The Long Saga Of....the Coronavirus, Oh, the Coronavirus

I remember hearing the words "coronavirus" and "Covid 19" a few times in the months of January and February. At that time it felt like a far away problem, totally unconnected to me. I was sorry for the communities that were struggling with it but did not feel anxiety for myself or my way of life. And then I remember attending some meetings for my church leadership and the virus was a major topic. The other attendees were talking about all these contingency plans and how we would possibly hold church differently or maybe not at all and I remember just sitting there wondering what everyone's problem was. I mean, wasn't this just kind of like the flu? And wasn't it no where near America? It was so weird. So. Weird. And I was a total idiot. Over the next few weeks there began to be cases identified in the United States and even one or two in St. George. It still felt so unreal. Then came the Ides of March.

I'll never forget the day - it was Thursday March 12th actually. There had been a few more cases diagnosed in Utah and suddenly it felt like my entire life was just water that I was trying to hold cupped in my hands. Everything began to disappear. It seemed like within just a few hours every single event in my life got cancelled. We had play tickets that very night to go see Newsies at Clayton Middle School. We had tickets the next week for Romney and me to go see Bright Star at Hale Center Theatre. There were music lessons doctors appointments and choir performances church socials and school gatherings and they all just slipped away literally within one afternoon. I felt like I was watching the end of the movie Infinity War and every social event in my life was a superhero that got dusted away.  That day Troy and I talked and decided that I should go to the store to pick up a few shelf-stable food supplies to keep us fed in case we suddenly had some type of shelter-in-place order. I was not the only person to think this - the local grocery store that afternoon was absolutely packed with people buying up supplies like pasta and flour and sugar and canned beans. Oh and toilet paper. That was the day that toilet paper started to be scarce and it remained hard to find for about another six or eight weeks along with many other supplies. I've never had a hard time finding things before like frozen chicken or ground beef. I've obviously lived a very privileged life because that was quite a jolt, to not be able to get exactly what I wanted exactly when I wanted it.

The next day was Friday the 13th and there was a meeting called after school for the faculty and staff of the elementary school to discuss what the plan was. We got word just as we were gathering in the faculty room that school at least for the next week would be held off campus. So, there we went - no more school in person. At the time it seemed like it might just be that one week plus the week of spring break after that. (As you can see I continued to be an idiot.) At first it was kind of like a fun vacation. We started hearing the word "Quarantine" a whole lot. We took that first week with some at-home school stuff showing up at the end of the week. Then the next week was spring break. Let's see... for spring break we did....nothing. That's right, we did nothing. We hid in our house and wondered what was happening with the world. 

Oh yes and then there was the earthquake. That was Wednesday the 18th, at like 7:30 in the morning. Troy and I were up and in the kitchen. I was at the sink and Troy was behind me. I felt an up-and-down shaking feeling and I swear I thought Troy was jumping up and down. I spun around to ask him what he was doing, and there he was staring at me with huge eyes. I believe he even said, "You have GOT to be FREAKING KIDDING ME." Yes, that's what he said. I should have sprung into action, getting in a doorway or under a table or something but all I could do was stand there in absolute shock, frozen in place. It was really really scary. The motion was like the house was jumping up and down but then began rocking and rolling forward and back right under my feet. It felt like the counter under my hand was waving like water. My heart rate went up to a million beats per minute and I swear it stayed that way all day long. Not only did we get many aftershocks to keep my heart racing, but I was just freaked out. It took me weeks before every single jolt I felt, every truck rumbling by, didn't make me think there was another earthquake. Talk about adding stress to a stressful situation!!

Well, by the time spring break came to a close it was clear that we were stuck with online school for the time being. At first they said a few weeks, then May, then it was just the rest of the year. We coped with this by enjoying the flurry of memes that suddenly erupted with the start of quarantine. I once told Chase that we were truly in the golden age of memes, and he's quoted me on that several times. Those first weeks  it seemed that was how the world coped with the virus and quarantine. Just keep making memes. 

Here are just a few of the millions that we all were sending each other like crazy:

With quarantine came the birth of the zoom calls and meetings. I know they had existed before but now they became the primary way we communicated with each other. Here we are having a zoom date night with our poetry group. 

We also tried to entertain ourselves at home. The girls made some home movies. Chase and I played a game where we hid this figure-drawing model all over the house. Chase won that - he had the best ideas. Made me laugh all the time.

By the time the school year was wrapping up, the kids were all heartily sick of home school. It took a lot of energy on my part to support them but they all did really well. But man were they sick of it. And the virus was still going strong. But you know what was so weird - at first we all really put ourselves on quarantine, barely leaving the house. But as summer approached, it seemed like people sort of got desensitized. People got more and more comfortable going out in public and not worrying too much about social distancing or mask wearing. And so with summer the virus has really resurged and our numbers in Utah are way way higher than they were in the spring. We are now mandated to wear masks anywhere we go in SLC proper. If you leave the city though you still find that many people don't wear them.

It's so weird. Life is so weird!  Since this situation has lasted for four months now, it's hard to capture it all in one blog post, but there are some things that I'll always remember. For example, church. Along with every other event in our lives that got cancelled, we stopped attending church in person. What is just amazing is that a year before that we had been given a program from our church leaders helping us having more worship in our own homes. It certainly was inspired. We had a program already in place for us to focus our learning and study in our homes. We have really missed seeing our church community - I mean, my church members in my neighborhood are pretty much my family. I really miss them. But also we have enjoyed some really sweet and bonding family time as we have our own church services in our home.

I'll also always remember all the crazy things we had to do to keep school seem school-ish at home. In some ways it seemed like a bunch of busy work but hey, those awesome teachers were doing everything they could to make school meaningful. One of my favorite things was Emma needing to recreate famous artwork - she made a great girl with a pearl earring:

Also she had an assignment to do her reading in a different space. She picked a wheel barrow.

It took us a little while to get used to wearing masks. At first it was optional and I wasn't sure how I felt about wearing them. But then it became clear that masks were really helpful (though not everyone agrees) so now we all have a mask plus I have extras in the car and we wear them every where we go. (How did I become a character in a science fiction novel?)

The whole country seemed to get interested in prepper hobbies. We all started getting chickens and puppies and learning to make bread and using sourdough. I confess that I was one of those obnoxious people who got into bread making. I totally did not mean to hop on a bandwagon. I just got interested and I really love my sourdough starter. I got it from my friend Ben, who told me that it had it's beginning in France in the 1700s. So we named in Pierre and I have been baking ever since. In fact, one of my favorite comfort activities is watching bread baking videos on YouTube. We did not join the ranks of people getting puppies though, much to my kids' chagrin. They want a puppy so bad, and seriously, I think I've seen about 20 people get dogs since the start of quarantine.

We started some fun habits/traditions during this super weird time of not being social or going places like we normally did. For a while in the spring Emma and I went to the park pretty much every day to play frisbee and/or football. That was fun, but kind of fizzled out when it started getting hot. What has held on longer is a weekly walk for Troy and me every Sunday morning. We get up early and hit the avenues and walk for a good hour and a half. We love it so much and dread the day that our walks are put on hold due to cold weather.

Okay so that's all I can think of to say. Coronavirus is still going strong and this fall school is looking more and more like it will be online again in the fall. Turns out it wasn't just a few weeks off like we thought at first. Now it feels interminable and instead of sending each other lots of funny memes like we did in April we are all just eating too much and letting go of our life goals. We are certainly in the middle of an event that will go down in history.

The Long Saga of...The House, Oh, the House.

My dad lived in a great little townhouse in Holladay. He sure had put a lot of love and style into his home - he actually had quite a bit more influence on the decoration and feel of the home than my mom did. He had a strong design sense of his own. I'm not sure if my mom just went along with it because she knew how important it was to him or if she was pretty much in agreement with what he liked. Either way, dad drove the design choices and although I know his finished product isn't what everyone would choose, it was a great space with a very particular sensibility to it. One of the first things we did after dad passed away was photograph his home because we knew that it would start to be dismantled pretty quickly, even with just taking down some paintings and keepsakes to display at his memorial service. (Just saying that is still so weird. I still am in shock a little bit that my dad is gone.) I'm so glad we took pictures because it's true, it did start to change almost immediately and I'm glad we preserved the space that he created.  He had so much art on the walls. So many pieces of pottery on the shelves. Looking at these pictures now is really tugging at my heart. It's like it should still be there but it's not.

In February and March I spent countless hours at dad's house. I mean, COUNTLESS. It was both good and tough to be there. It's hard to describe the amount of work it took to sort through all his things, deciding what to keep and what to let go of, even with the fact that my dad was a very tidy person who was the opposite of a hoarder. A home still just accumulates a whole lot of stuff. Luckily we four siblings were able to approach his possessions in a pretty organized way - making a list of everything we thought we needed to discuss and communicating quite well about who got what. You know, I don't think I mentioned in my previous posts about my dad's illness and passing what a great team we four Romney kids were. I mean, we really bonded together and got through this tough thing with no arguments. Even when it came time to choose what we wanted we did it. However, it took what felt like hundreds of hours though to go through every drawer, every closet and shelf. Going through boxes of photos and slides. Sorting everything into the throw away pile and the donation pile and the valuable-but-not-sure-what-to-do-with-it pile. The hardest part was letting go of dad's clothes - we didn't really want to keep many things besides his beloved golfers hats and some ties, but it was still hard to pack them all up and send them away. That was one of the first things we did and it hurt. We felt pretty uncomfortable, like the whole energy in the house was mad at us for starting to take it apart. But once we got the ball rolling it felt better and we each brought so many of dad's favorite things into our own homes that it felt better. I was lucky enough to get the grandmother clock, a lovely armchair that fits just right into our living room, and an antique sewing table that now holds our television. I love having these things in our home, along with many many smaller things like a great collection of Russian painted eggs. Having dad's presence safe in my house with me made it easier as we took load after load of stuff to the D.I. and even a trip to the dump with some ancient food storage. I'll never forget the day I spend going up and down the stairs a million times lugging #10 cans out to my van. I'm just trying so hard to convey the weeks it took to go through it. Some of that time was awful, like with the cans. But I'll also always remember the late night I had there all by myself, quietly going through every loose photo he had in this closet and finding so many treasures and gems and packing up a box for each of my siblings with pictures we either had never seen or hadn't seen in years. That was a great night.

Because it was so nerve-racking to have dad's house just sitting there with no one to look after it, all of his possessions just sitting in the quiet solitude day-in and day-out, we sibs wanted to move pretty quickly on selling the home. Yes, that can be painful, and like I said (and will keep on saying), SO MUCH WORK, but we did not want to drag it out and have that weight hanging over our heads for months. We hired a realtor, a good friend of my sister's, to help us get started right away. She helped us know what to keep in the house to stage it for when potential buyers came through to see it. She made trips to the DI for us. She helped us know what needed updating in the house - I mean, we loved the green and purple walls but that's not really what sells. We were taking away with us the big oak mantle that mom claimed she and her cousin Jim had dragged out of her grandmother's house just before it got demolished when they were around 14 years old. (Now that it took five adults to move it we are not sure we still believe mom's story but who knows. I should ask Jim.) With the mantle gone we would be leaving a banged-up wall so we needed to replace it with a nice wood mantle. All of these changes - I was sure I was going to hate it and feel like all personality had been removed from dad's lovely home. But we for sure got the right realtor.  She helped with the paint colors and the furniture arranging and when I went back to see it with the new paint and stuff I was just blown away. It was beautiful, and I knew that it would be tempting for anyone looking for a townhome. 

That turned out to be true - we held an open house in February I think and had three offers on it by the end of the first day. The details are boring, so I won't go into them, suffice it to say that within three weeks all three offers had fallen through. It was quite discouraging. One thing and then another just kept tripping people up and they'd rescind their offers. We even had one person just a few days away from closing and it didn't happen. Well, by the time the third offer had fallen through, Covid 19 had just started, and I was sure that we were in trouble. Who would want to go house hunting during a pandemic? It seemed to me that we might be in for a long haul trying to get the house sold. But, we went ahead and held another open house, this time with social-distancing guidelines and stuff in place. (Man the world got weird fast there in March, didn't it?) Before the open house began I took my girls over there to tidy up, dust, make sure things looked nice. We also took a few minutes to kneel in a circle in the living room and say a prayer together, asking for a blessing of good feelings to be in this home and for the right person to want to buy it. Lo and behold, by the end of the weekend we had another three offers. One of the offers was a very special one - it came with a letter attached. It was from a single woman with grown daughters and an aging father. She wrote to us about how she had not been looking to buy a house at all, but was driving up the road and saw the sign and stopped to take a peek. Her heart leapt - she knew this was the home for her. She described to us all the things she loved about it and all that she hoped to do there, all of which were things my parents loved too. Art, theater, growing tomatoes.... It seemed magical, like she truly had been guided there. Besides all that, her offer was the highest we had received. We were thrilled to accept her offer. 

Well, that was all fine and good. I am really enjoying looking back and thinking of all these positive memories that happened before the you-know-what hit the proverbial fan. The you-know-what came in the form of a break in the sewer pipe leading out from the house to the main sewer line. This break was discovered during the inspection that is part of the buying process. I don't know if it's worth putting down many of the details here - I'm not sure I want to remember what happened because it has been an absolute freaking nightmare. The good part is that the buyer and the realtor and my family have been on the same team. No bad feelings there, even though we made some big mistakes, such as closing on the house before the plumbing issue was resolved, just assuming that since it was in process it would all be fine. Well, it was not fine. I'll just sum it up by saying that we were dumb and did not get more than one bid from any companies and also did not research the company that was recommended to us. Definitely do these things, okay? The plumbing company basically hosed us. The main issue is that instead of ripping out the porch stairs which were over the break, they just threaded flexible pipe (not up to code, as it turns out) through the break, then realized that by not fixing the break they no longer had the 2% grade needed to go downhill from the house to the main sewer line. Then they told us that to fix this we would need a $4000 ejector pump to force the sewer contents to the main line. (This after our price had increased over and over again until the amount was staggering.) They did not tell me that this pump would be in a giant hole in the bedroom floor with a huge plastic lid that opened directly onto raw sewage and made a constant running-water sound. (And after the fact, we discovered that the pump, which was made for ponds and waterfalls, can be bought on Amazon for less than a quarter of that price.) Of course this all got installed after we had closed on the house. There was some serious sleep lost on my end over all this, especially when our buyer realized how bad it was and flipped out. We are pretty lucky actually because a) there are actual problems caused by this horrible company besides us just not liking it, so we have legal ammo against them and b) our realtor is so committed to her buyers and sellers being happy that she's helping us pay for a second company to come in and do it right if we end up not getting money back from the first company.

This has been incredibly stressful. We have a lawyer, the issue is not resolved with the first company, and I sometimes still get extremely anxious about it. It was horrible knowing that I made major errors that could potentially cost me and my siblings a lot, and I know I frustrated them. However, the good news is that most importantly our buyer now has everything totally completely fixed and done and just perfect at her house. I now no longer think of it as my dad's old house. A wonderful person has purchased it and we were able to make it right for her. That is a closed book and I'm very grateful for that. Also, we have the support of our realtor who will make sure there is a cap on how much money my family pours into this horrible situation. We have all learned a lot. I hope we don't end up paying the first company any more money than we have. I seriously doubt we'll get any money back, but thankfully, we have a lawyer having those hard conversations with them, not us. I look forward to the day it's all resolved and hope it doesn't cost our realtor much if anything. She has been so good to us even though we all made some errors in moving forward on official things without official understandings. Hopefully we have all learned the lessons we need to and it will be finalized soon.

As for now, I still feel tender about that town home. I spent more than 13 years going there to see my parents. It was my mom's last home before she moved into full-time care. And of course we surrounded my dad as he passed away there; so lucky to be home instead of at a facility of some kind. It's a special place. I had a chance to drive by it this week and discovered that I wasn't ready to see it yet. I had a lot of time on my own there feeling a lot of feelings. I'm so grateful that my prayers were answered and a deserving person found a place to make her happy and I wish her the best. I now am praying for a peaceful resolution to the conflicts with the plumbing company, and I have hope that that situation will come to a close soon. My nervous system would appreciate it a lot. 

Bleak Week and Finding Respite in the South

The dust was settling. The visiting family had gone home. The play was over. Our house was packed with flowers. And it was time for us to be home together. We decided that what our family needed most was to hold our annual Bleak Week celebration. Perfect timing, really, just in time to help soothe our spirits, drooping from the letdown after the monumental month behind us. So we did our normal things - we went to Crystal Hot Springs, we went out to dinner, I watched as many Jane Austen movies as I could pack in to one week. For dinner we picked a new sushi restaurant in the neighborhood and just decided to whole-hog. We tried so many delicious things, everything from ramen to octopus sashimi, which all three kids adored. Here's an awesome video of Romney trying it out:

For the culmination of the week we drove to sunny St. George (since it's July right now that does not sound fun but it was so wonderful at the end of January.) We went to see Siena perform in her Jr. High production of Peter Pan, with the real broadway music that we grew up listening to - I Gotta Crow! Siena was a pirate and we enjoyed the show a lot. Equally wonderful was the afternoon we spent out with Sheri'e parents rock climbing. I know Chase really loves climbing and is quite good at it. That was what made him excited to go on the trip. What a great way to refill our tanks - get out in the sun, run around outside, scale large rocks.

And...then we came home to snow. 

Which Chase promptly dove into face first.