Incubation

We have been kind of quarantined for over three years now. Ever since Annaka strolled out of Pittsburgh with her brand new liver back in April of 2017, our family has had to take precautions to keep her exposure to germs seriously limited. At first that meant just about what it means now – she’s at home and so are we. We restricted our traveling for essentials and when we came home we washed our hands, closed the curtains, and threw our clothes into the washing machine. 

Over time that protocol relaxed. She could leave the house but we kept some Germ-X in her diaper bag and even used an enclosed stroller for talking walks. If we knew someone ill would be attending a gathering (or might have been ill even in the past few days) we stayed home. At first that hurt some feelings and even caused some pretty intense arguments between the two of us, but over time Annaka’s inner circle ended up on the same page. (Or at least we were all reading the same chapter.)

A year ago she started preschool; a month ago she climbed the Arch.

Ah, the good old days.

Sometimes my wife’s ability to predict the future is annoyingly uncanny. For example, she diagnosed Annaka’s biliary atresia weeks before blood tests confirmed her worst fears at a time in my life when I couldn’t help but think of the A-Team each time she used the term’s initials. I still pity the fool that I once was.

She also predicted that Annaka would need a live liver donation to survive, as opposed to a cadaver, and she also had a weird hunch that Nancy's liver would be the match.

Thus, in mid-January, when she started spending more time on her smartphone researching the spread of COVID-19 and started saying insane-sounding things like, “Two months from now we’ll all be on lockdown,” I didn’t have the luxury of calling her crazy. I just took a deep breath, pretended I didn’t hear her, and squirted another dab of Germ-X into my hands.

And so here we are again. Quarantined.

Here we all are, or, at least those of us lucky enough to be considered nonessential. (And while I have this forum, a sincere thank you to all still working to keep our society afloat. You people are the 101^st Airborne in this biological world war.)

Here we are, biding our time, scrolling through one meme after another. Some of them are pretty crass, but the clever ones help us smile and even keep things in perspective. My favorite so far has a picture of a perturbed-looking Anne Frank, seemingly scolding us from beyond the grave for whining about being quarantined in a house with the Internet, central heating and microwave ovens.

Things could be worse, she seems to be saying. Things were worse, and, unfortunately, things will likely get worse, at least in the short term.

But we will get through this. It won’t be easy. People we know will get sick; some of them will die, and perhaps for as dumb a reason as someone felt the “need” to socialize.

Our economy will struggle. It will be years until things are back to “normal,” as if that is even a word worth keeping in a language that also contains terms like  “unbiased opinion” or “functioning Congress.”

But we will get through this, and speaking of words, a former Unit 40 teacher and Facebook friend posted some helpful words a couple days ago, about the trials and tribulations of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband Almanzo. He pointed out that during the Wilder’s early years of marriage a hailstorm ruined their first wheat crop, a drought wrecked their second, and then the barn holding what little grain they had burned down. (And in a time before crop insurance and global food distribution, such events often meant starvation or financial ruin.)

They both suffered diphtheria and became deathly ill. After recovering, Almanzo suffered a stroke and would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, which is a serious liability for a farmer even today, but excruciating before the advent of mechanized labor.

Their infant son died two weeks after childbirth, and soon afterwards their daughter Rose accidently burnt down their house.

Pretty rough stuff.

She survived, though. She survived and became one of the most important American authors of the 19^th century.

Like Anne Frank’s story, her story can help keep things in perspective.

In closing and concerning perspective, last year in second grade, my son received the privilege of watching chicks hatch. His class incubated eggs and were thrilled when the baby birds found their way into the open, and so I used that term—incubation—to try to explain to him what our lives would look like in the coming weeks.

We were being incubated, I said, not quarantined. We were trying to keep Annaka safe, trying to keep us all safe. The day would come when we “crack” out of the house and return to the park, play baseball with our friends, swim again in pools. For right now, though, we would need to stay home and grow.

He seemed all right with that idea. After all, he’s been reminding us to wash our hands for over three years.