By Joyce Woods, May 7, 2020 — The best day of my quarantine was yesterday. I have been in my house almost since March, consistently almost every day, my husband and I. Listening to everything, all of the scientists and the news people and reading about all of the different epidemics and all and having different things that happen in my life, I can remember when polio was out and what was it? MERS, and the measles, and Ebola, and the Tuberculosis vaccine that came out, and SARS and influenza and all those things, but nothing have I ever remembered in my lifetime, and I’m quite sure of all of us, have experienced anything of this magnitude.
I’ve had some very good days and some very, very low. Not myself personally, but my brother-in-law passed away from it on the 19th. He wasn’t sick, he lives in New York, as we all know it’s very, very bad over there. Actually his daughter is a critical care nurse there and she feels very badly because she’s taking care of all these people herself and wasn’t able to help her dad. So, that was very hurtful to our family but we also were proud of all the nurses in our family and we felt good about that. My children have been very nice to us. I have nine of them and different ones, they call us on different days. I have one daughter [who has] been sending us things in the mail and it almost felt a little like Christmas — like every day we don’t know what’s coming. It’s little things like rubber gloves one day, and then she’s sending us some gloves that you can actually have a little spa treatment: you put your hands in after you wash them and you leave them in for ten minutes. We got a case of water, the kind that I probably couldn’t afford to get. So little special things like that was really, really nice I thought, and still going on. Every day is something.
Yesterday I would say was my favorite time of all because my husband and I decided to walk over to our garden. We live in a small apartment but we rent a little garden over at the arboretum in Germantown, so we went over there and started weeding and everything. It was almost like we were in our little world, away from everything, just for about an hour. So I would consider that our best day. And I looked and I dug up some of our soil and I found it still had some carrots so I brought them home yesterday and we had those and I’ll probably have them for today, to mix in with jambalaya. So, another thing we had a wonderful box sent to us from the AARP people. My husband volunteers for them and they sent us this lovely box and it’s so compact and it has such wonderful things in it. That was a nice thing to receive. Our grandchildren they are calling us all the time and checking in on us, so I just feel very special. Not a lot of things, just those little things to me feel special. I guess that’s about it. So my special day was yesterday, going to the garden and feeling the nice air. Just before we left there was a little trickling of rain that came down to close our day out. And my daughter drives from Maryland every week to take us shopping and that’s when she took us to our garden because we don’t have a car now, we sold that. So we’re actually having a good time inside other than the loss of my dear brother-in-law who was a very nice person. I’m glad to hear you all. It really sparked things up a bit, and that’s all I have to say about my best day in quarantine life.
