Life in Lockdown

If you had told me back at Christmas that by Easter our churches would be empty and everyone would willingly stay home I would have thought you were crazy. Yet last Sunday we found ourselves sitting in the living room once again watching our service on TV, streamed in via Facebook, and we took Communion with grape juice and crackers we had on hand.

So here we are about a month into lockdown or self-isolation or quarantine or whatever history will choose to call this. I walk on the farm to get some exercise and clear my head when it's not too muddy. It's so strange to look up and not see the contrail of a jet racing high above or catch a glimpse of an airliner coming in to BNA from Chicago or other points in the Mid-West. It's eerily like the days after 9/11 except that I hear the engine of a private plane every now and then.

This is an overstatement, but I've joked saying that I have burned more gas in the mower than in the truck these last few weeks. And then the other week I was putting clean clothes away and noticed I could hardly squeeze them into my closet. That's when it dawned on me that a third of my work clothes that are normally in the laundry cycle are all clean now. Hey, at least I get to teach in shorts every day!

Distance learning is in full swing at our house. We were forced to switch to a different Internet service provider back in August. I griped about it then only because we had to scramble to switch over to a new service that I had no time to research as I would have liked. Some eight months later I'm thankful that played out like it did. Given that the three kids and I have the potential to be on separate Zoom meetings simultaneously I am convinced our old service didn't have the bandwidth or reliability to handle that sort of traffic. This is just one example I could cite where God has handled details months ahead of time that never even occurred to me to pray about.

I would say overall things have gone pretty smoothly. Our school seems to have adapted to this pretty well, but I know students are tired of being stuck at home and want to come to school to see their friends. I am too. As for me, I've struggled with lesson planning. Just about everything I do in my classes is hands-on, requiring tools and equipment that are only available at school, so rewriting my plans to attempt to cover the same or similar concepts has been a huge and challenging undertaking. It has been hard not to get discouraged when I thought I had a pretty good curriculum developed at the beginning of this school year.

I think the hardest thing for me is this. As an adult I have to bring my work home sometimes, but I try very, very hard to keep work at work and personal life away from work. Over the years I have developed the skill of mentally switching work on and off as I walk into the building in the morning and back out to the truck in the afternoon. Now that line that I've worked so hard to maintain is completely gone and I feel like I'm never away from the office, or classroom in my case.

To put my woes into perspective, my former colleagues with Robertson County Schools (total enrollment around 11,500) have been focusing on delivering meals, breakfast and lunch, by school bus to about 4500 economically disadvantaged students. So far they've served about 80,000 meals and counting since all this started.

Vicki and Jenna are still going in to work. Jenna is surprisingly busy at the coffee shop. Vicki is busy as well. She does the majority of her work over the computer or by phone. Occasionally a client will drop by, but those visits have stopped now.

Mom is well. We have not been able to visit her in a month now, but at least she has not been confined to her room all this time. Even though they are practicing social distancing where she lives she is still able to see her neighbors, play games like Bingo, and go out on the porch, weather permitting. She has sounded chipper just about every time we've talked on the phone. I know it will be a happy day for her when she does finally see us walk through her door.

So, we're looking forward to the day that we can regain some normalcy, hopefully that's sooner rather than later. And most of all, I hope the normal we knew before is not forever lost, but I'm afraid the scars from this event will run deeper than the ones from 9/11. It may very well be the pre-coronavirus world I describe to my grandchildren someday is as hard for them to imagine as the tales Aunt Mar used to tell me of growing up a century ago when few had electricity or indoor plumbing.

Joe