Coronavirus...life in the slow lane

My braces

The longer I am confined the slower my life becomes.

When the most exciting in home activity is reaching the two week mark on my first set of Invisalign braces and changing to the second set I know life is not what it used to be.  Gee, only 15 more changes and I'll have straight teeth.  That's eight months. What a miracle?!?When the highlight of the week is a masked excursion to the grocery store I know life is not what it used to be.  I ordered  a toaster air fryer and a new outdoor lamp for the balcony, neither of which I really needed, just for the thrill to hear a knock at the front door signally contact-less delivery was made.  Where is the recreational shopping where I can actually walk through a store and not surf the internet without moving a leg muscle?  Will I ever get to try on shoes again?  What about a dress?  A shirt?  Or will life become contact-less is all aspects?  What happened to texture?  To the distinguishing interplay of woven threads, the tactile characteristics of silk, wool and cotton, the feel of those fabrics bring back memories of past pleasures?

My husband and I had our first coronavirus scrimmage Saturday night.  What was it about?  Does it matter? Ah, I remember. The subject was pound cake.  He kept telling me what should be the recipe and I kept telling him that just because he can cook doesn't give him the authority to tell me how to bake.  It was all so stupid as neither of us can bake our way out of a paper bag. In the end, I didn't leave and he didn't leave me. Where would either of us go?  Down the hall to the trash room?  But, whole encounter proved a point - living together 24 x 7 doesn't bring two people closer together.  Sometimes it just pushes us to our own corners in an already tiny world.  Not good, but not the end of the world by any means for in the end I did bake the pound cake Sunday morning, and, true to form, we laughed, agreeing it was awful.

On the brighter side of confinement, the speed at which I am rewriting the first draft of my novel into a second draft impresses even me.  Perhaps I'll actually get it done and published before the end of the summer. In the meantime, it time to wash the reusable masks on more time.