The sign outside Chatham Marketplace says “Masks welcome” and in small print at the bottom “Unvaccinated must wear masks.” But of course, there is no way to tell who’s had the jab and who hasn’t.

I have my favorites: the black mask that hangs on a back-door coat hook, the red one that I keep in our Subaru, and the blue mask that lives in the door pocket of our blue Volt. I’ve tucked a green Chatham Marketplace mask into my purse and stocked the glove box with N-95’s and 94’s.

I never stopped wearing a mask in public, even when the pandemic was in recession — before the Delta variant began circulating in Chatham County. I wash them, hang them in the sun to dry, and carry them back to their posts. They are the smallest of insurance premiums, along with online shopping and socializing outdoors. I like to stack the deck in my favor.

I’m a little irked by the unvaccinated. This might be over, all this mask-wearing, were it not for the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. But now that Delta has arrived, it’s too late for that kind of thinking. The virus will continue replicating, bouncing from one under-immunized human to another, getting better at contagion, crippling economies, burning out health care professionals, many of whom, inexplicably are also unvaccinated.

In Vaxed, waxed, but definitely not relaxed: Welcome to the pandemic swerve, Maura Judkis of The Washington Post writes:

The best way to describe what we’re going through right now is the prisoner’s dilemma, says Gretchen Chapman, a professor of psychology who studies vaccination decision-making at Carnegie Mellon University. Vaccines, as with the classic game theory model, provide a collective reward when everyone cooperates, though individuals may have personal incentives not to cooperate. If not enough individuals cooperate, then the people who did the right thing suffer the consequences.

And the truth is, only wealthy countries can afford to vaccinate enough of their people to produce herd immunity and it was only a matter of time before the virus upped its game. Now, it’s every man for himself and I’m doing everything I can to stay out of the hospital.

My father says the virus is God’s (or Nature’s) way of addressing overpopulation. Like many, he wants to believe there is a plan, that someone out there has the blueprints, that there is a system with built-in checks and balances.

I’d like to believe we’re smart enough to stay ahead of nature, that we won’t replicate until we run out of food like the White-tailed deer, or unwittingly unleash a super-bug that changes life on earth forever.

Like many, Shelley has been sidelined by the virus. Her grade school music students sent home, private lessons suspended, and the classes at Joy of Movement on hiatus. Yet her protein quotient remains stable, and chickens are a great way to bridge that gap.

For a long time, her coop stayed empty. She’d had chickens in previous years — big laying hens and roosters she’d gotten as chicks — but like most backyard flocks they came and they went. When that happens a couple of years in a row, it sorta takes the wind out of your sails.

There is no need for a rooster if all you want is eggs, and especially if you value quiet. Hens lay eggs with regularity whether they have been fertilized or not. Some find the idea of consuming a little embryo a little hard to stomach.

Others insist the roosters provide essential protection, but I have seen some very scrappy hens as well as timid cocks. But Shelley wasn’t taking sides in any of these arguments and so she ended up with two impressive roosters a couple of years ago.

I enjoyed my role as the chicken aunt in those days. When Shelley was out of town, I crawled through the hen house door and gave the water and feed dispensers a good shake. The birds were friendly and unafraid and sometimes touched my hands with inquisitive pecks. I peeked in the nesting boxes and harvested the eggs. “Keep as many as you want,” Shelley said, and I did, putting the rest in her refrigerator for her to eat and give away.

Shelley’s tuxedo cat, Lucy, kept me company. It has been a long time since I had either livestock or pets and I reveled in the purposeful routine of animal care.

Shelley’s boyfriend Eric had been house sitting when those birds perished. Every last one shredded by what must have been a fox. Mercifully, he was able to remove the carnage before her return, but the episode stunned Shelley and she went a long time without birding back up.

A couple of months ago, when Eric saw a shipment of chicks arrive at the Pittsboro Post Office, he seized the moment and put a reserve on half a dozen pullets.

Covid-19 has put so many out of work and turned grocery shopping into such an ordeal, that chickens have become quite trendy. Our two local feed stores can barely meet demand. The chicks come in and fly out the door. Eric was not taking any chances. If she didn’t want them, he could rescind the hold.

Eric enjoys tinkering with cars and homesteading infrastructure. For example, he turned this blue barrel into a lettuce planter for Shelley’s birthday last year.

But of course, Shelley did want the chicks. She already had the setup and even a little feed leftover. Plus, she was home where she could keep an eye on them. And now she had a rooster to help fend off the predators.

“Look at this comb, and these wattles. I’ve been wondering why they were growing so fast, and now I think I know.” She cradles her little guy and beams. “They’re supposed to all be hens, but this breed is hard to sex.”

Shelley puts the little black cockerel back and reaches for a Barred Rock pullet. It’s obvious she is smitten with the backyard chicken bug and they seem to enjoy being fussed over.

It’ll be a couple of months until her babies begin laying, but she’ll still be ahead of the game. With store-bought eggs approaching $5 a dozen, she will have a steady supply for only $1.50 a dozen.

The virus is not done with us yet and nobody knows what will happen when the weather gets cold and forces us inside. Best to be as self-sufficient as possible.

I step onto our new blogging platform, pale knuckled from a week of standing in the wings while our good friend, Steph, of Warm Reptile Designs, worked her behind-the-scenes magic. Should you need a web designer or someone to help you stay up to date, look her up. Steph delivered everything I asked for while fielding my uninformed questions with the patience of a saint.

Bob and I discussed at length the future of our digital world and decided to move only a portion of Troutsfarm to SiteGround. The old site was an unwieldy patchwork created across two decades using a variety of software, much of it unsupported. Rather than keep 228 monthly photo essays out there on the web, we’ll turn our most cherished photos into coffee table books. In the same way that restaurants are resurrecting as caterers, we are re-imagining our photo albums.

And then there’s the camera. My brother, John, a professional photographer, was smart to point us in the direction of the Sony 6100 series. He liked that it was mirrorless because that made it small and lightweight, quick and quiet, and capable of taking in a lot of light. To keep us from floundering, Bob purchased a 362-page guide to help us navigate the menu settings.

For this post, I’ll take a walk around the garden, beginning with the ground cherries, or pohas as they call them on Maui. Their flavor is unique, a buttery cross between strawberry and vanilla with overtones of pineapple, or, as our friend, Rose, described them, “If buttered popcorn were a fruit.”

I see the edamame pods are growing fatter every day. When they’re ready, we’ll boil them in salted water and suck the buttery beans from their fuzzy pods. Yes, we have a butter fixation. I think back to last year’s August edamame feast with Haruka and Jason, about how we ate until we couldn’t eat any more and left food on the table.

I zoom in on the picture and am astonished by the detail. What a fantastic camera!

On to the squash, which is dutifully climbing a makeshift trellis, but has a long way to go. We started three varieties from seed this year and Kabocha, pictured below, comes highly-heralded by our friend, Linda Watson, of Cook for Good. Linda wrote about discovering Kabocha here.

I also have high hopes for our brown turkey figs which should start coming ripe in late August. Bob is not a big fig fan, but I love them and so do most of our friends.

And our coveted persimmons. More hand-wringing here. Our yard is lousy with squirrels, or “rats on acid” according to Bob. A mockingbird pair have made a nest in the Asian pear adjacent to the persimmons, and every time a squirrel climbs the tree to pinch another green pear, the mocking birds swoop down and attack. It’s funny to watch, but when we began seeing unripe persimmons on the ground, we started chasing the squirrels, too.

Last year we harvested three Asian pears and no persimmons. Three years ago, the new trees yielded a bowl of fruit while still in their pots. Last year, we planted them in the ground and they were too mired in transition to bear fruit. This year we wait with fingers crossed.

There, that wasn’t so bad. I defined my deliverable — a hybrid between essay and photo album — and got started. It feels good to be posting on a secure site (the old site was not secure) and with that dark tunnel of transition behind me.

I’m calling the reopening a dance based on an article by writer and researcher, Tomas Pueyo, in which he referred to virus suppression strategy as a hammer and a dance. We’ve done the hammer part — locked ourselves down tight to starve the virus of vectors and flatten the curve — and now we begin the dance. We’ll venture out, and when infections spike, we’ll retreat. Open, die, retreat — one step out, one step back, skipping over wet sand, flirting with the waves in a hurricane.

Bob and I are sticking with the hammer phase until a vaccine becomes available. He’ll continue working from his back room office while l pretty up our gardens, harvest greens, launder sheets, walk the woods, and talk on the phone from our hammock. Day after day. The hammer looks like retirement sans walks with my friends. I feel as if I am caretaking an expensive resort with only two guests.

Our spring flowers are always over-the-top robust. I refresh our vases daily, like Marta did for the lodge we managed in Belize. I would watch her in admiration and envy as she wandered the grounds in search of beauty. And now I am Marta, making beds, kneading dough, and stalking fresh blooms with my pruners held high like a divining rod.

The highways roared to life as soon as the governor announced Phase 1, and logging trucks began spraying bark shards on the strip of lawn out front.

I push a weed and twig-laden wheelbarrow up there to add a layer of auburn crumbs. I’m startled by the slipstream, a gale that follows each giant truck. No speed limit today. Everyone seems determined to make up for lost time.

I park the barrow and dart across the lawn between bursts, plucking bark, tucking pieces into my sweatshirt. A semi roars by and I turn to see the wheelbarrow flip into the ditch. One step forward, one step back. Cha cha cha.

I’ve been fighting writers block for weeks.

When Bob and I first tucked into the primal adventure of our lives, I anticipated an unprecedented flow of words. They would spill freely, unhampered by social distractions just like the times we had left the country and reinvented our lives. I pictured me and Bob in a sampan, bumping our way down a river clogged with Covid refugees, an island of two navigating a foreign landscape.

Writing would be as easy as falling off a log. All I had to do was pick up my Pilot G2 gel pen and float to the fertile gulf. I would delve deep, spending hours on my back porch rocker with my legs stretched out, scribbling furiously, capturing dialogue and irony, blithely blasting through the log jams.

I would build an easel of my knees and sketch a fantastic world. I would capture the glories of spring in watercolor pencil, nuanced with brushstrokes of global angst. I would be the Edward Scissorhands of Art, flinging finished work to the lawn as my fingers rushed to start another.

But that surge in creativity has not been forthcoming. Instead, my words repeat in dull loops, rolling beneath my feet, refusing to carry me anywhere. My sketch pad sits patiently on a dusty shelf.

Granted, it is April and we have planned a tight garden, every square inch of that old swimming pool measured and groomed. I’ve been shuffling compost and mulch around the yard in our wheelbarrow, have made that grey plastic tub the epicenter of my world. No time for art.

But, who am I kidding? Were it any other time of year, I would be squandering these extra hours polishing the copper-bottom pots, cleaning out cupboards, and squirting canned air on my crumb-infested keyboard.

On cold mornings perfect for writing, I zest lemons and bake pound cake. I flip pancakes and chop onions instead of fleshing out my stack of first drafts. In the evenings, after reading mountains of corona-virus news, I labor over The New York Times crossword before turning off my browser to play solitaire with a stiff, new deck.

Like many, I’m suffering from cognitive dissonance, unable to reconcile my sinfully simple day-to-day routine with the sour news of death. When I close my eyes, I imagine that I’m sitting at a table with Bob on a Mediterranean veranda. We touch glasses, our eyes shining, and turn our faces seaward to await the mushroom cloud.

And so I eat lemon pound cake while the planet wobbles, and I find myself choking on the unfairness and the uncertainty, the loss of stability, life, and livelihood. I can’t ignore the sight of our social systems folding in on themselves like a house of cards.

I want desperately to write of something else, to try and capture the light of hope. I’d like to believe world governments and their people will rebuild a more equitable world on the ashes of this pandemic. In my dreams, people who have been forced to cook for themselves will retain the habit, the gardens they have dug will remain weed-free, and government will fix our healthcare fiasco. In my dreams.

Homo Sapiens built enormous homes and blew up mountains for minerals to heat them with. They covered their food in plastic, and the plastic ended up in landfills, waterways, and inside animals. The well-to-do relied on the disadvantaged to trim their toenails and cook their food. The planet was heating up, the ice caps were melting, and hundreds of thousands of animals were sailing over the extinction cliff with humans close behind them.

Yes, humans were a runaway train of obscene wastefulness in the pre-Covid days and it took a pandemic to wake them up. But that was eons ago.

After the virus killed millions and dismantled the global economy, people sobered up and let go of non-essential nonsense. They learned to garden, cook, and cut their nails, they began harnessing solar and wind for energy, built smaller homes, and stopped smothering everything in single-use plastic packaging. Meanwhile, the trees grew, unhindered, and, over time they turned the air breathable again.

The best part of this story? Covid-19 was a virus that attacked human lungs.

I picture five strangers in a floating prison with four gallons of water and three weeks of rations, stonily regarding the infinite, blue seascape. Conversation long ago exhausted, their eyes shift from the tarp covering their meager supply to the deepening lines in each other’s faces, and back to the sea of undrinkable water.

My browser feeds me news of asymptomatic ballplayers and senators testing positive for Covid-19 while the untested hoi polloi hover in limbo, staring at their kitchen cupboards. A family in Freehold, New Jersey, my childhood stomping grounds, is paying the ultimate price for honoring their Sunday dinner tradition. The matriarch and three of her eleven children have died, while others wait out their infection.

In the absence of community testing, we assume that we and everyone around us are carrying the virus. All are guilty until proven innocent. And, should we test negative, that status evaporates when we touch the next community-accessible hard surface, or pass downwind from someone with a dry cough.

The only rational response is to distance ourselves. Bob and I bang around our little dingy, embracing each time we cross paths. We’ve shrunk our world to house and yard, meandering from our news feeds to the garden, to the refrigerator. We subscribe to a spring CSA and start planting potatoes.

This morning I wake from a dream where I am hugging an older woman in a red dress, a familiar stranger with whom I’ve formed an instant bond. What I wouldn’t do for a hug from an outsider.

The United States took action too late. Our curve will look like most other countries, a hockey stick of terrible decisions, drastic action, overwhelmed health care, and triage. I click on a satellite image of two limed trenches in an Iranian graveyard, while our hospitals draft guidelines for who to turn away. The governor extends North Carolina school closures to mid-May. Many of our friends are now sidelined from work, while friends and family in healthcare, food service, and delivery scramble to keep up.

As the sun bears down, the water lures you from your rubber seat. The cooling relief quickly turns to panic when you feel the first bump of a fish against your dangling legs. You claw your way back into your life raft and watch the salt crust bloom across your arms. The fins appear, and you try not to lick your lips.

~*~

On the weekends, we break our quarantine for a walk at the dam. We’ve altered our route as more people take advantage of the park. We test the breeze, doing our best to stay upwind of other strollers. Like us, many take calculated risks: the occasional trip to town for supplies, dinner with the folks, or a walk beyond the confines of home.

I’ve given up my Tuesday walk with Shelley and Amy. Instead, we text and talk on the phone. I compensate by walking out our back gate and disappearing down the trail into Tami’s woods. At my destination, I stand on the big rocks and regard Stinking Creek, hoping to see a deer come down to drink, or perhaps another human being. On the way home, I stop and sit on Carl’s bench, beneath that stately beech. Sometimes I lie back, staring up at the beyond, thinking about what I’ll do with those peppers when I get home.

I set my flip phone on the table and look out a freshly-washed window at our greening lawn. It is Saturday, day four of my self-imposed covid-19 retreat, and plan-canceling has become second nature. I was able to say “No,” to grocery shopping, buddy strolls, and a writing workshop.

Bob and I had a pivotal discussion after dinner on Tuesday. At first, I thought he was kidding, but the set of his face assured me he was serious. He’d been watching the virus sweep over the globe, affecting his co-workers and their clients for weeks. “I’m only suggesting we limit our exposure and wait it out. See what happens,” he said.

“Okay, I’m with you,” I said, struggling to catch up. “I am, after all, an introvert.”

Earlier that day, I had spent $100 on groceries, and now it was time to sit tight and eat down our larder. “It’ll be easy, I assured myself. “It’ll be fun!”

We have long been a nation of two, so reducing our social profile would be easy. Bob works from home, I’m retired, and we have access to an arsenal of social media tools. Ignoring the lump in my windpipe, I began re-framing my commitment. It would be a relaxing mini-retreat cleverly disguised as our civic duty, not solitary confinement. We’d merely be removing ourselves from the vector pool. It would be like a second honeymoon.

“What’s on our list?” Bob asks this morning.

“Well, we’ve got our Dam walk . . .”

We are running our of winter projects. The pollinator garden we topped off with compost last weekend is settling nicely, and the frogs are happy. We should probably plant out the last of the spider lily bulbs we got from Whitney. If we felt ambitious, we could work on replacing the crawl space door. And we could spend an hour wiring chicken wire onto the garden fence.

Instead, I sew the heels shut on my wool socks, and we drive out to Jordan Lake. We step between the guard rails onto the worn path towards the tailrace. The water is much calmer today, the whirling gull vortex replaced by a solitary blue heron. The sun bounces off everything, the distant trees one-dimensionally stoic. A man with a long, black ponytail tosses a net as a cormorant rises, flapping wildly.

Back home, we tackle the overflow in our garage, unearthing a set of rusting pipe-wrenches that Bob plans to restore. We play tidy-up for a little while before coming inside to gorge on popcorn. Bob retires to a sunny bedroom with the last chapters of In Cold Blood while I sit in a rocker on the front porch and get caught up with my brother, Johnny.

Later, I open the chest freezer and pull a bag of homemade seitan cutlets from the top shelf. We could eat out of here for a month! Additionally, we are packing an extra ten pounds of flour, ten pounds of dried beans, a cupboard stocked with canned goods, five pounds of rice, and four pounds of pasta. The garden weighs in with collards and carrots, and there are squash and sweet potatoes from last fall. And, in the refrigerator, we’ve got four quarts of mayonnaise and more than a dozen eggs from Ted and Helen’s chickens in the fridge.

So far, our social distancing project has been quite bearable. Tomorrow promises more of the same: a little exercise, a bit of puttering, and some heavy snacking. The tightness in my throat is long gone, and I’m feeling good about doing my bit to slow the spread of Covid-19. Additionally, we’ll likely stay healthy, and are in no danger of losing weight.