“How are you doing”?

I am perfectly aware that this is not an appropriate breakfast to be eating at 5:18 in the morning, or any other time for that matter. However, when you’ve been awake since 3:45 and get hungry, you eat what is at hand. These sea salt caramel/chocolate cookies were available to me and I was powerless to resist. But, I am told that eggs and milk were involved in their creation, two perfectly acceptable breakfast staples.

When people ask me how I’m getting along during this pandemic, my answer is usually some version of “pretty well, actually.” The reason that this answer is mostly true is because I am married to Pam Dunnevant.

Since the day that Henrico County schools closed on March the 12th or whenever it was, Pam has been home all day everyday. Like everyone else, the isolation has been troubling. She, like everyone else, is worried about the future, concerned for her family and friends. But, with her it feels and looks different. There is a calmness about her, a serenity about everything. After a half day in the office, I come home at lunchtime a bundle of frayed nerves, often with a vacant expression on my face. More often than not I find her busy with some project or another. She is cheerful, relaxed, calm. I pick up on it and it begins to calm me as if it’s contagious. I begin taking my cues from her. I begin to relax. I start thinking of mundane things, the daily plot of life, the relentless forward progress of things. Yes, rearranging the furniture in the den needed to be done. Yes, she made cookies, a new recipe she’s trying out and yes, I will have one at 5:18 in the morning for my breakfast. No matter what is happening around me, I see in her a cheerful confidence which is infectious and allows me to truthfully answer, “pretty well, actually. I’m doing pretty well.”