Diary 2020

My name is Eileen Earhart Oldag. I’m married, retired, a mother and grandmother, a White woman.
Secure in ways I didn’t realize before March 2020. This is written from the inside out.
I started this journal before learning of the National Women’s History Museum project. Covid
isolated my husband and me physically and emotionally from our family, from most friends. Our front
yard, our long, horse-shoe street, and our neighbors became our world.
The past became present.
Older, retired, independent, we were the extremely fortunate and the specifically targeted. Far
beyond the dates of this journal, Covid has been a duel between gratefulness and fear.

Friday, March 13
We’re met at the front door with sanitizer and news. This place is closing. Look for the next gathering by
Zoom.
We’re allowed this time to go ahead, hold our meeting as if. We unplan our April program. We
unplan May, too. But maybe not. That’s six weeks off. Who knows?
Fist bumps as we leave.

Week One | March 15
The Zoom invitation arrives; we join. It looks good, sounds good. We open a paid Zoom account.
We cancel Monday’s raptor survey requiring four of us to spend eight hours in a truck cab. Tom
grumbles.
To compensate, he goes to his Zumba class at the gym on Tuesday.
I start gathering disinfectant. Ace Hardware is the place. If we don’t use the bleach on our
counters, we can clean the siding.
We’re encouraged to stay home. It’s like vacation from retirement, a break in routine. I read The
Plague; Tom reads Station Eleven; we watch the documentary Influenza 1918. That should do.
I try to order pick-up groceries from my grocery store. It doesn’t work. It’s not that I need toilet
paper. I just need it to work.
I think about Camus. I didn’t know The Plague took place in Oran. My father told me he was in Oran...an
18-year-old in the 1940’s Merchant Marines. He probably saw Santa Cruz and went to the Casbah. He
could’ve been there when Camus was. They could have passed each other on the street as Camus went
down to the docks. My father, an unrealized farmer with his unwatered intellect traveling for the first
time outside the Texas counties of Ft. Bend and Wallis, brushing the arm of Albert Camus who is lost in
philosophical thoughts of politics, resistance, justice, ethics and suicide.
I wish I’d asked my father more about Oran.

Week Two | March 22
The market dives and takes us with it. Cash in a carpet bag sounds good. The financial advisor talks us
down; we’ll wait for capitalism to reward us for being patient patrons all these years. Like our phone
company does. Yes, we have an advisor in another state to Zoom us advice. My parents had a savings
account and a land line.
We stop watching nonstop news. Good move. Then we start watching again—but only two
times a day. Choose wisely.
The gym closes. Everything closes. The governor orders us to stay at home until we’re told
otherwise.
Half of Idaho buys more essential weaponry. A fool and his money.
Liquor stores stay essentially open. I hope it is the other half of Idaho buying liquor.
Second attempt to order pick up from my grocery store is a nonstarter.
Our son and daughter bring us groceries but there’s no tofu to be found. Also, no Vegenaise.
We’re in Idaho! We’re the only vegetarians in a five-mile radius. Who’s buying out tofu? Are people with
shotguns hoarding toilet paper and tofu, daring me to come take it?
Tom walks, bikes and grumbles.
I start cussing, just like that. My vulgabulary’s quite small, but I’m good with inflection and make
the most of my limitations. Everywhere I turn there’s a reason to inflect.

Week Three | March 29
May as well—we do our taxes.
We talk to our advisor regularly. We’re wearing him down, I think, and we come to an
agreement. We’re getting out of stocks for good. Also, he should vote Democratic.
We clean out files while we’re taxing ourselves.
We cancel our June vacation. It was actually here in town, but we were having a reunion. It
seems early to cancel...things could change for the better. But if it doesn’t get better, the money’s not
coming back.
I clean out my closet. Now I have a stack for Goodwill to go with the stack of paper files to shred.
I notice that I’m clenching my teeth. Probably because I quit cussing. It started in my sleep, but now,
during the day, I’m locked up.
Tom is doing Zoom Zumba. Good for his spirits and for clever jokes. The second class, his teacher
twists her ankle, and it’s all over.
Then, we have an earthquake. Actually, Idaho has an earthquake. Tom catches pottery as it takes leave
of the shelves, but the shelves stay in place. Everything hung on the wall skews. When we straighten
things, they drift atilt again.
We order and get pickup groceries from Walmart on one try. Except for tofu and Vegenaise.
We order bring-in from Kibrom’s, the immigrant-owned restaurant in our neighborhood. Please,
Kibrom’s, stay afloat.

Week Four | April 5
It’s all Zoom all the time: church (yes, church), friends in Texas, grandchildren, more Texas friends,
important volunteer meeting twice, coffee with local friends. I Zoom, therefore, I am.
We order bring-in food from the unfortunately named Corona Village Mexican Restaurant. It’s
good food from good people, and they reduce plastic. Please, stay afloat.
Tom’s blood workup—yes; my dental appointment—no.
We walk Sandy Creek with a friend and watch two horses play in the round pen. I’m not a horse person,
but right now, I wouldn’t mind being a horse.
We play Scrabble; an ongoing competition at which I am supreme and which ends when Tom
gets mad because I check words before playing. I say he can do the same, but he doesn’t want to play
that game.
Tom farms the back yard and landscapes the front yard. A passer-by says, “Our yards will never
look this good again.” Tom spreads more mulch and pots seeds.

Week Five | April 12
We get masks. We walk with friends...we assume they were our friends; they were wearing masks when
they arrived.
The governor tells us to stay at home longer.
Our COVID checks are auto deposited. We give the money away.
We Zoom more: family; meditation; poetry twice; coffee with Arkansas friends; coffee with local
friends.
Tom’s doing walking meditation when he sees that the shelves in the china cabinet have fallen
in delayed earthquake response. The old china has folded over and into itself like Idaho geology, the way
it looks where the once-edge of the continent buckled and crushed to accept accreting arc-islands.
Something has to break here and there.
Another important volunteer meeting is called to plan how we start fundraising again when the stay-
home order is lifted. (When the order is lifted?! We’ll be home under order until we die. Do they think
anyone will ever go anywhere again as long as we live? You’d have to be a f*****g [see week two] idiot.
I was born under this shelter order, and I’ll die under this shelter order. I am socially isolated for the rest
of my f*****g life. It’s like Groundhog Day except the phone calendar keeps flipping.)
I tell them to let me know what they decide. I’ll do what I can.
Then, I clean out the garage, move the files to be shredded and Goodwill clothes out there.

Week 6 | April 19
We listen to a spiritual program on an elitist radio station. The old monastic says these times don’t make
us anxious, they make us fearful.
He’s right. I’m not Western-White anxious...I’m locked-in-my-jawbones afraid. I’m afraid I’ll
wake up one day with just an unwrinkled sheet next to me where Tom used to laugh in his sleep. I’ll cry,
and there’ll be no one to hear much less ask how to make it okay. I’m afraid this’ll happen sooner rather
than later, and I’ll hold Tom’s wake alone in our living room grieving on behalf of every person who ever
knew him but can’t come out of their self-contained purgatory because they fear this virus hell. I am
afraid for this whole condemned-to-what-we-deserve country that eats Tweets for breakfast and
consumes pathological lies like jelly beans. This country that started out cruel, superior and self-serving,
sewed those values into a flag and hasn’t stopped waving it since. That uses the flag pole to punch
immigrants in the eye and hit Asian neighbors over the head. I’m afraid my Goodwill blanket will infect a
Shoshone child. I’m afraid with the black men and brown men who are afraid to wear face masks in
public while the White Ace Hardware store manager can check me out with his unmasked frown and un-
sanitized hands because he’s just fine—he’s an untested normal, he’s the norm. I am afraid I cannot
wash my hands enough. I’m afraid this will come and go again and again—1919, 2020, 2121—and
nothing will change for good. I am Camus-existentially afraid of the obvious and inescapable: that we
will all die alone, I will not be there, no one will be here, we will never again be closer than six feet.

Week 7 | April 26
I start refinishing hope chests. Mine and my mother’s. My mother: born six months before the stock
market crash of 1929 to a young Polish couple who had already survived the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic.
My grandparents: talking of jobs in San Antonio, Sweetwater, Shreveport and Beaumont before settling
in Galveston; never saying they moved because jobs were few and ephemeral; never saying the word
Depression. When my mother graduated from high school, they took cash and bought her this cedar,
hope chest so she could save linens and wares to start a home after her predestined marriage.
What did my mother hope for in 1946? To meet my dark and handsome father by fortunate
accident? To marry him and have five children? Did she hope for frozen peas and perma-press shirts to
transform her life as a wife and mother? Other than referring to our chests, I don’t recall my mother
ever mentioning hope. There was what you had, what you could make and what you could make
happen. Hope wasn’t really relevant—neither practical nor necessary. You made or made do.
So, when the chest aged and the veneer peeled, my mother painted it plum and kept it at the
foot of her bed. When she died, we opened it to find pictures of her and pictures of us, gifts my father
brought her from Japan before they married, a silver dollar from the year my father was born, and still
some linens, hand-sewn, embroidered, edged with crochet. Things past, because at 85, the past is what
you save.
Now the veneer is stripped, and the plum paint. I learned on YouTube how to glue and clamp
broken parts. I took my mother’s Ryobi sander, still working, to domesticate if not refine the cedar. I
wear homemade masks to mitigate dust.

Week 8 | May 3
Tom and I are talking again about things we want to talk about. Saying small, cheerful things like good
morning as we look each other in the eye. We discuss things, then decide we don’t need to decide, not
right now...it can wait. I hear myself laugh about something.
When I was 20, the first boy I ever kissed was killed in a plane crash. This is what I always say to describe
Donald: the first boy I ever kissed. I forget to say track athlete, senior class VP, owner of the oldest
vehicle in our high school, which was directly related to my learning to drive standard and to the kiss.
At his funeral I lost my religion.
His coffin was blue. I had never seen a coffin before. It was my first funeral, and I thought coffins
were always black. While the priest tried to make sense, I sat there comprehending the blue coffin, and
I heard my own, young voice say This—is all there is. It was irrevocably clear that there was no after-
anything. It all ended in blue.
I took my exhausting grief home, to our house where my family gathered to recount the
ceremony and remark on the mourners, to eat dinner, to be our life again as before. I had changed into
shorts and was sitting on a stool when someone made a funny remark, a wise-crack, and I laughed out
loud. Then froze. I tried to recognize, to interpret the sound I’d just made, as if I’d spoken some
language I’d learned in another lifetime—something familiar but incomprehensible. A laugh.
“Already?” I asked myself.
Is it possible really, already, to laugh again?
Children think so. Evenings are laughing time in our neighborhood. Children who spent their days at
schools and parents who went off to work are all home all together all day inside their houses. So,
evenings and weekends are outside time, as they’ve always been, but now we are all right here, not off
on trips or to games or parks. We play in our own streets and front yards. New bikes are everywhere;
bigger ones for the moving-to-middle-school boys; family bicycles for two and for three plus a pull-
behind. A motorized one. Then a second motorized one. Everyone on the street takes a ride on those,
sanitizing handlebars between riders.
Every house on the street has improved itself: one new front door, two new garage doors, two freshly
painted all around, one completely new front yard, while in the yard across the street the tall,
overbearing grasses are out and Missouri primrose is in.
Our next-door neighbor has one of the new garage doors—the old one being a wooden sieve of
holes from hockey pucks powerfully misguided down the short distance of the drive by the boys. There
is now a basketball hoop, the sound of calculated dribbling, and the gasp of the backboard which is
always shocked at the inevitable layup. The teen boys, who’ve been obscure and interchangeable
entities for the past three years, have grown to reply if spoken to. They chase their stray ball across our
driveway with no sense of intrusion or need for apology. It’s what balls and boys do.
Everyone walks in the evening with no particular destination; no one wears Fitbits. People who
live blocks away and are somewhat lost stop to compliment Tom’s noticeable yardwork and affirm the
contribution of our own small construction project, a very nice cover for our sidewalk.
In deep evening, our house doors are open, and the screened doors freely admit the laughter of
someone’s children playing outside. I stop reading because they sound like my growing-up brothers
playing with their friends in our ample yard and the grassy lots around us at the edge of town. It’s not
the intentionally cheerful sounds that adults make, but the expression of unfettered. The sound of
running in no particular direction and of calling each other for attention, of complaint from lack of
attention, of insistence and acquiescence, capture, capitulation and return to freedom. It’s the
unburdened world going round and round itself, laughing. Again, already.

Week 9 | May 10
The home-and-garden center down the street holds a liquidation sale, and J.C. Penney has filed for
bankruptcy. Is this a sea change or a terminus? We need a road through this that we can walk slowly,
learning new geography as we go. Instead, we’re dropped in the middle of no-man’s-land with no
compass.
When my father retired from his refinery job, he told Mom that $25,000 would be plenty to live
on, and they kept it in a savings account, which she did live on for 20 years after he died. And, when she
died, she had a paid-for house and $30,000 in the credit union. Do you know what the White financial
world tells their White clients today: you need at least a million dollars to retire. They say let’s take the
money you inherited and invest in a stock market that’s more emotional than a football fan, then let’s
reinvest the money you made infesting—that’s a typo. Or maybe it’s not.
No one on Wall Street is talking to workers like my dad who knew you should retire with one
skill to pull out of your back pocket when you got old...just in case. No one’s talking to the aides, the
orderlies, the taxi drivers, the essential workers in slaughter houses. My father would have loved Suze
Orman. I love Suze Orman: stay out of debt, keep it simple. But this is complicated, and there may be no
saving it.
If I need a million dollars to retire, it’s to replace body parts until I’m significantly inanimate and
to keep the rest of me alive hydroponically with spooned-down meds. I need a million to keep my newly
assembled parts in a lovely care facility, which is where all this started in the US, a place with perpetually
peppy background music and a happy hour every day. One hour every day to be happy.
Three people, two cars. Tom and I caravan with a friend to the Shoofly Oolite trail. I am from the South,
and even I think this name is funny.
We stop on the way to see 40 species of birds at the Trueblood Wildlife Area, including egrets
and pelicans, which are essentially the color white stretched or compressed to satisfy the curious
imagination of nature. We eat lunch in a park, six feet from our friend and six feet from a lark sparrow.
Then we head to Shoofly Oolite.
Idaho’s oolites and graupel are identically opposite twins. At heart, oolites are small 12-million-
year-old grains of lake sand that slowly coated concentrically with calcium carbonate, then washed back
and forth in the shallows of Lake Idaho to make tiny, egg-like rocks. Formed and reformed, deposited,
gathered and now exposed, they expect to go nowhere any sooner than another couple million years.
They will sit here suffering the cold and heat of the Snake River Valley.
Graupel starts with a snowflake, fast-forming and simply falling through the supercooled water
of winter air, ice coating it in layer after layer of rime until the flake is invisible but still falling. A rimed
snowflake, small, rounded and so fragile that graupel will fall apart on impact, created and destroyed in
countable seconds.
Seven billion sets of lungs encased in seven billion human bodies. We are washing back and
forth in fear and confusion. We are rimed in virus, falling through disease. There’s no knowing our
strength until impact.

Week 10 May 17
In 1919, girls jumped rope and chanted...
I had a little bird
Its name was Enza.
I opened up the window
And in flew Enza.
Other than mockingbirds, which cannot be ignored, I didn’t pay much attention to birds growing up.
Sadly, because not only did I live in the Mississippi flyway, I lived 30 miles from High Island, the royal
grandmother of all US birding spots. There was a lot I could have seen, and I’ve done my best since to
pay attention, to make up for missed opportunity.
But Idaho is not the Mississippi flyway. So, it’s a local thrill when the Western Tanagers migrate
through our neighborhood this week. The males with their orange heads and sunflower bodies cannot
hide, even in dense arborvitae. It’s a small, hungry flock that we spot in the back yard in the morning. At
noon, they are in Tom’s blueberry bushes, berry-picking three feet from me as I sit, window-side, at my
desk. Driving to the store, I spot two males in the gravel of the tree lawn bouncing like a child’s lost ball.
When I get home, Tom’s in the yard watching swallows. The Violet-greens came in yesterday,
too. They’re often around the river crossings, but not usually in our neighborhood. Perhaps there was an
insect eruption overnight because they are plentiful, mesmerizing and indefatigably improvisational in
their aerials. Gathering. Spontaneity. Migration. We envy it all.
The fir in the next yard is filled with birds right now. Even in concert, my eyes and binoculars are not
strong enough to confirm the species. Not likely finches...a bit big. Could be tanagers, but no flashes of
yellow. I say—crossbills. Yes. I believe Red Crossbills chose this coned tree this afternoon. Not that I’ll
report the finding or check to see if others are reporting it. I won’t check the field guide for range maps
or ask Tom to confirm. It’s a good time to see something unexpected, just beyond the boundary of my
allotted space, not mine and only mine. Something distance can’t deny me. Something distance actually
made possible just for me.

Week 11 | May 24
In Idaho, we are rebounding. It seems more like unfolding, the way something newborn stretches on
instinct, with the drive and energy to move, but still sleeps with its small legs contracted. We want to
move outside ourselves. We are tired of our perfectly fine homes, our children, our spouses, our
screens. We are tired of thinking about everything...we’ve lost the auto-pilot. We forget how many have
died, where they were, how many are dying now, how many are not working, how many have no choice
but to work.
It is an unfortunate time to die for any reason. Lung cancer takes a friend in Shreveport. Her funeral is a
gathering of mourners parked in two adjacent lots, a service broadcast to the cars on a radio station,
and a drive-by farewell. Honestly, she would have laughed.
Molly and Joe have gambled a trip from Portland to Utah and are coming through town. They stop here
for a few hours, and we gather, nine of us, at John and Lori’s house to spread across the back yard, to
watch dogs play, and to look at each other in person for the first time since February. We are the lucky
ones, a family reconvened and momentarily whole. Even the grandchildren know it. Still, we’re
compelled to tell them this is a momentous time, a time they will tell their own grandchildren about.
They ask—we all ask—when it will end. Just knowing that much would do. All we can say is, pay
attention.

Monday, May 25
In Minneapolis, Mr. George Perry Floyd, Jr., is strangled to death by a policeman while three others
watch. Mr. Floyd is from Houston, just up the road from my hometown. He is the age of my oldest
daughter. He is a Junior, like my brother Frank was. When George Floyd dies, everything stops and
accelerates at the same time. Everything changes.

Week 12 | May 31
It’s my birthday. Tom and I drive the hour to Horseshoe Bend, buy a slice of marionberry pie and eat it at
a turnout over the Payette River.
We take an unmasked walk up a trail and back. It’s cloudless, bright, windy, a bit warm. There’s a small
stand of sego lilies alongside the road that curves up the flat-topped hill with the Andrew Wyeth
farmhouse resting on its brow.
Let’s do this again next year, Tom says.
Next year.
Around us, restless grass voices Camus’ words, “...the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”
I take a deep breath, glance at the patch of wild lilies.
Next year?
Perhaps I will live that long. And after that, perhaps, I will go to Oran, walk down to the wharf
and just sit.
Blue Earrings
I buy the pair
For no good reason
Except
I like the loop, the look, the lightness
The blue
Translucence, the color
Of chill, of flyway, primary
Color of open
For business or for pleasure
***