Here, I went to church. There was maybe 1/2 the normal attendance (which is never big to begin with).
There were a few moments of levity - the biggest one being the usher offering to "anoint" anyone coming in with hand sanitizer from a big pump bottle (he dispensed it into people's hands).
I did the announcements because the person who would ordinarily do them (The elder serving the cup) was late, and so I added in: "If anyone is concerned about grocery shopping because you're in a high-risk group, I will run out to Pruett's or Green Spray and get what you need and bring it to you, just call or text me." And I paused a beat and added, "I love y'all but I'm NOT going to wal-mart for you" which got a laugh (I wanted it to) but of course also wal-mart will do the "bring it out to the curb" service and I may wind up doing that if I get afraid of going to Pruett's.
(And yes. I had some anxiety after getting home from church about "what if someone there had it and didn't know yet" but no one was coughing, no one got very close to me, I did not shake hands with anyone - we all just waved to greet - and I washed my hands and changed out of my clothes upon getting home. And anyway, there have been no actual or presumptive cases in my county or the ones surrounding mine)
I had a couple rocky moments - I almost cried during the Doxology (why? I don't know) and also during the Call To Worship, which had the lines:
Some of us need strength
Because we are facing big challenges
Some of us need hope
Because we feel like giving up
Some of us need love
Because we are feeling alone...
And yeah, I find myself very much in need of reassurance this evening. I am telling myself it may be very, very bad for a couple months (yes, months) but maybe it will gradually get better but it seems like a critical mass of people are NOT taking the calls not to gather in big groups and are doing things like going to bars and that's going to sink us, if transmission takes off like wildfire, and all the rest of us can hope for is that we can hide out in our houses long enough for the disease to burn through the reckless population....but I worry.
However, the minister did also mention, "When you begin to feel comfort in a choice, it means you have made the right choice and God was leading you" and yeah, when I made the decision to cancel my trip I did feel some comfort and now I know it was 100% the right choice.
If I lived within a short (~4 hours or less) drive of my mom, I'd totally have thrown what I needed for a month or more into the car and driven up to hang out with her, but she's a solid 12 hour drive away and that's too far for me to do alone, and I am not sure I would want even to stay in a motel room overnight now.
So we are talking by phone for now. I hope I get to see her again. (Yes. I mean that literally and seriously: I hope both she and I make it through this, and that there will come a time when it's OK to travel by train again, OR I find a friend who wants to go that direction and will share driving duty with me and keep me from nodding off while on the road. But I am also telling myself I may have to accept that she will get this thing and die of it, or I will, or that we will never again be free to travel without fear)
I sewed for a while and I was okay while doing that but now....well, I find these days, late evenings are bad for me. If I'm going to melt down and be sad or scared, it will be after 8 pm. I don't know why.
Anyway. Tomorrow will be more sewing; I may well finish the Tabula Recta top; I put three rows on it today and I am down to either four or five that remain.
My plan next is to use my unicorn fabric and my castle fabric, and do a quilt top whose pattern name is incredibly ironic, and when I pulled the pattern out today I just looked at if for a few moments, and felt deflated.
It's called Homebound
Yeah.
I did do one other thing for myself. Way back in January I speculated about getting a weighted blanket to help me sleep less anxiously. Purlewe came through with the name of a place (Weighting Comforts ) that a friend of hers had used and liked, and so I thought "Well, maybe it's time to buy one."
They were having a St. Patrick's Day Sale - 25% off. So, I am getting my 15-pound grey blanket for a lot less than I intended to pay. (And they get another sale in a time that's melting down small businesses, though I bet a lot of people may be buying weighted blankets right now).
But I do feel a little deflated - tired, and sad, and realizing the full horror of doing this for anywhere from 2-4 (or even more, who knows?) months, mostly stuck at home, mostly hoping and praying that things get better and that the curve will flatten out and that our medical facilities will not get overwhelmed and that doctors and nurses will not sicken, too, under the physical and emotional strain of being called on so hard in this. And more selfishly? That I will still have a job come next year, that this doesn't kill off my university or higher ed in general or my ability to retire some day. And that small businesses DO still exist to be shopped at and enjoyed - I know that since I can't get out for a while, I WILL be doing more mail order, and I will use the "little guys" as much as practicable - so they're still there after all this is over (I hope)
But yes. I find now that it would help to have someone else here, someone to look at me and go "Babe, we're not gonna starve" when I start to anxiety-spiral about "what if I run out of beans" or to tell me "it will be okay eventually, just wait" when I feel like this is the end of everything I knew, and the rest of my life will be spent as a recluse and that even going to get a freaking carton of milk is a risk-calculus I have to do (and so: I probably wind up buying powdered milk online, and drinking crummy gritty powdered milk, and eventually forgetting what real milk tasted like...)
I just...I know I'm going through stages of grief about this, it feels VERY much like losing my father did. And that's an awfully fresh wound still.
I need happiness and comfort and probably what I need to do is either sew on quilt tops while playing non-news programming on the BBC app, or watching my different Miyazaki movies and knitting, or finding all the light and entertaining books I have and reading them NOW.
And yes, I also need to keep up with exercise and eating healthful meals (as much as I can manage with limited grocery store access - I think at most I will go once a week, early in the day, to the Pruett's , for fresh food)
In a way this reminds me a bit of what I've read about people in world war II, the privations, the news of whole industries changing over (car manufacturers in the UK are allegedly retooling to make ventilators, and one of the big French perfume companies is going to switch to making hand sanitizer and I wonder what other things we will see)
I don't know. It still feels so unbelievable and I keep hoping I will wake up and go "oh man, that was a dream?" and turn on the news and hear the old idiocy we used to hear and go "wait so there is no pandemic?" and then rejoice, but I also realize that's not happening.
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