A SPRING LIKE NO OTHER Julia Hirsch

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 6 th , 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 8 th , 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,

people were buying six or seven or a dozen bottles at a time. I asked one of the salesmen, “Is this holiday time?” “It’s busier than New Year’s Eve,” he said. Again, I wondered whether I was missing something. I wasn’t facing up to the long haul that lay ahead. Perhaps this virus was going to be another one of those historical moments I’d lived through before. Maybe it was going to be like the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the War in Iraq, the bombing of the World Trade Center, one of those events that marks a turning point that changes everything.

By March 11 th , entire shelves of supplies at the supermarket were empty. The wall of nut butters was empty. The chicken was all gone. Canned beans and rice had vanished. The people checking out customers began wearing latex gloves. At the discount store, to which I returned every day to stock up for my daughter, a woman was buying numerous bottles of Vitamin C. “That’ll help,” she said. She pointed to one lone bottle of Zinc. “You should get that,” she urged. “It builds up your immune system.”

On March 13 th , I decided to go to New Paltz and consider staying there for a week or so to see how things developed. I balked at having to change my plans. What of the opera for which I had a ticket? What of the writing group I was meeting at the end of the week? What of my volunteer work with asylum seekers?

The highway is empty

Three days later, these questions seemed irrelevant. The virus was spreading and the directive to “shelter in place” had become urgent. Mid-week I wanted to go back to the city for the day just to “see how things are going.” My daughter insisted I not go. I didn’t.

That was a month ago. I’m learning a new way of life and some new skills—not without some difficulty.

The internet had become more of a lifeline than ever. I spend far too much time at my computer shopping for groceries. A delivery service is available for a small fee (less than I would spend taking a taxi home from the store), but a week to ten days go by before the groceries appear at my door. My daughter fills in the gaps. I send her a shopping list as a Google-doc and she stops by every three or four days, staying six feet away from me as I unload the groceries, wipe them down with a disinfectant wipe, and return her huge IKEA bag. “Shop more strategically,” she urges me. “Buy bigger quantities.” “But I don’t have enough storage room,” I tell her. “Don’t tell me about storage room. I lived on 35-foot sailboat for a year and we never ran out of food.”

On March 19 th , I “met” with my writing group for the first time on Zoom. There are four of us and we’ve been together for five or six years nurturing each other’s creativity. I was dismayed when I looked at my face reflected back to me from my computer screen. It captured me at a most unflattering angle. The next day a friend told me to raise the computer so that the camera would view me from above, not below. That did improve matters.

It is now April 15 th . I go for a walk of 2 to 5 miles every day, trying to vary my course. The roads around here are off the main street that runs through New Paltz and if I meet anyone they stay on the other side of the road, to be sure to maintain the recommended six feet (1.8 meters) of “social distancing.” A few small shops in a little shopping center a mile away urge customers to wear gloves and masks. In one shop, the salesperson is protected by a plastic shield and payment by credit card is made on a small machine he has set up on the other side of the shield. In the shop next door, the owner wears neither a mask nor gloves. I wonder why he is so indifferent to public health.

The center of town is empty, except for the occasional passing car. The students were sent home a month ago. The schools are closed as are the public library, beauty parlors, barbers, and gift stores. I can no longer hear the hum of traffic on the main highway about 2 kilometers from my house. It’s usually loud and clear as New Paltz, with its lovely mountain trails and scenic walks is a beloved destination for weekenders, honeymooners, hikers and rock climbers. But the voice of the “peepers” (little frogs) who live in the marsh across the street is far louder than usual, and so is the call of birds who eagerly flock to my feeder.

Hours go by and I’m not sure how I’ve filled them. I have trouble concentrating, staying at task. Friends report the same difficulty. When “shelter-in-place” first began, I thought it would provide an opportunity to finish writing an essay I’d started a few years back, to label boxes of family photographs, to develop my skills at embroidery. But after half an hour or an hour at a task, I go to the internet and look for messages or read the latest headlines. The phone beckons and I check in with friends. I look out the window and watch a delicate green gauze of new growth appear on the trees.

Flags are now flying at half-mast in New York State Thank you sign as well as in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan and California in honor of the victims of the Virus and particularly the doctors, nurses, emergency ambulance drivers, food delivery personnel, and the diverse workers who are risking their lives to keep ours going. The statistics of illness and death are frightening and at the moment I have no plans to return to the city.

The visual rendering of the “Corona” virus is a circle surrounded by spikes on its rim. This image suggests the jewel-studded headgear of a monarch. This terrible disease is ruling us. It is destroying lives, devastating economies, stopping the free movement of people, attacking the poor and disenfranchised with particular brutality.

Like people all over the world I wonder what the long-range effects of the Virus will be. We can only hope that by August, when OPEN! appears, we will be in a better place, looking back at the pandemic as merely a terrible nightmare.