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A SPRING LIKE NO OTHER Julia Hirsch

Professor Emerita Brooklyn College (City University of New York)

At first it seemed just a strange bit of news, a curiosity: a doctor in Wuhan, China had discovered a new virus. I didn’t pay much attention. What was topmost on my mind was the prospective presidential election, the debates, the subtext of the enterprise. But then insidiously that news item grew in significance. The Chinese doctor was alarmed. But it was December, holiday time, the end of the year. Time to think of family gatherings, of the new year and what one hoped for it. In February, the doctor died of the virus he had tried to warn people about. The virus was making its appearance in Italy, in Spain, on a cruise ship. “Corona” was swelling into a tidal wave of disease and death spreading to every shore. This past year has had its horrors, to name but a few: the hurricanes devastating parts of the southern United States, fires in California and Australia where they decimated homes and wildlife. But this was more elusive, more ominous, with no end in sight. By the end of the month I began to think that I should pay some serious attention to the virus, not just dismiss it as another potential inconvenience akin to a subway strike or a major snowstorm. In order to force myself to pay attention and not hide behind a cloak of denial I decided to note each day something that signaled the growing severity of the virus. By March 6th, the supermarket shelves were emptying out of Purex, a popular hand disinfectant which soon became entirely unavailable. Paper towel, tissues and most dramatically of all, toilet paper disappeared both from supermarkets and from pharmacies. A small discount store near me which usually has no more than two or three customers at a time was suddenly crammed with anxious shoppers whose numbers overflowed into the street. On March 8th, they were also out of Purex and placed large plastic bins stacked with disinfectant “wipes,” near the front of their store with a sign indicating only one to a customer. My younger daughter (the one whose sailing adventures I wrote about last year and who is now back home in New Paltz, a small college town 80 miles north of New York City) called me in alarm to tell me she could no longer find the products that my discount store seemed to have in quantity. I promised to shop for her. The lines at the supermarket were getting longer than on the day before Thanksgiving ( the most widely celebrated holiday in the American calendar), or Christmas and New Year’s Eve, snaking back and forth from the front to the back of the store like the lines at Disneyworld. As I waited in line for up to an hour, I peeked into other people’s shopping carts to see what they were buying. Everyone had some notion of the product they had to have: ice cream, spaghetti, tomato sauce, salami, cheese, eggs, milk, bread, chicken—and the inestimable toilet paper which was gone by the middle of the month. My own basket was filled with dried beans which I use for soup—a staple in my diet—apples, lettuce and avocados. As I looked around, I worried whether I’d made the right choices. At the wine store, where I picked up a bottle of a favorite chardonnay,

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