The Fortress You Retreat Within

 The house at the end of the lane is mine.

She's a little fortress of stone straddling a bank that tumults into a pond. She is a formidable villa whose skirts used to encompass all the land around her. She has been settled here for over two hundred years. Long enough to have seen dozens of families transition from new hope to old death. She has secrets. Mysterious hidden passages. Root cellars, caves, and an ominous presence fortuitous in its reassurances. 

I met her twenty years ago. She was a speck on the edge off a map. Her criteria fit; old, stone house with land, relatively untouched. There were peepers and Lily of the Valleys in Spring. Deer and abundant wildlife in Winter. Her location did not. She was alone on the edges of a place no one sought outside of being born there. Her charm was what stole me. She was as exact in her integrity as she was simple in her merits. She would also require a lifetime of devotion. Old houses are like that. They will you into bowing to their needs and enslave you in their necessities. It wasn't me so much that I was worried about, it was my city slicker husband. He had no idea what he was in for.

We bought this place with the single goal of never leaving. We were going to die here. Our final stop. I wonder how many others before me meandered down this lane and felt the same way? 

A fortress can serve as a refuge, or, it can become your enslayer. Perhaps a matter of perspective. Perhaps a toothless grin from wicked grandmother waving an apple.

COVID has found us. Arrived quietly in the night. Tickled my throat. Ended up swallowing us whole. A python of paralysis that inches you into their gut. It has been 14 days of isolation. The house and the virus suffocating us from all sides. And yet there is no answer elsewhere. No place to go and find better shelter. No welcoming relief awaiting us where the drive meets the world. We stay. Hidden. Quietly suffering watching the hope slip into snow falls, and simpler lists for the tasks of the day. 

In two weeks I have watched my husband erode. He is distant, vacant, empty. He resists everything. The bed calls him like a tomb. The worry has melted into anger. He is giving up. Letting the leeches in his blood suck away his resistance. I ask him "how he feels?" a mind numbing hundred times a day. I search for any sign of forceful intent. It is not there. We just lie together. All day every day as it melts unrecognizable into the next. A delirium of attempts to know what day it is, and how many we have  been here? 

It was our custom to ask each other at the end of everyday "what the best part of the day was?" I attempted to carry it into COVID. A last sense of routine to hold us together within. I had to abandon it a week ago. There is not one remarkable thing within these 24 hour loops, save for breathing. We are still breathing.

I check his pulse ox, his temperature, heart rate, rhythm, rate of breathing. His degree of dysphoria. I am certain that I can feel this bug worming a way in my brain. "Eating into my cribiform plates" as I rip the scalp from my head to wave off the headaches causing my blinding agony. He keeps repeating, "umm, ok, uh-huh." Some statement to a villain I cannot see beside him. An affirmation we are alone here save for the thief within us. 

I am a veterinarian. Trained and skilled at assessing my patients who cannot speak. Who cannot point or articulate the source of their dismay. I am certain that if a disease of this magnitude hit our pets as hard as this has hit us that (save for a few outliers)The  all of my clients would be ending suffering long before day 14. 

People don't survive this. Seems silly to those of you not in the midst of it. Or, those young enough to allow resiliency to shape the path. The elderly are sitting ducks. Incapable of escaping the life it steals as you are too tired to fight. 

The snow has covered the ground. Seasoned the salt and pepper to all white with a few remaining black trunks to jab the gravid sky. 

The dogs are so bored they have become bad. Annoyances with too much energy to direct in a manageable fashion. I used to tell clients about the many advantages pets breath into life. The stable regimen they adhere you to. The life their antics breathe. The optimism they shed. The youth they bind us to remain within. A pandemic magnified this. Everyone got pets. Everyone found their isolation someone in a wag and a purr. For as much as I have lost all sense of any kind of humanity holed up here away from the world they have brought me back every day. Perhaps just for a peek, perhaps for just a vivid moment, but, they have been all I had, and dare I say all I needed. A life line of a wet nose nuzzled under the covers of eternal slumber housebound in a snowstorm sobbing alongside a pandemic.