Episode transcript: season one, episode 2: One day in
// Tuesday, March 18, 2020

Welcome to Shelter in Place, a podcast about finding daily sanity in a world that feels increasingly insane. Coming to you from Oakland, California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

It’s late as I’m recording this—way after midnight. I’m not normally awake at this hour, but the past few days the only consistent time I’ve been able to work is at night after the kids are in bed. Every night I’m so tired from the day, but as soon as I lay down, my brain wakes up. I know, it’s the screen time before bed—something I normally avoid. But maybe it’s also latent anxiety about what’s ahead. 

Yesterday was the first day of the Bay Area mandate to shelter in place. It was also St. Patrick’s Day, and my son Gabriel’s eighth birthday. 

He’s been a remarkably good sport about the craziness of the past week, even though it’s meant cancelling the birthday party he’s been planning for months, and missing his school field trip to the Cal Academy of Sciences, his favorite museum. He’s happy that school is cancelled, of course, but he’s also had to contend with a lot of change, almost as much as we have. My husband and I decided that under the circumstances, we’d all take the day off. With everything going on, it was the one thing we could do to make this day special. 

For me, it was a day of massive transition. After some last minute scurrying, my husband’s sister Alexis (our only local family) agreed to drive down from Healdsburg for the day with her kids. Their county was still free to move about, and they could come celebrate Gabe while also dropping off our teenage niece to help us out for the week.

I should probably stop here and tell you that we live in a a 914-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bathroom house. When we bought our house back in 2008, we figured we’d transition into something bigger by the time we had kids. But that was before real estate prices skyrocketed, and we realized we’d never be able to afford that bigger home with an extra bedroom. The Bay Area has been in a housing crisis for a while now, so our situation isn’t actually all that unusual.

It’s a weird thing to know that you’re sitting on top of a pot of gold that you can’t touch unless you leave the rainbow. 

We really love Oakland, for all kinds of reasons that I’ll get into at some point. So we try to keep it in perspective. Only in the U.S. do kids expect to have their own bedroom. Our three are squeezed into one. It’s a little tight, but we have a back yard and a writing studio that we built a few years back. Mostly we make it work.

While my husband and the kids spent the morning playing Legos, I tried to transform our home into a place that would welcome a sixth person.

I put new sheets on my kids’ bunk beds, one of which would go to my niece. My 6-year-old would move to a crib mattress on the floor. I brought the small desk we usually keep in our kitchen out to the writing studio. It’s the one place in our home where kids aren’t allowed. It’s just big enough for a desk, two bookshelves, and—if you really squeeze it, which we often do for guests—a queen air mattress on the floor. 

The whole time I was moving furniture, I kept thinking how this was temporary. In a few weeks, my husband would go back to work. The kids would go back to school. The grocery stores would eventually restock their supplies of toilet paper, rice, and cold medicine. We’d all go back to life as it was before. 

Alexis and her kids arrived just as it was announced that the shelter in place mandate would extend to Sonoma County—their county. 

We sang happy birthday and ate cake. Neighbors waved to us from the street.

In a lot of ways it was like any other family gatherings we’ve had over the years—except for that our conversation was fixed on an almost certain recession, on how hard this quarantine has been for small businesses, and for the people they employ who can’t work right now, many of whom don’t qualify for unemployment because they’re undocumented. 

This is true everywhere of course, but particularly for the restaurants and wineries in wine country, which got hit hard this past fall when wildfires swept through Healdsburg during their biggest month of tourism. Alexis knows this firsthand. She and her husband Matt built their wine business from the ground up, and until now it’s been thriving—but they too are suddenly facing the very real possibility that they’ll have to shut their doors if people stop buying wine, and the restaurants they’ve sold to can’t settle their accounts for the wines they’ve already shipped. 

As my sister-in-law and her younger kids packed up and headed back north, a neighbor sent me a message saying that Gavin Newsom (California’s governor) had posted a message on Twitter that we should not expect schools to resume before the fall.

We all took a moment to let that news sink in. No school until the fall. Even my teenage niece and nephew looked glum. It’s not that I can’t find silver linings in this situation. I can appreciate that even though I am not particularly skilled at homeschooling my kids, there’s a big upside to us spending this much time together.

I think what feels so shocking about this news is that we’re no longer just talking about a blip. We’re talking about a new normal that none of us was really ready for. About a long game that doesn’t feel sustainable. 

But maybe I’m thinking about it all wrong. Maybe the answer isn’t to figure out how to work more so we can sustain our current way of living. Maybe the answer is actually to need less.

Depend on each other more. It doesn’t solve our problems—especially for those of us who are not getting paid right now. And right now, depending on each other takes real creativity.

But we have tremendous capacity for creativity, even now. Today, while we were celebrating my son, the people who love Gabe found a way to get messages to him. A few days ago, my father-in-law set up a family Zoom meeting that included five families from three generations spread across the country. A friend of the neighborhood set up a group Marco Polo group so we could all send each other messages throughout the day. All around our neighborhood, families colored sidewalk tiles with chalk, leaving buckets of chalk, and notes encouraging others to add their own contribution—and of course take their piece of chalk with them when they go.

I don’t think this time is going to be easy, but I also don’t think it has to be the end of all that is good in our lives. It feels to me like we are being stripped down to the essentials, forced to choose the kind of people we will become in the face of calamity. 

Personally, I haven’t settled into this new normal yet. I feel like it’s going to be a while before I do.

But I’m not hopeless. Because even though we’re not together, I’ve still got all of you.

But before I go, in the spirit of supporting our local businesses, I asked Alexis if she’d mind me putting in a plug for Brick & Mortar and Delta wines. I’m not getting paid to do that. I just really like their wines. You can order at winesforchange.com or brickandmortarwines.com. You’ll get fast shipping right to your door, with options for free overnight delivery in California. Get a 10% discount on your order when you use the code SHELTER. It might be just be the thing to make this time a little brighter. 

Until tomorrow, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.