The Quarantine Chronicles

Well, it’s been an interesting few weeks at our home.

Here’s some highlights from the quarantine Chronicles:

• An actual exchange I had with our five-year-old.

“I wish I had a time machine,” he said.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because then I could go back in time and stop that person from spitting in your mouth and giving you the corona,” he said.

I did explain to him that nobody directly spit into my mouth (at least that I can remember) – but he does grasp the basic science of transmission of the virus.

• Well, my battle with COVID is over, and I have been allowed back in public (I hold no ill will to the people who saw me in HEB and walked the other way. I’d have done the same thing, but I promise I am not considered contagious anymore).

But the virus did not go quietly.

The physical part of the virus was bad.

But I think the mental part was worse. One way I can describe the feeling of having COVID is that I felt like a loaded gun pointed at my family.

But 10 days after I first started having symptoms, and after all my symptoms had subsided, my wife and I packed up all four kids in the car for a celebratory trip to the urgent care clinic in Giddings, which is the closest spot that has the rapid result COVID tests.

This was the day before Thanksgiving and we just wanted to confirm that no one else in the family had contracted the virus before we sent the kids back off to school the following week.

A bunch of swabs were stuck up Wick noses, we waited, and then the doctor walked in with the ominous greeting of “mixed” results.

My wife and two our kiddos tested positive for the virus and two did not.

It was an odd Thanksgiving the next day. My wife and one of the kids had lost their sense of taste by then – I’d recovered mine just in time to enjoy the wonderful holiday meal delivered to our front porch by my sister. I wouldn’t have blamed my wife for giving me dirty looks across the table – but she didn’t.

• Here’s the crazy thing about having two kids not having COVID in a house where the other four do.

The four of us that tested positive had/have a definitive timeline for return to society. Our two kids that tested positive the day before Thanksgiving can actually return to school this coming Monday.

The two kiddos that are negative actually have to stay home until after Christmas break (14 day quarantine beginning 10 days after their siblings tested positive) – unless they too test positive for the virus.

Then they are only out of school for 10 days from when they test positive (assuming they are fever and symptom free).

So that put us in the mind-blowing situation of actually rooting for them to test positive, so they can “recover” and get back to school earlier.

Tuesday of this week, those two Wick kids with apparent super immunity took another COVID test, this time we took advantage of the county program where a med tech visited the house and administered a COVID spit test. Right there on the front porch, two Wicks kids were racing one another to fill their spit vial, while the health care worker watched and laughed and told them how good they were doing.

Getting praised for spitting and hoping the results come up positive – this is a wild new world we’re living in.

• Among the things I did when I was home quarantined was to read an honest to goodness novel, and I cooked a dish that it was actually a good thing that I couldn’t taste it (lentil and oatmeal porridge).

My complete loss of taste and smell lasted four full days and during that time, my wife and kids orchestrated a sort of game show in which I was blindfolded and had to try to guess various foods based only on texture. It didn’t go well as I sunk into a deep depression after falsely guessing that a spoon full of coffee grounds was sand.

But among the more enjoyable endeavors, my wife and watched the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” which is focused on a fictional chess prodigy. The series was great, and it also re-ignited my fondness for the game of chess.

I remember first starting to love the game way back in 6th grade when our teacher Henry Lyle devoted an entire six weeks to teaching us how to play chess, and then letting us play one another in class for the entire period, before having a bracketed tournament at the end of the six weeks.

I told my kids that story and they marvelled at the wonder of such a by-gone era when something so unorthodox could be done in school.

Anyway, all our kiddos also caught the chess bug over quarantine and we ended up playing a lot of chess games.

Our love of the board game monopoly was re-kindled too.

We didn’t even mind when the game stretches beyond three hours.