Lawless Letters

Image credit: Washington Post The humans have been barking more than usual. They watch that big flat box that they like, the one that shows pictures of other humans barking, and they bark back. Coronavirus , they keep saying. I do not know that word. But I know it must be something really great! For one thing, my entire pack is home. All of them, together, all the time! The man and the woman stopped telling me to guard the house (as if I needed a reminder! What will they remind me to do next, breathe?) as they left for "work." And the small humans have not stepped into that giant orange Twinkie with wheels since last week. Someone must have eaten that Twinkie. Lucky. Not only are they all home, they take me for walks three or four times a day now! Today, the man put on my leash and mumbled something about getting out of the house before he committed hairy Carrie. I don't know who Carrie is, or why she needs to be committed, but I sure hope she gets better soon.

Times are weird, folks. My little village at the edge of Chicago has gone from “quiet suburb” to “ghost town,” and the ghosts are us, haunting our own houses. Just under two weeks ago, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Somebody at Johns Hopkins University created an online tool to track confirmed cases and deaths. I refresh it daily to see the latest numbers. Ordinarily, that would be a weird thing to do, morbid even. Maybe it’s still weird, but normalcy has gone on hiatus. The stories from Italy are particularly heartbreaking. Medical staff must decide which patients to treat and which ones to let die when they run out of hospital beds and equipment. Newspapers print extra pages to accommodate the surge in obituaries. Survivors can't comfort each other at funerals for fear of spreading the sickness. Compared to that, my own problems seem trivial. I was supposed to be on my first-ever cruise right now, and being on lockdown sucks, but out there