Feb 5, 2021 3 min read

One vitamin C, two vitamin Ds, two Bs, a cod liver oil capsule and half an allergy pill – that’s the morning routine. At night it’s a different amount of the same things, minus the allergy pill.

Those handfuls of tablets, gulped down with a glass of water, have become the bookends of my days during the past 10 months. Although I long have followed some version of that twice-daily pattern, the restrictions of the pandemic have elevated those routines to markers of time, as predictable as a clock or calendar.

As the months have dragged on, working from home has taken on a sameness that makes one day less memorable or notable than the next. Although many of us have become more productive during the shutdown -and I’m grateful to be working when so many have lost their jobs – all that productivity has happened in the same context and without any of the convivial energy of an actual workplace.

My context is the home office, a spare bedroom with a desk and a chair.

Every one of the pandemic’s many dozens of zoom meetings has taken place with me sitting in the chair, an embroidered bug pillow propped on the day bed over my left shoulder.

When we all commuted to work, we saw the world – its traffic, its trees and houses and its people on sidewalks. Although I drove the same route to work every day, the scenes through the windshield were always moving and changing. Except for when I wash the bedding, that bug pillow has not moved since March.

When my children were toddlers, other young mothers and I would meet and talk about how all the days looked the same. Little kids need the routine of breakfast, play, nap, lunch, play, nap, dinner, bath, sleep. While baking meringue pies for Christmas one of those early years, I reached for the little jar of cream of tartar, and as I spooned out a quarter teaspoon, I wondered how many pies it would take before I needed a new jar. Time was somehow compressed in that jar of white powder.

Where would my children be when I finally ran out?

I finally bought a new jar of cream of tartar this week, a reminder – as if I needed one – that my children are grown, and one of them is so far away I haven’t been in his presence for more than a year.

Those vitamins are my pandemic time in a bottle. Opening the cabinet and pulling down the bottles has become such a routine that, one day last week, I almost took a second morning dose. The motions have become so rote and so forgettable in their sameness, I hadn’t remembered whether I’d taken the pills or not, such was the muscle memory of the physical motion of it.

As a voracious reader, few things would seem as empty as two bookends pushed together with nothing between them. My morning and nighttime routines have been pushed together, as if time has collapsed into itself. Yes, there’s plenty of work that happens between them, but the days lack the color, the variety, the people – all the noisy life that used to swirl around me.

Seven pills every morning and five every night – that’s 12 a day, times 11 months, which equals almost 4,000 pills I’ve taken. That’s a lot of pills.

But more to the point, that’s 330 days, all more or less the same.