COVID: The Road to Thanksgiving

They are coming home, most of them, the students from colleges around the country. Some of them have been tested for COVID, some have not; some have taken highly unreliable tests and are carrying with them the false confidence of false negatives. A few of them, but only a few, have taken high quality tests at the optimal time. Many do not know what kind of test they have taken. One thing is clear—the colleges that were so eager to welcome them in the fall do not want them now. Although some colleges are allowing people with “exceptional circumstances” to stay on campus, most have made it clear that it is time for their students to go home, in some cases weeks before the semester was supposed to end. As a nation we are experiencing a reverse spring break; waves of students, waves of infection, but few beaches and little sunshine.

The message from all but the few states burdened with recalcitrant Republican governors is that the holidays will, or should be, “different” this year. The first challenge, of course, is Thanksgiving. As stores stock up on turkeys and food banks give them away, we are told it would be best if there were no one to eat them except the members of our “household.” For those of us with college-age students, our sense of what constitutes that household is under construction as students-- and Thanksgiving--get closer. For this section of the population, “household” and “family,” even “household” and “immediate family,” begin to drift apart under the pressure of the pandemic. Our returned and returning students inhabit the edges of “household.”  How can we find a place for them in our homes and at the table?

My own son left his apartment in Syracuse, New York a week before his classes ended and just as all events, including classes, went remote. Because he lived off campus, the university could not require testing, but he took a test and got the negative results the day before his 1400-mile car trip to Houston. The idea of home propelled him through the night; driving too fast and too long. He was in Alabama by dawn of the next day. He did not, as my husband and I begged him to do, stop at a motel along the way, but called at 5:30 a.m. from a rest stop to say he was pulling over for a brief nap. It was a moment of wordlessly coordinated (if stumbling) parenting: Scott and I immediately got out of bed, downed some coffee and eggs, and headed to meet Paul on the road to spare him the last few hours of driving.

It was hard, as we raced east and a little bit north, not to think of what we were doing as reeling Paul in, the way one (that would be Scott) might reel in a fish. We were not exactly reeling him “home” as we hurtled away from it, but to our car, to “home” as it was embodied in a mother, a father, and (always up for a road trip) three dogs. This was a mobile home, a portable one, moving at 75 miles an hour through the brightening day. We were in time to see the morning sun sparkling on the waters of the Atchafalaya Basin, to see the Louisiana swamps in their early stillness. We were also, of course, heading toward a moving target—heading toward a traveler headed for us. The miles between our two cars, represented as squares on my phone app, diminished in double time. It seemed as if we were travelling not 75 but 150 miles an hour, flying towards each other. Time and speed drifted apart; the hours mounted, but the distance melted between us.

 Micromanaging our meeting took a little effort, but not as much as I thought it might. West of Hammond, Louisiana we were about 12 miles apart. It was time to find an equidistant exit on 1-12, where luckily all exits are numbered by mileage. The exit number problem forced me to look up from my screen, to convert dots and lines into the reality of gas stations, boudin shops, and grocery stores. Nonetheless, seeing Paul in the flesh putting gas in a car at a Shell station near exit 60 near Mandeville, was something of a shock. I found it a little hard to believe that we had found him without effort, that the numbers had added up—or more to the point, subtracted—to the zero point of encounter. With COVID uneasily in mind, I decided, for the first time after a separation, not to hug my son. Our distance even at meeting was, like many COVID precautions, something of a superstition since I was to spend 6 hours with him in a closed car. It was the dogs who touched him, pawed him. His own dog, left with us for the semester in case of the need for a getaway, gave him a greeting so moving for its shock and delight that I had to turn away.

Although both cars—Scott in Paul’s, Paul and I in mine with the dogs-- drove just as fast towards Houston as Scott and I had away from it, time slowed down to a crawl. Home was waiting for us, but did not move toward us in greeting.  I am not sure I have ever retraced so long a car journey in a single day. Landmarks reappeared in reverse order as we undid our morning drive. We were able to see the Louisiana swamps in evening light, and to wave as we passed the place in east Texas where two of our three dogs were born.

Once Paul arrived, our household coalesced around him as though he had never left. The dogs could now include his bedroom in their morning explorations; he sat with us to watch tv, and cooked his favorite foods in the kitchen. The house smelled different, but reassuringly familiar:  redolent of frying peppers, turkey bacon and Paul’s shampoo. It sounded as it did over the summer: a soundscape of rap music, phone alerts and weightlifting grunts. His alarm broke the morning silence, the quiet routine of late middle-aged awakenings. I had set myself the task of establishing and maintaining respectful boundaries, and of asking him to do the same. I tried not to ask him about his homework, although he had to remind me not to do so. I kept to my own routines: work, exercise, eating, while enjoying the fact of his presence and the salient reminders of it. We were once more a household.

But of course, we weren’t—exactly. Scott and I were out on a long walk when Paul called to tell us that a friend of a friend back in Syracuse had tested positive for COVID. We worked to understand the timing and chain of contacts, to calculate the risk. It turns out—no surprise—that these stories are complicated; names, tenses, chronologies are hard to pin down. We all tried—with limited information—to recreate the last day of Syracuse in the first days of Houston. All that driving, all that distance, and college could not be left behind in Paul’s rearview mirror.

As we wait for test results and try to calculate infection windows, our household has dissolved into two. Paul stays in his room 90 percent of the time, sometimes appearing masked in the kitchen. The shock of seeing him at the gas station gets replicated in miniature; although I can hear him in classes and meetings on Zoom, his presence is always a revelation. This pattern of withdrawal and reappearance feels like time out of time; it is both a requirement of the infamous “new normal” and a return to older patterns: the teenage Paul spending most of his days in his room. Determined to function as a household of adults, we are nonetheless revisiting, in a different house, the family forms of an older time and a younger Paul.

In the next few days, we will find out if we can reconstruct—quickly, immediately—our immediate family and a semblance of Thanksgiving. If Paul’s test is negative, and ours are too, if my older son Ross tests negative (again) in Austin, we will take the risk of reforming as a nuclear family, of coming together over what my husband dismisses as a “tiny” turkey. If things do not go optimally, we will immediately look at the house in a new way, apportion space for sickness, think differently about food and drink. Whatever happens, that house during COVID, that house-within-a house, will exist for us as a newly tangible possibility as the household reforms again.