In February 2020, news out of China about a novel coronavirus was making me anxious. Generally, I don’t get worked up about diseases. SARS and Monkey Pox worried me very little, but this felt different. I stocked up on shelf-stable foods and bought extra butter for the freezer. Then COVID hit New York in March followed quickly by the first Ohio cases and I almost told the husband he couldn’t go to a Blue Oyster Cult concert that he and a few friends were invited to by a member of the band (don’t get too excited, how they were invited was the nerdiest of reasons–Richie Castellano, a current band member, plays a game called Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator. Darrin and his friends, who write game/adventure scripts for the computer game, had taught Richie how to write his own scripts).

March 12th, 2020 school closed for “three weeks” (which turned out to be longer). I thought, aside from the kid being home, not much would change for us. I had been working exclusively at home for years. My husband had been working at home four days a week for nearly as long. And, truthfully, not much did change. The husband worked from home. The kid worked on bridging assignments I gave him. I wrote.. well no, I didn’t. I had friends who were getting epic amounts of writing done and I was getting almost nothing on the page. Except for, what I remembered as, a long series of posts making fun of the easy time I was having in the pandemic.

I just looked up that “long series” and found it was three Facebook posts spanning just under a month. Three of my most popular posts, but only three. Memory has a funny way of making small things big and big things small. I barely remember the endless hours of Animal Crossing I played while listening to NPR for the latest news. I vividly remember every fight my husband and I had over the two years before the vaccine. I’m still anxious about each time I found the shelves bare in the grocery store (I still keep a LOT of toilet paper and ramen noodles in the house). I knew I wasn’t finishing short stories or working on my novels, but part of my brain told me it was ok because I wrote funny posts and a few really well-thought-out blog posts (I’ve done three blog posts in three years and one of those was a copy and paste of something the husband wrote). For the most part, though, each day has burled into another, even now that we are no longer locked down.

So, here it is, collected for you, my pandemic opus:

March 16th, 2020

My Dearest Loraine,

We endure during this time of plague. Each letter you write raises our spirits. We endeavor to keep each other entertained, often reading your missives aloud to each other as there are no live sports on television to raise our spirits. Even late-night television has abandoned us.

The kind and wonderful Mrs. Miles, Mr. Miles, and their charming daughter brought supplies of Girl Scout Cookies these 5 days past, saving us from sugar withdrawal as our bad-food supplies were running low.

Oh, Loraine, I do not know how to tell you this, but that cookie supply is nearly gone. By the end of today we will be down to one box. Pray for us, my dearest.

Yours, forever,

N. Bright

March 27th, 2020

My Dearest Loraine,

‪The last of our stored chicken broth has been used. We are reduced to using Better Than Bullion and… Dare I write this? Bullion, cubed and granulated. I’m sorry to admit to having fallen so low.‬

‪Our cookie supplies were used up this past Monday but a stray box of brownie mix held us over a day or two beyond. Flour, butter and sugar stores are solid thanks to my careful planning in February. We will be reduced to basic shortbread cookies but we shall not suffer too greatly. I can only pray our forced confinement does not outlast the bread flour as I just began a jar of sourdough starter.‬

‪Your Zooms have been a great comfort to us. We wait with anticipation for your Hangout and Skype requests. ‬

‪I console myself in knowing this plague cannot last forever but until we are free to embrace again, there are cat and dog pictures on the internet to bring me joy.‬

‪Stay safe, my love. ‬

‪N. Bright‬

April 6th, 2020

Dearest Loraine,

I trust this letter finds you safe with your hands well cleansed but yet unchapped from the harsh soaps we must depend on.

The bread flour, my darling, has been running low. I have searched the mercantile sites of well-to-do stores and the lowly mass market stores and found the shelves bare. I even was lowered to beseeching Amazon with no flour to show for the degradation. The new bread makers, who have hoarded our nation’s supplies, will be the end of us. I believe I have two or three loaves left in my stores before I shall be forced to use all-purpose flour. I do not look forward to the horrors of flatter, denser loaves.

Recently I found myself in low spirits, perhaps because of the cookie shortage. The last bouquet of flowers had long since died and we were unable to visit with the Trader named Joe to buy more (assuming he had any, there is so much scarcity in this time of turmoil). In a moment of despair, I stepped out my door, ready to throw myself into the hands of our Lord, when the most amazing miracle occurred. There, exploding from the ground, in long beds around my house were flowers!

I admit to greedily picking them. In this time of uncertainty and deprivation, I find that the good Lord has provided me with an endless supply of flowers to brighten my rooms. I hope you, also, have found some hope in your days.

Your darling friend,

N.Bright

My husband and I were discussing the summer schedule and our son’s swim team practice. “The team is on break, because the coaches are doing the lifeguard training program,” I said.

“I would like him to do that. I think lifeguarding would be good for Grant,” Darrin said.

“He can’t.” I said, thinking of how our son can’t sit still and his pacing around and talking to himself as he plays out a story in his head. The current state of driving lessons, he has all the technical skills of driving and much of the muscle memory, but he needs someone in the car to periodically remind him to pay attention. Just this morning the brake lights came on in the car in front of us. My son made no move to slow down. I said “Brake.” Still no slowing. I sharply said, “Brake!” I swear I could almost hear the audible sound of his attention snapping back to the present, real world, “Oh, right. Sorry.” And only then did he slow down.

“He can do anything he sets his mind to,” my husband replied.

I get what he means. Our kid has accomplished many things that were in question when he got his Autism diagnosis at age 4. He speaks perfectly fine (though to the ear of someone who knows folks on the spectrum there are aspects to his speech that give away his not-so-secret identity). He can ride a bike, drive (sort of), play viola and clarinet, and has taught himself to play the piano. He is an honors student, taking honors classes, with a minimal amount of accommodation. He went on the seventh grade Washington D.C. trip with the other kids, never went missing, never missed a bus, and never lost his camera or cell phone. He’s often more capable than I expect.

While our son is neurodivergent, he is in the shallow, easier end of a large, scary wave pool. It’s a pool we are presently in no risk of drowning in. Our footing is firmly on the bottom. We are only periodically disbalanced by unexpected waves. But we spent his early years so deep in that pool that we could only gasp for air as we bobbed up and down. The cost of medications, speech therapists, occupational therapists, pediatric neurologists, daycare, early intervention preschool (which was only a few hours a week), social skills play groups, play therapy, music therapy, and every activity we put him in to help (from Boy Scouts to Therapeutic Horseback riding), put us at risk of drowning. We survived that by managing expectations and picking our battles.

My husband saying “he can do anything” made me angry, which is strange. If a teacher had told me he “can’t do” something, I would push back. So why was my husband’s insistence that being a lifeguard was a possibility for our son making me annoyed? Was it just that I was caught out being ableist, assuming he was unable to do a task only because he is different from other people?

I’m dyslexic. It’s a funny thing for a writer to be, I know. Before the advent of spell checking software and word processors, I’m fairly certain I would have never been able to be a writer. When I was young, audio books were abridged monstrosities, but when I was in high school unabridged books on tape started to become more widely available. I first met the clever Miss Jane Austen in audio format and a wide range of authors and genres were thrown open to me as audio books became more available over the decades. Many of the barriers to being a writer were lowered for me. However, I can’t spell. Spell check software gets me about fifty percent of the way. Text-to-speech software helps me find that I’ve selected the wrong correct spelling for a word and changed the meaning of a sentence. (I once wrote “Thank you for your constipation, a reprehensive will be in contact shortly.”) What I cannot do, no matter how hard I study, no matter how hard I try, is win a spelling bee. I would most likely fail on the first word. A neurotypical eight grader is going to beat my ass every time. I’m fairly certain a sixth grader would beat me. Ok, maybe a fourth grader. Seriously, words that I can rarely spell correctly include calendar, neurological, and exercise. Exercise is an example of one that I spell so atypically that the computer spell checker throws up its hands and stomps off muttering under its breath.  

Being neurodivergent is a pain in two temperatures: too cold, people not believing you can do things, and too hot, people demanding that your disability can be overcome if you just try harder. I’ve had teachers who punished the entire class for my failure to get through a reading assignment fast enough. I carry a lot of scars from both and I’m ever questioning if I’m expecting too little or too much of my son.

I took the discussion of lifeguarding, and if the word “can’t” is ok or not, to the person in the best position to judge. I asked my son. My husband’s “rule” of parenting is to never ask his son to get off the computer before asking him what he’s working on or playing. My rule is to have no discussions about my son, without my son. I’m lucky in that sense. He doesn’t take these discussions emotionally. He’s a happy kid and happy to talk frankly (sometimes painfully frankly). I outlined the discussion his father and I had had and asked, “Should you be a lifeguard?”

His answer was a clear no.

We circled back around to what was really bothering me, “Was I wrong to use the word can’t?”

He thought for a moment and then said, “I would rather you say, ‘Can’t yet.’” One little word: yet. It’s a lovely word, full of hope while still being honest about current realities. Right now my son is too much in his own head to be responsible for the lives of others. A year from now might be different. The solution for later might be working for it. It might be just maturing more. It might be some magic new treatment that gives my son a doorway into a more typical experience, if he wants it. Perhaps a technology will come along that changes the requirement for focus or helps him keep his focus on the people frolicking in the water. There is so much power in the word “yet.”

 When I was young I couldn’t be a writer yet. That changed. I’m dyslexic and I can’t win a spelling bee… yet.