Lemons
Creative Nonfiction
Note: I began writing this essay on April 30, 2020, six weeks into the pandemic lockdown, but I soon found it difficult to write anything, and I set it aside for more than five years. I just came back to it and finished it, with the perspective of those intervening years. I’ve been told you shouldn’t write about experiences until you’ve fully processed them and have that looking-back perspective. Honestly, though, the heartbeat of the essay hasn’t changed that much from the original. What I was feeling at the time remains what I was feeling at the time, and if anything, the feelings I express in the essay are more honest and more true because I wrote them down contemporaneously, as I was experiencing them. What I do have now, though, looking back on that period in our history, is more gratitude.
Under the right circumstances, being alone is the stuff of horror films. Castaway. I Am Legend. The “Time Enough At Last” episode of The Twilight Zone, where the introverted bookworm is the last man on Earth but finds solace in the fact that he is left alone with all the books, and all the time in the world to read them … but then he breaks his glasses.
*Trigger warning for video clip: gun, contemplating suicide.
Living alone during a worldwide pandemic felt a little bit like a very bad, very sad breakup, only much much worse. Breaking up with the whole entire world was a big thing. Too big.
At first, just like after a bad breakup, I cut my hair. I couldn’t go to a salon, so I cut it myself. It was a disaster—I looked like David Bowie in Labyrinth. Friends and family checked in on me via text messages and telephone calls. And Zoom video conferences. So many Zoom video conferences. It was overwhelming, to be honest, the rush to fill a social void I didn’t really have. I’d lived alone for several years, and I’d gotten good at it. Going from evenings spent mostly at home engaged in reading books and other quiet pursuits, punctuated with an occasional play or concert or dinner out, to thrice-weekly Zoom video conferences with family and different friend groups, was more social engagement than I was used to. It was overwhelming, and it wasn’t the same, and it was heartbreaking.
Then, things quieted, and that was even worse. We adjusted to a new normal. People went about the business of surviving and finding toilet paper and making things work. In the absence of the noise, I began to grieve what I was missing. I missed seeing my children and my grandchildren. I missed going to the movies. I’m generally an introvert and a homebody, so the shelter in place orders didn’t affect me as deeply on a social level as they did some of my more outgoing friends. But like my sister and fellow homebody Kim said, “I did like going one or two places.”
I didn’t feel lonely most of the time, but I missed who I missed. I missed my family. I missed a performance of Every Brilliant Thing that my daughter and I had tickets for in April 2020—I’d just purchased the tickets in February, when I was still blissfully ignorant of what was coming. I missed hearing Elizabeth Strout in conversation with Pico Iyer at U.C. Santa Barbara in May 2020—I’d purchased my tickets nearly a year before. I missed a much-anticipated gathering of friends in Palm Springs in June 2020. I missed my sixtieth birthday celebration in July 2020—I’d planned to take my family ziplining in the redwoods near Santa Cruz.
I sank into a depression. Friends said to me, “You must be getting so much writing done.” I wasn’t. Beyond work, which I was fortunate to be able to do remotely, my motivation was zilch. It rained every day those first few weeks, but even if it weren’t raining, where would I have gone? I was sad, and I was scared. I worried about my children and my grandchildren. I worried about myself. I worried about my friends and my extended family and the entire world.
A year before the pandemic, I took my grandchildren on a ten-day spring break trip, just me and them. We visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Alcatraz Island. We went to opening night baseball at Raley Field in Sacramento. We panned for gold in Coloma. On the last night of our trip, we got out of bed late at night, got dressed, and walked down the block to get ice cream cones at Baskin-Robbins. A year later, they were missing important times in their lives—sixth grade graduation, eighth grade graduation, the end of the first year of high school. School dances, hangouts with friends, first loves.
And me, I had plans for places I’d like to visit, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to travel again. I was grateful I’d traveled to Europe two summers before with my daughter and to Kauai with all of my children years before that. I wondered if I’d ever make it to Vienna, a lifelong dream. Or even to the East Coast—I’ve never been.
I turned sixty years old in July 2020. My daughter Melissa showed up the morning of my birthday and serenaded me on her ukulele. My family and I gathered on my porch for a socially-distanced takeout meal that evening. In that moment, it was all so much better than ziplining through the redwoods—seeing my children had become something rare and precious—sweet and bittersweet at the same time. We were being careful, but I knew that, if I were to get sick and lay dying at that time in history, I would never get to see or hug my children or my grandchildren again. Not in person. I am not generally such a downer. Well, maybe I am sometimes. But my tendency toward calamitous thoughts was magnified in the solitude and the silence. It was impossible not to process all the possibilities, and most of them weren’t good.
I heard people saying, “We are all in this together,” but it didn’t feel like it. Instead, we were all alone in this together. Although all of our stories intertwined in a big way at that moment in time, each of us had our own story, too. The pandemic was hard on each of us in unique and different ways. Some lost their jobs. Some were trapped at home in abusive relationships. Some were able to work from home but struggled to get anything done with their children at home all day. Children were missing out on being children.
Some, like me, were alone. I kept in touch with my children, but they were working, caring for their own families, and dealing with their own unique issues. I kept in touch with my grandkids, but they were teenagers and struggling to keep up in remote school, to stay connected with friends, and to fight boredom and cabin fever. They must have been afraid about the future, too. One day, I asked them where they most wanted to go after the shelter at home orders were lifted. Abby wasn’t much of a texter and didn’t respond—in her defense, her phone was probably turned off. I aspire to be more like her. Gavin answered that he was looking forward to hanging out with his friends again. It was his freshman year of high school—I can’t begin to imagine what he was going through. “Hmm,” Hunter said. “I’ll have to give that some thought.” They went back to whatever they were doing, and I never heard back.
I dwelled on all of these things, and I missed seeing my people. I began to feel lonely. My depression worsened. I was accomplishing nothing, least of all writing. I worried about my writing, too—it would be changed by the pandemic, it couldn’t help but be. I thought about how it would change, how the pandemic would creep into everything I wrote, unbidden. How everything I’d already written was before the pandemic, and everything I would write going forward for the rest of my life would be after the pandemic. Friends urged me to write about the virus, but that was the last thing I wanted to do. I stubbornly refused to give it any press. So no, I wasn’t getting any writing done. But I did rack up more than five million dollars in profit by making and selling lemon tarts and blackberry custards on Farmville.
One day, I was scrolling through the Farmville market board, shopping for lemons for my lemon tarts, when I came out of my body for a moment and hovered over an unkempt woman who had let life get the best of her. I saw myself as if I were seeing someone else, and I was shocked. I was scared of what I was becoming and what my future held. I was embarrassed and ashamed, too—I was so fortunate compared to so many. I was able to work from home, so my income was untouched. I knew my feelings and concerns were valid and that it was okay to have feelings about what was happening and to be sad. At the same time, I realized how self-indulgent it was of me to act as if my life had been destroyed when, in comparison to the lives of so many others, mine had merely been disrupted.
It had finally reached the point where I knew I had to snap out of it or go under, so I did what I do best. I made lists. Lists of things I needed to catch up on, lists of things I could do to improve my health and my mood, lists of things I could do to occupy my time. I got dressed. I brushed my hair. I put on shoes and lipstick. Then I began to do the things. I deleted Farmville and treated myself to a long-coveted MasterClass subscription. I began spending my evenings with the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Walter Mosley and Judy Blume.
I resumed journaling every morning. At first my pages were filled with COVID-19 statistics, doomsday worries, and complaints, but gradually the pendulum swung back and they became about more normal things, like what I’d done the day before, how the kids were doing, what I was writing about or planning to write about. I started working on a one-thousand-piece puzzle the grandkids and I hadn’t gotten around to and set up a family murder mystery party over Zoom. I listened to less news and more music. Less Trump, more Tom Petty. Less drama, more Dramarama. I read Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem for the first time. I ordered a book on beginning painting, and my son Robert gave me a set of art supplies—an easel, a canvas, a palette. Paintbrushes and oil paints. I hadn’t painted since I was fifteen. I started a succulent garden and an avocado plant. I didn’t make sourdough bread, but I learned how to make white peach and ginger jam.
I wrote a short story I’d been thinking about—it’s set in the 1930s, just after the Great Influenza pandemic, and it’s in my upcoming book, California Is an Earthquake. I did my best not to let my feelings about the coronavirus pandemic seep into the story. They didn’t belong. Only they did.
One day, my thirteen-year-old grandson Hunter sent me a text message out of the blue. “I know where I most want to go after lockdown,” he said. “I’d like to go on another spring break trip, like we did last year. There are still a lot of places we haven’t been.” A few days later, my friend Anna called just to talk. My daughter called the day after that to arrange a socially-distanced family get-together at the park for the upcoming weekend. We each brought our own lawn chairs and spent time together, catching up. In the long run, some days I was lonely, but mostly I was grateful. I knew that I was never alone, not really.
In one of my favorite movies, Singles (1992), Bridget Fonda’s character, Janet, tries desperately to get the attention of her narcissistic musician boyfriend, Cliff, played by Matt Dillon. After Cliff admits that her breasts are too small for him, “sometimes,” Janet even contemplates changing her body to better meet Cliff’s expectations of a girlfriend. Sitting beside him on the couch one day, Janet sneezes, and rather than say, “God bless you,” Cliff hands her a box of tissues without even looking at her and says, “Hey, babe? Don’t get me sick. I’m playin’ this weekend.” Janet has an ah-ha moment, the sudden realization that she doesn’t need this kind of energy in her life. She breaks up with Cliff. Cut to Janet engaging in self-care. Alone. Dancing in her bathrobe, watering her plants, lounging in the sunshine on her rooftop with a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and a boombox. In voiceover, Janet says, “I've always been able to do this, break up with someone and never look back. Being alone—there’s a certain dignity to it.”
My peace with living alone during the pandemic came slowly, and the isolation lasted much longer than any of us had expected it would, but I found that there was a certain dignity to being alone. I learned to appreciate and to lean into the good stuff. I learned to enjoy the sudden solitude—the quiet except for noise of my own making. The lack of food except for food of my own making. Entertaining myself rather than waiting to be entertained. Making something sweet out of lemons.
In the end, my family was so much more fortunate than many others. The memories of all the things that happened during the pandemic will haunt all of us who survived it for the rest of our lives. But we did survive, and we go on, and Hunter was right all those five years ago. We have a lot to look forward to—there are still a lot of places we haven’t been.
Leanne Phillips
Writer | Book Coach | Editor
leannephillips.com
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