Covid Thanksgiving

Where to begin? I suppose with Covid. It finally found us, walked right in through our front door and spent the night, several nights in fact, before we understood we'd all been exposed.

In a bold return to our pre-Covid custom, my cousin from Orlando, along with her husband and their two daughters (one of whom now lives in Brooklyn and used to live with us) all arrived to be with us for the Thanksgiving holiday. My cousin from Trinidad was also here, as were my niece who is at college in St. Paul, Minnesota, and her brother who just started college in Ithaca, New York. It was our nephew's first Thanksgiving with us, as he and his sister live in Jamaica. He was excited to be here, having heard all about the weekend long gathering for years. Thanksgiving day this year also happened to be his nineteenth birthday, giving us an extra reason to celebrate. Only his older sister, who lives in Dallas with her husband, was missing from the usual band of revelers, and thank God, because here's some exciting news, she's expecting, and definitely didn't need to be in a house where Covid would soon be circulating. 

All started out as festive as if the pandemic had never happened, with eleven people staying overnight so as to wake up together in our home on Thanksgiving morning. A handful more joined us in the afternoon for the feast itself. We hosted a smaller number of guests than in years past, fifteen as opposed to the usual twenty or twenty-five, and this was perhaps our only nod to the times. Wednesday night was an uproariously good time, with my daughter and her love—her fiance—making tequila and apple cider mules for everyone, and my young nephew enjoying finally being a part of the riotous labrish. Labrish is a Jamaican word that refers to particularly delicious communal storytelling, often verging on scandalous gossip, through not mean spirited, it's joyous and full of laughter and interweaving voices, everyone bonding happily.

But the next morning, one niece wasn't feeling so well, and stayed in bed as the cooking and annual dog show viewing and World Cup soccer watching happened out front. She had come to New York from Orlando a few days early to spend the week with her sister in Brooklyn before coming over to our house on Wednesday eve. They'd had a wonderfully social time with my Brooklyn niece's friends, including the group's usual drag bingo bar date on Monday nights. Turns out she and her sister both picked up Covid that night, though only the out of town sister was feeling the effects. She stayed somewhat distanced from most of our guests during Thanksgiving, perhaps she already suspected she might have caught the virus, though few if any of the rest of us gave it much thought. We all had a wonderful time together, the meal, cooked almost entirely by my man, was as delicious as ever, but I did notice later that my niece left the party early and climbed into bed.

That night, before falling asleep, the thought finally surfaced for me, and I said to my husband: "Lexi seems to battling a cold. Do you think it could be Covid?" "Absolutely," he said. "Okay then," I think I said, “here we go,” and then we both went to sleep, because that is the stage of equanimity we've reached in this years long Covid saga.

The next morning, Friday, my cousin woke us early, asking if we had any Covid home tests. By then everyone suspected what would soon prove to be true, both her daughters were positive. My cousin and her husband soon tested positive as well. My Brooklyn niece, though she had only a minor sniffle that she'd initially thought was a seasonal allergy, immediately packed up her stuff and went home so as not to expose us any more. We set up the back room and bathroom as a comfortable isolation suite for the sick, and my other cousin Nicky and I wore masks in and out of there to bring them food and medicine. They slept almost continuously for three days.

Everyone was fairly nonplussed, even my niece in college, and we all know she is a champion worrier when it comes to Covid. I was most concerned about her and her brother, because they had slept on couches and air mattresses in the living room with my niece who had now tested positive. It was still too early for the rest of us to test, as the advice is to wait three days from exposure, which had been on Thanksgiving Day. I called all our guests to let them know our lovely dinner may well have been a super spreader event, apologized profusely, and asked them to test themselves on Sunday, and again on Monday if Sunday's test came up negative. They all took the news in stride, because again, this is the world now, and these things happen.

Cutting to the chase: Everyone but the man and me tested negative, even my cousin from Trinidad, my daughter and her fiance, and both college kids, who were in the house with us for another couple of days after my nieces tested positive. My son had only been here for dinner on Thanksgiving, as he had to work, so he was only minimally exposed. When I called on Sunday to tell him his dad and I were Covid positive, he said, "Well it took long enough to find you." His wife had gone to her parents in New Jersey for Thanksgiving, so thankfully she escaped the drama. 

Everyone checked in every day to see how we were doing, and really we weren't doing badly at all. It was like a bad flu. I had keen joint aches the first two days, and occasional chills and a swoony head, then an awful sore throat the second night and into the third day, and that was the worst of it. After that, it was as if I was recovering from a regular cold, the kind that in pre-Covid days we used to drag ourselves into the office with, infecting everyone else. 

It happened to be a busy work week for me, as the current issue of the magazine was set to go to press, so I worked every day, dosed up on decongestants. My doctor prescribed Paxlovid, just so I'd have it in the house, but she advised that I not take it unless I took a turn for the worse, meaning high fevers and trouble breathing. That never happened so I didn't take it. Neither did my husband, who had congestion and a bad cough for the first three days, and sat up watching World Cup soccer the whole time. My cousins traveled back home to Orlando and Trinidad on Tuesday and Wednesday as planned, my Orlando cousins still testing positive, but properly masked up. And that is the true moral of the story—that there are most definitely people on planes with Covid, who simply need to get home, who are possibly still contagious (though for my Orlando family it had been the requisite five days), so wear your masks while traveling, people. 

Now it's just the man and me in gentle quarantine, reading and working and dozing and watching World Cup soccer and movies as we wait for our home tests come up negative. Wow. I sure used a lot of words to say, we got Covid, but we’re basically okay.