March 19th, 2020: The world is changing. People are hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer and water and food. The store shelves are empty. It feels eerily like the beginning of every apocalypse or dystopia movie I've ever watched. I live in a small town in Connecticut that is usually bustling with traffic on Main Street, but driving to work this morning I only saw one or two other cars, and nobody was trying to make the illegal left turn from Cherry onto Main...there was no backup at the light in front of Starbucks... it was....different. As I hustled through my day trying to get things done at the commercial laundry where I manage a small business office, I felt fortunate that I was not one of thousands facing lay offs and unemployment. Day to day operations are uncertain and jobs are disappearing left and right in other industries. Ten thousand people filed for unemployment in Connecticut today as the restaurants and bars and movie theaters and bowling alleys and malls and casinos were mandated to close to the public. Restaurants will have to try to get by on takeout orders for the foreseeable future. My daughter is out of school, possibly for the year. It is March 19th. I haven't panicked yet. I placed one Peapod order that is scheduled to arrive tomorrow between 3 and 5 pm. Future deliveries are not possible until the second week of April at this point. Other than that i have not been to a store since the week before the pandemic began. I have 24 double rolls of Quilted Northern. I have a moderate supply of food that i would normally have on hand. My Peapod order's arrival tomorrow will replenish my supply, but i don't have an overabundance that will last me an indefinite period of time. My husband manages the Central Sterile Supply department at a local hospital and has been covering on second shift, so we have barely seen each other because of our schedules. I forced myself to stay up late so I could talk to him tonight since things have escalated so quickly and we talked until 4 am. I just can't shake the feeling that the entire world will be different once this pandemic dies out....We will all be changed.
