Dominoes

The man and I are both in bed, under two layers of comforters on a cold gray Saturday. It’s late afternoon, or maybe already evening, and we have Covid. I’m a couple of days ahead of him. He’s in the thick of it, while I’m emerging, the chills and the sore throat gone, but now my left knee has given up the ghost, and I’m lying here in my heavy wool socks trying to cajole that knee. My daughter had it first. Then my son spent an hour with me on Tuesday in between getting off from the night shift at the fire house and heading to get his wife from her parents’ home in New Jersey. I had no symptoms yet. But it turns out I was contagious. My girl was upstate with her in laws, after spending the past week with us. She had started feeling sick but wasn’t testing positive yet. A day later she let us know we’d all been exposed. “Took my whole family down,” she said ruefully. “Dang.” We fell like dominoes. First my daughter. Then me. Then my daughter’s partner, then my son, and after valiantly holding out, my husband, who had refused to isolate from me. My son’s wife seems to still be okay. My daughter’s mother in law too. May they both escape this thing. It’s what they call mild. But for two days of that, mild feels like a lie. And then in the stage I’m at now you feel quite normal (knee notwithstanding), and you’re doing stuff, working, interviewing, writing new pages, revising, editing, and then all of a sudden you’re slammed with exhaustion and need to crawl into bed again. So here we are. Covid new year.