DAY 11

We went out for a walk after breakfast. The streets were eerily quiet, like on an early Sunday morning. We went several blocks and ended up near a park. Miss Nine wanted to play at the park, but I was reluctant to let her play on the equipment. This is the worst part of all of this for me. I have to try and be reasonably calm and collected for her, while navigating these possibly irrational fears. When a threat is literally invisible I feel like I have to suspect that every surface might be infected. My rational self tells me that there are only a handful of cases in our county. My irrational self says that maybe the child of one of those cases just left this playground. I guess next time I will take sanitizing wipes to deal with the handrails. I am not normally a paranoid person, so I hate to admit that I am thinking like this.

Next we decided to write letters to people that we can't visit. Miss Nine wrote to two neighbor kids who moved to Georgia a few months ago. We have missed them, and I know that they miss our neighborhood. I wrote to my friend Nancy who is home with grandchildren just like I am. Hers are really little and I imagine that she is having a hard time keeping them busy. I wrote to two more friends who are much older than I am. I worry about their health and how they are navigating this crisis. When I was young and lived in another state for a few years with no telephone I wrote letters quite often. I wrote to my family and friends once a week and looked forward to finding a letter from one of them in my mailbox. I saved every one of those letters and still have them in a box in my basement. Letter writing has become sort of a lost art. We dash off quick emails and hit send. I don't imagine anyone prints their emails and saves them, tied with a different color ribbon for each friend or family member. Sad.

My sister in law has been giving us Yum boxes. She gets one in the mail every month. They are filled with candy and other snacks from a different country each month. The choices are sometimes really tasty, other times not so much. She brought one over the other day from Brazil. Miss Nine and I opened it up and tried a few things. The boxes also contain a booklet with information about the country of the month. We learned some interesting things about Brazil. Did you know that Brazil is named after a tree? Or that in the city of Laguna dolphins help fishermen catch fish? There was a quiz about different aspects of life in Brazil. We answered about half of them correctly. Lucky guesses for the most part.

I received an email from Miss Nines teacher with more resources and encouragement. She is setting up something online (Zoom) where she can connect with the kids. I haven't checked it out yet but it sounds kind of like Facetime.

We went for another walk late in the afternoon. This time we took a fanny grabber (that's what my dad called it) and some plastic bags. We picked up trash around the neighborhood and came home with a bagful. We saw a neighbor who was cleaning out his garage and putting stuff by the road. Some good stuff! Coincidentally this was the father of the two kids that Miss Nine wrote to this morning. They are getting ready to close on the sale of their house here in Michigan and he came up to finish cleaning it out. We had a nice chat, from a safe distance, and then I went home and got my car so I could load up some of the good stuff he was getting rid of. Now ask me, did I worry about what germs might be on that stuff? A little, though I did put it all in the basement and wash my hands thoroughly when I was done.