by Léonie Rosenstiel
“I’m going stir crazy! I don’t know if I can take any more of this.”
Two weeks into quarantine, my friend’s discomfort leaped out of the phone at me. “Why are you so calm?”
“Am I? Guess I’m just busy.”
I meditate and pray daily. I feed the backyard critters. I do physical work. I give thanks for all the good things in my life. I put together boxes of clothes to be donated, when I’m able to do so again. I try new recipes. I check my publishing deadlines. I avoid predicting when I will be free again. Worrying about it won’t help, so I consciously pay close attention to other things.
After I moved into my new house, back in 2014, I put my old, large-screen TV in the shed, intending to hook it up “sometime.” I never did. Instead, I started writing daily. The flat screen’s still in the shed and I’ve just finished a three-volume set, tracing the history of my family from ancient times to the present.
What surfaced? A love letter to my mother from an American colonel later cashiered for consorting with a German spy. Another from a provincial Australian official (also a colonel). Even during the late 19th century, I discovered, women in my father’s family always participated in family enterprises. They might not have been able to vote yet, but they did have a voice in family affairs.
The manuscript ran to over 900 pages, completed just before we were told to stay home. I’ve plugged into the draft all the new insights I’ve gleaned from the documents I found in the garage. Complete with footnotes, it now tops a thousand pages, has found a publisher—Wisdom Editions, an imprint of Calumet Editions—and will be published in 2021.
Now, I’m sorting through some of the thousand or so boxes I inherited from various members of my family, a task I’ve spent years actively avoiding. I’ve invented all manner of convoluted excuses for this lapse. But I’ve run out of them now.
My closest friend died during the pandemic—of loneliness, I think. Others are ill. And we’re all physically isolated. So very much alone. In the process of keeping in touch, I’ve become an international clearing house for information with developments on the virus as well as what transpired in my family all those years ago.
I’ve endured periods of solitude before—some as I was growing up, others when I was doing research in Europe and knew I was under surveillance, and finally, recently when I was living under a very restrictive gag order. These memories help me now—knowing that I’ve always survived. Even the gag order was eventually lifted. Because all of those difficult periods ended, I find it easy to hope that one day soon, we’ll all be able to live in society again.
Léonie Rosenstiel has worked in many different genres, including biographies (W. W. Norton and Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), record liner notes, translations from French and Spanish, and a college-level textbook for Schirmer Books, a division of Macmillan. She has won awards for her fiction and nonfiction from SouthWest Writers and New Mexico Press Women.