, the airport was frantic, buzzing with harried, masked passengers coming off planes from everywhere in the world.
Our daughter and her husband drove two cars down from Collingwood to pick us up. This was our introduction to social distancing. Instead of hugging them, we just waved at them through the window of their car and then got into ours to drive home. As we headed north on that cool grey afternoon, the bleak landscape offered such a contrast to what we had just left. We arrived in the ghostly calm of downtown Collingwood just as the light was fading, the streets empty save for a lone dog walker. But we felt relief; we were home.
Our two-week isolation period was greatly aided by having kids and grandkids living nearby and able to drop supplies on our front porch. They would ring the doorbell, run away and then give us a distant wave when we came to the door. We so wanted to hug them instead. It was an eerie foretelling of becoming dependent on others. We especially hated to ask them to go to the liquor store when we all too frequently ran out of wine.
We were forced to learn new forms of communication, another source of anxiety for our technologically challenged demographic. We had disjointed Zoom meetings and watched live-streamed lectures on the iPad. I took yoga classes on Zoom, played scrabble with my granddaughter on something called WordFeud, and learned to play bridge online with robots. All weird substitutes for live human interaction, but something.
As I write, the most important element is that our friends and family are all well, and so far, appear to be sane. I have learned to count blessings, gain comfort in small gestures and good books, and appreciate our good fortune. I am still able to take longs walks in the woods and visit neighbours on front lawns while keeping our distance.
Other examples of neighbourly goodness help lift my spirits. At 7:30 every evening, a piper plays on the driveway of her nearby home in honour of the front line workers who are keeping us all safe. One warm April night I listened from our back deck as she played the World War I marching song, “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile …”
But I was crying. ❧
