By: Mary Forde
When I was about nine years old, I contracted Scarlet Fever, which I then passed on to my father and at least one of my siblings. This caused the family to be quarantined in our house for almost three weeks. We couldn’t leave the house and no one, except the doctor, could come in. We had a yellow sign on the door that said, “plague house – enter and die” (or something like that). I was the oldest of six kids in the house and I think the quarantine may explain the twitch my mother experienced later in life. This was before the time of distance learning, computers or decent children’s television – so we made due.
My mother’s approach to life was to set direction but not give directions. So one morning she asked me to make breakfast. This was when I learned that you can’t make Cheerios by following the ingredients on the back of the box and substituting spices for the chemical names you don’t understand. At some point I realized that the concoction in the pot was not going to lead to crispy golden rings, nor was I able to scrape the mess out of the pot so it was buried in the backyard – more to follow.
One of the major perks to quarantine was that since we couldn’t leave the house, a band of caring neighbors and friends would bring us a food basket everyday with exotic, tasty delights. One particularly memorable meal was from Mrs. Grady who left us Chicken Kiev and Brussels sprouts. I had always wondered if there was more to chicken than chicken wings and was amazed to find out the things you can do with farmyard animals and produce. Cooking for eight people, seven days a week, was not a passion (or even mild interest) for my mother. The possibilities of food was a revelation.
Probably my favorite quarantine memory was the day my mother gave us a stack of sheet and masking tape (where she found masking tape in our house is one of the quarantine miracles) and told us to drape the sheets over the furniture to make our own rooms. We spend days constructing spaces under tables and overturned chairs, crawling out around lunch time for bologna sandwiches and crawling back in. We exiled my baby sister to “Siberia” and I think my mother only found her by following the scent of her diaper.
It was during this period I learned how to do the wash. It did take a couple of months of bleach to turn our underwear back to white, but remember, mom was long on direction, short on directions. I think my father actually came to like pink boxer shorts and t-shirts.
My father was probably the sickest with the disease but every night we would all troop upstairs to their bedroom where he would make up stories about the Frog family – Freddy, Frankie and Fergy and their adventures. He was either very creative or delusional with fever but they were great stories (after a big rain storm the brother had an adventure riding on an egg carton using popsicles sticks toward the sewer drain). When we get together for family gatherings, each of us seems to remember a different Frog story – but we all remember them.
One afternoon, after we had dismantled the sheet world and I had washed and colored all the sheets blue, my mother but on big band music to teach us how to dance the Lindy because my father wouldn’t dance and she was going to need partners at our upcoming weddings (this is the first sign of cabin fever). None of us did learn the lindy but we did find out that frantically jumping around does resemble the jitterbug. If nothing else, it did tire us out.
Another afternoon, my mother told us to go out in the back yard and try to dig a hole to China, always game (but not very bright) we went out and got to work. We didn’t hit China but we did have a hole deep enough to bury the pot (see above). Between the ersatz Cheerios and all of our dead small pets (birds, goldfish, turtles) I believe our former back yard is now a toxic waste site.
My final fond memory of quarantine is when my mother would put the young kids down for a nap, she would tell the rest of us to go read. For some reason prior to lock down, she had purchased a set of Golden Book encyclopedias. I started with Volume 1 “Aardvark to Aye-Aye” and would crawl into a small, quiet space and read until I, too, fell asleep. I think I got all the way to “Oak trees to Ozone.” I have no idea what my primary school brothers were “reading” but then, neither did my mother – just as long as they were quiet(ish). You can play basketball with rolled up socks and a wastepaper basket.
Truth be told, despite being mildly sick, I loved quarantine. It felt like we were in this bubble where you had nowhere you had to go and nothing you had to do. To this day I love big band music, dancing and baking. I can do wash that comes out the same color it went in and I am reasonably good at Jeopardy (Aye-Ayes are lemurs native to Madagascar). There is nothing better than having a lazy afternoon to read a book until you fall asleep. I also learned that I don’t hate meat loaf, just my mother’s meat loaf (sorry mom, thanks Mrs. Winters). After all these years, I remember that my father can’t dance, my mother isn’t a cook but that together they could make quarantine into magic.
