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One Year in Quarantine With Small Children and Living to Tell the Tale
One year ago, we hosted a hamantaschen party at our house with several families. It was something I had been looking forward to for weeks. Of all the kid baking projects, there are few things as fun as hamantaschen to make or witness in the making. There is delight in the overeager mixing of ingredients, flour and sugar flying out of the bowl and dusting the counter like snow settling amidst a blizzard; the aggressive, steamrolling motion of a rolling pin; pudgy hands, cutting out circles at the far end of a glass, sloppily pinching the edges together into something that vaguely resembles hated Haman’s triangular hat, but more closely resembles the fingers themselves; big eyes overstuffing the dough with more filling than, in an oven’s heat-induced expansion, it can comfortably contain; and then that filling itself, so open to creative possibility. Which delight will the child choose? Chocolate chips or apricot jam or honey or spoonfuls and spoonfuls of Nutella?
There was talk of a virus in the air. We wondered if it was already there among us. At daycare, we were instructed to hold even our infants’ hands up to the warm faucet and scrub them together while singing the ABCs. Our three-year-olds did the same, thinking it was all a game. None of us knew how many times a day we would soon be singing it, how many times over the next year. Just how well they’d be learning their ABCs.
I felt an undercurrent of worry about having guests over with this unknown thing gathering on the horizon — or here already. But I handled it with steady dismissals and jokes, reassurances both aloud and internally that it was probably all overblown, that we had to be cautious but go on with things. That the ABC song and a little hand soap would sustain us.
When the guests arrived, we joked and turned our regular hugs into air hugs and our hand shakes into elbow-fives. One guest noted my not so discreet removal of the cloth hand towels from the bathroom, hastily replaced by an ill-fitted roll of paper towels.
“Tell us how you really feel,” she laughed.
I laughed too, and then we all tried to forget about it. We turned to the task at hand, exchanging stories as the kids delighted at first in the cookie making and then lost…
