Special Delivery

In the summer of the plague year, my other half and I moved from San Mateo, California, where we had lived for 33 years, to Seattle, Washington, to be in the same city as our only child. We loved the Bay Area. We had friends there, family, purpose. But the pandemic came and with it, the clear, overriding imperative to reunite our family and weather this together. We sold the house that we had lived in for 17 years and embarked on a surreal 13-hour road trip on eerily empty highways. Every gas station rest stop felt like coronavirus Russian Roulette. The anxiety of feeling COVID lurking all around us was so overwhelming that I think I was in a trance for most of the drive.

And now we’re in Seattle in a rented house where I…