The COVID-19 diaries: Easter eggs

For those of you not in NZ (hi! Thanks for reading!), last week Jacinda Ardern declared Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy essential services. Which was cute, but I was hoping for a pass this Easter. I’m a little bit bah humbug about Easter – I no longer spend the weekend going to the Catholic church with my mother, and I was never really allowed to indulge in the treats and had to watch my brother and sister scoff chocolate while I choked down the carob egg, which was always a little earthy and chalky and never convincing. I did make some buns, though! They were quite nice, but they did their inevitable trick of making my blood sugar levels high and then horribly low when I tried to correct them with insulin and a walk. To add to the cognitive dissonance, now that many of us have abandoned religion, we are approximating a European spring celebration in the middle of Autumn. All of the colourful egg pictures Violet and I taped to the garage (thanks, Jacinda for the templates!) blew off in wet squall.

I did go to the supermarket this morning, imagining the Easter rush to be over, but I still had to wait in a line for 20 minutes. This time I followed my friend Susan’s hot tip and brought a novel. I found myself reading Nell Zink’s account of the planes hitting the twin towers. It was very disconcerting, given the fact that I’d only just heard the news about the almost 10,000 dead from COVID-19 in New York City. I moved to NYC not long after 9/11 and can remember the time well, but now I can only imagine what it’s like to be holed up in your apartment, listening to the ambulances wail.