My husband is not essential. Selling books is not an essential service. Not even after you consider all the bored people and the students who no longer have classes. Not even if he wipes down all the banisters and door knobs between customers at the book shop.

Shipping dangly earrings with phonetically spelled names like “Tripolee” is an essential job at this time. I know because I am the one who gets up at six to eat a hot bowl of buckwheat porridge and drives to the warehouse to ensure the Tripolee earrings are packed up. Yes, I’m driving for once! It is one of those new bonuses permitted me because the world is ill. It is right that fares are now waived but busing to work seems inconceivably dangerous. The car I’m driving is a beat up whore, practically a zip car. It is owned by a minimalist bike mechanic who loans it out to any pal who needs it to get more than a bike-load of groceries. This car is usually in the service of bringing passengers to campsites or hauling amps to gigs in seedy, anarchist bars. I’m not sure the horn works but the side-view mirror is cracked into two halves that increase visibility by providing two different angles.

When I drive my lips disappear. My eyes do not blink. The first day the radio was not played but a high eeeeee-ing song was heard coming from my own person as I entered the freeway. In the name of income I drive to work. In my house of two adults I am the only one who can pay the rent. For the first time in my life this gluten-freek is the bread winner. If I wanted I could stay home and still get paid, the warehouse actually said so. Some of my co-workers are doing that. But they are all the ones who have been working there for three years and can neatly pack a box with seven items in under a minute. Compared to them I am the slow poke newbie and if lay offs started my name would be first. Honestly, it was hard enough getting this warehouse job during good economic times, so I can’t imagine people taking my resume seriously in hard times. I can just hear the employers of the future interviewing me… “It says here you worked a few months for a puppet theater ten years ago…” “So with all this experience as a self-employed artist what makes you think you have what it takes to pack pickled herring all day?”

Everyone has a different level of paranoia at this time. Some people are washing the bottoms of their shoes. Some people just aren’t going outside ever again. Some people touch everything through a plastic bag. Some people won’t video chat because the spies might learn the layout of their living room. Some people are hoarding liposomal vitamin c (following the alternative doc hype that it can eliminate covid faster) so that those of us who take it mainly because it helps us to poop just have to remain really constipated all the damn time. There are not enough facts and the facts that exist change constantly.

My husband and I go for walks every day so we don’t scratch the walls up with our unshorn quarantine claws. The thistles along the river are thick and lush right now. Thanks to covid-19 swans have returned to the canals of Venice. In India, the smog has thinned to reveal the Himalayan mountains, and for once no one messes with the thistle patch on the hill next to Stubby’s Hamburgers. It feels good to see such healthy thistles. Those thistles ain’t afraid and it gives me hope. Seriously, cause even the neighborhood orange cat who normally rubs on everyone seems to know something is up and is keeping his cautious distance. Someone told me they want to get a new cat but fear they might carry the virus in with them. Who knows what is possible, but for now I say just go out and look at the thistles.

On one of our walks we saw a digital billboard flash the slogan, “Thank you warehouse workers.” “Hey, that’s you, baby! You’re a hero,” grinned my husband. I think he’s been a little worried that I might decide I am too anxious about the situation to keep going to work. And I did have a day where I was thinking like that. It was back before I had a face mask that fit me snug enough and we went to the grocery store and laundromat on the same day. I know, I know, but believe me, it’s a bad idea to try and wash your jeans in the bathtub without a contraption to designed to squeeze the water out. I’ve done it. Twice. So instead we went to the laundromat and my handkerchief kept coming untied which caused me to feel too unsafe, and soon I was sobbing, dragging my wet clothes out of there to finish air drying at home. Actually, we went to two laundromats that day, but as we entered the first a guy decided to play offense and coughed performatively by the front door as we entered. When we drove away we saw him pointing and laughing at us through the window.

I have never been publically thanked for anything in my life. Before this nobody ever placed a hand on my shoulder and earnestly said, “Anja, you’re essential.”

“Stolen Valor!” laughed a friend over Zoom. I agree. I roll cat hair off of returned yoga pants and get paid for it in a time in which medical professionals are fighting to keep a pandemic worth of hearts beating. But stolen valor or not I wanted to get my picture with the “Thank You Warehouse Workers” sign. Maybe I could show my colleagues, hey, we have a sign!!! So we waited for the billboard marquee to switch to that message again. I waited for a long time and saw a lot of ads for McDonalds plus:

“Thank you delivery drivers!”

“Thank you grocery store workers!”

“Thank you farmers!”

“Thank you home healthcare workers!”

It went on and on but never came back to the warehouse workers. To me this whole experience is like September 11th mixed with the fantasy of what some people thought Y2K was going to be like. It is the only explanation I have for why people are hoarding bottled water. What do people think is going to happen to the tap water? Why do all these people who live next to the Great Lakes want bottled tap water shipped in from somewhere else?

Anxiety doesn’t make sense. I know, I have been terribly anxious all my life. When I was a kid I used to lay on the floor by my mom whenever she had a phone call. If anything I was overhearing sounded potentially threatening I would interrupt her conversation and ask about it. I was reminded of this the other day by a six-year-old listening in on the other end of my conversation with their parent. “A man with covid was caught coughing on all the fruit in the grocery store?” “An entire choir caught it?” And the six-year-old was assured “Oh honey, it wasn’t our grocery store. And that choir was very, very far away.” But no kid who sits straining for things to be worried about in their parent’s conversation is going to be too calm in this time. Then again, as a normally anxious adult, for once I feel abnormally calm. Maybe it’s just that every stressful task has been canceled so I finally have time to just draw pictures of donkeys and arthropods if I feel like it. Whatever it is I find myself trying in vain to tell all my friends, “This is a temporary situation. What will be, will be. It is largely out of our control, relaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaax. Go outside and look for thistles.” In non-pandemic times they’re usually the ones to tell me that.