Thoughts from a Pandemic

“Tell me about quarantine and I will tell you mine.”

I have been quarantined before. That first time a big red sign appeared on our front door which read QUARATINE in large black letters and was signed by the Board of Health. It said in effect, no one can enter here, and no one can leave. Our whole family was in lock down though not by that name. I had come home from first grade, age 5 (because my birthday was late in the year ) with a sore throat and a fever. My mother called the doctor (in 1936 doctors came to your house, as a matter of course).

The doctor pronounced my sore throat,  “Scarlet Fever,” a potential killer for the old and the young, and an illness which often led to other infections in the ears, eyes, and respiratory system. Groceries were delivered just off the road at the entrance to a long walk which led up to our front door. I was allowed another big red sign to put above my bed. “Board” and “health” were among the first words I leaned to read that winter.

I have many happy memories from our quarantine days. We had two houses. The winter house was in West Newton near Boston and my father’s office. The summer house was on the beach in Winthrop, just across the harbor from Boston. When money got tight, we rented the house in West Newton and spent the winter in Winthrop, surrounded by empty summer cottages. I remember the changing face of the ocean; it was behind a short sea wall just in front of the house. In winter when the sun shone the ocean was a beaming everchanging face of tricks and turns, placid or light rippled until riled up,  when it became a flashing burst of white and an angry dark green , a raging , exciting display of spray and crashing surf which we could clearly hear inside..

Although I brought the scarlet fever home, I was never very ill, and when my father got it, he was not very ill either, but Honey, a.k.a Fran, age three, developed an ear infection and lost the hearing in one ear. My mother never got sick, perhaps she couldn’t, she was too busy cooking and delivering food to all of us, running back and forth with pills, and hot soups and soothing washcloths, and answering demands for this and that. She must have been awash with conflicting emotions, anxiety, concern, compassion, irritation and, mostly, exhaustion.

 The house was heated by a coal furnace with registers between the first and second floor to allow the heat to rise. I remember leaning out of my bed to see the books Honey held in her lap below. Could I read? Maybe I was “reading” the pictures or telling the stories learned by heart. What a nice phrase that is “learned by heart”– it honors the affection I have for favorite books and for what wonderful new worlds, insights and escapes books have given me over the years. Even at five, and then six, books make many things bearable or welcomed.

At Christmas time I can remember chanting little ditties with my mother: “Mothers and doctors and Santa Claus can’t get Scarlet Fever.” Santa Claus did come, ( I must have been worried) and brought Jane, a doll I had been longing for. Jane comes into the story again in March ( We were in quarantine for a long time!) when the red sign came off the door, my father went back to work and my mother was left to the task of sterilizing everything we had used: clothes, bedding, curtains, anything boilable, including Jane. I remember coming  into the kitchen as she was taking a sodden and dripping Jane out of a big pot of boiling water. Piled up beside her on the kitchen counter was a pile of sheets, towels and pillowcases about to go into the pot. Jane was a little stained and floppy from boiling but still beloved. Tears were streaming down my mother’s checks and dripping from her nose.  I thought she must be crying for Jane, but now, having been a mother and head of a household myself, I think it is only amazing that she wasn’t crying all the time.

Five years later, when I was ten,  my  sixty-three-year-old grandfather died from Scarlet Fever. Twenty-five years after that I took my five-year-old son to the doctor, complaining  of a sore throat and a fever.  The pediatrician said, in an offhand way, “It looks like Scarlet Fever, what we call strep throat now. I can give him a shot of penicillin and a few pills to follow up. He’ll be fine in a few days.”

I realized then, that human will, and human intelligence have the power to change the trajectory of history – and may do so again. But human will and human intelligence also have the power to kill, disable and destroy in the never-ending conflict  between human compassion and human greed. Every day I hear or read about some act of unbidden kindness in my community and beyond: homemade masks arriving at the hospital  by the hundreds every day; neighbors shopping for neighbors, bell ringing parties; exhausted doctors holed up in hotels to save their families from exposure. These little acts of kindness and solidarity are matched by the ugly accounts of people and corporations making money from the pandemic, siphoning relief funds for their own use; deliberately altering the facts for their own benefit:  appalling examples of how lacking we can be compassion and empathy. 

The most striking difference between my two quarantines is, of course , the way in which the new electronic devices make cross communication so much easier. In our house in Winthrop we had a party line, which you couldn’t use  when someone else was using it, (but you could listen in on their conversations!) a dial-up telephone and the radio.  I assume my father spoke with clients on the phone (working at home) and they spoke with his parents or occasionally friends but probably not often, as phone calls were expensive and it was sometimes hard to get through with a party line. And there was an active – and appreciated – postal service.  But groceries delivered, yes, solitary walks, yes, and reading, oh yes! And it wasn’t a pandemic. It was dangerous for us, in our small cozy world, and maybe a few other people, but not a pandemic, not even an epidemic. With the right medical knowledge scarlet fever was tamed, as was smallpox  and a great many other communicable diseases. I am assuming this virus will also be tamed. But at what cost and how soon?  

With normalcy perhaps we will have wakened again to the beauty of the natural world and the importance of understanding and collaboration with our global neighbors.  “Hope springs eternal…”. Whatever else, it is an interesting and rapidly changing world.

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