Living on Covid Time

For nineteen years, Story Circle Network, an international online organization that encourages women to write about their experiences, has published an anthology, Real Women Write, choosing a different theme each year. For the 2020 anthology, the choice of theme was clear; the book is subtitled Living on Covid Time. It contains 80 pieces of poetry and prose, written by 52 women. I got my copy in the mail yesterday.

In her foreword, Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press, suggests that for writers the time of isolation imposed by the virus may be a rich and focused period or one so filled with anxiety that writing proves impossible. Whereas authors usually write in retrospect, this past year has required many of us to write as we live through a worldwide, terrifying experience with no sure idea of the final outcome. Writers are capturing the present moment, recording history. As an aside, let me add that for novelists, this has meant a choice: do you allude to the pandemic in a novel or assume people are too tired of hearing about it and set the action just pre-pandemic (I chose the latter for my current work-in-progress). For memoirists and many nonfiction writers, there is no choice: you come to grips with the disease.

The stories and poetry in this collection “showcase a range of reaction,” including “grappling with illness, fear and death, with heartbreak and isolation, with the coexistence of ugliness and beauty.” Reading, Warner points out, is one way we listen, and writing is one way we start a conversation with vulnerability. She believes, and I do too, that we have an opportunity to come out of this more courageous, more honest, more productive.

In the final brief essay in the book, Susan Wittig Albert uses a hardy antique rose to make just that point. The leaves of the rose, on her side deck, turned brown, something that had never happened in 25 years. She realized she had taken it for granted and neglected it during a blistering hot and dry summer. But then came Hurricane Beta, with cooler temperatures, even if only a smidgen of rain for the Hill Country. Susan saw that as a lesson from nature, teaching us that the world is resilient but also vulnerable. She concludes that we will go forward. The world will never go back to what it was before the Pandemic, but we can move it forward with hard work and deep breaths, taking more responsibility, paying more attention.

Reading these selections is like listening to a chorus: Lynn Goodwin describes a physically painful episode during which she is convinced she has the virus (it was not); Jeanne Guy offers a prayer to be free of fear and not to have to go to the grocery store—apples and oranges, you think? Not on Covid time. Linda Hoye uses a trip to the grocery store to illustrate just how different life has become in lockdown—and how small things can grate on our nerves. Linda Wisniewski describes sewing masks while watching, for 111 consecutive days, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings and the reassurance she found in his constancy.

Yes, I have a short piece in the collection, a piece that made me face honestly some of my lifelong anxiety. It’s called “The Temptation of Quarantine.” At different times in my adult life, but more as I aged, some ordinary activities raised my anxiety to an almost paralytic level. Things other women did without thinking could cause me great agony. Suddenly one day, in quarantine, I realized that I was perfectly content. I didn’t have to step down that curb and fear losing my balance, drive on the highway, take self-service elevators, or a thousand other little things. I could stay home to write, read, and cook. While others gnashed their teeth over boredom and freedom and the like, I was a happy camper, more relaxed than ever.

The other day my oldest daughter said when I have had both shots, she wants to come to Fort Worth so that she, Jordan, and I can go to Neiman Marcus for lunch. I hesitated—I haven’t been to a restaurant since March 12 last year, and now, vaccinated or not, I’m not sure I want to go. But I will. As the saying goes, I’ll put on my big girl panties and go with my daughters—and enjoy it. But getting back into life beyond my cottage and yard is going to take some doing.

Real Women Write is a good book. You’ll see yourself, and you may come to understand others. It’s available through Amazon.