Love in the Time of Corona

by Alice Henry Whitmore

A couple of nights ago, my husband, Wayne, poked his head into the kitchen and asked, “What are we doing for dinner tonight?” Well. Ordinarily I wouldn’t find this hilarious. But ordinarily we are not cooped up together 24/7 in state-suggested social isolation.

Wayne asking what we were “doing” for dinner reminded me of my old days in the Ad Biz when we Ogilvyites would fly Midwest Express out to Appleton, Wisconsin, to call on our client Kimberly-Clark. Bless their hearts, the stewardesses (yup, those were the days when they were called “stewardesses”) would put a cloth napkin on your tray table and ask sweetly, “Will you be joining us for dinner tonight?” I always wanted to reply, “Oh, I don’t know. I was thinking of going out.”

The “what are we doing for dinner” night just might have been the night of our wedding anniversary. I’m not sure, since it’s pretty hard to tell, most nights being pretty much the same. But, yes, a couple of weeks ago we celebrated our wedding anniversary -- all alone in our kitchen. We did pop a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, which added a festive touch to whatever the heck it was that I cooked.

So far, in our 36 years together, Wayne and I have weathered the rise and fall of careers, the birth and raising up of our daughter, and, in recent years, birding trips to exotic lands. Was it only last month that our biggest worry was how to deal with the leeches in Borneo? Gosh, I miss those leeches.

Suffice it to say that little has prepared us for Corona Life. The masks, the gloves, the compulsive sanitizing of surfaces. And on top of all that, more “togetherness” than we were led to expect. Where in the wedding vows does it say “love, honor, and occupy the same space every hour of every day?” Luckily, Wayne has his domain—outdoors, where he is now happily cleaning the gutters, and I have mine—pretty much the whole inside of the house.

But things do get a little tense now and then. “Are you going to watch that? Without earphones?” “What do you mean, you want to take a bath? I want to take a shower!” And my favorite: “Are you going to eat that? We just had toasted cheese sandwiches!”

Well. This too shall pass. And I am confident we will survive self-isolation. As long as we continue to practice our in-home social distancing, that is.

In the meantime, I think it’s time to crack open another bottle of champagne. Wayne just sat down at the piano. Again.

Alice Henry Whitmore is a writer and a keen observer of human nature, skills she honed while working on Madison Avenue for many years. Now that she is retired from the advertising business, she focuses her attention on her weekly humor blog. Her pieces comment on situations and experiences that Lustre readers share.