{"id":3842,"date":"2023-03-02T09:23:49","date_gmt":"2023-03-02T14:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/?p=3842"},"modified":"2023-03-02T10:22:28","modified_gmt":"2023-03-02T15:22:28","slug":"pandemic-penguins-in-a-plague-house-to-a-parakeet-in-a-parking-lot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/pandemic-penguins-in-a-plague-house-to-a-parakeet-in-a-parking-lot\/","title":{"rendered":"From Pandemic Penguins in a Plague House to a Parakeet in a Parking Lot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A long and winding story about friendship and fate, perhaps\u2026<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Aubrey Ann Parker
Current Contributor<\/strong>

I grew up in and around Traverse City, where both sets of my grandparents lived\u2014Cedar, Williamsburg\/Acme, and then Lake Ann\/Interlochen. My best friend from college, Quinn Davis, also grew up in Traverse City, but we didn\u2019t become friends until we dated roommates during our sophomore year and basically became roommates ourselves, since we spent more time in the boys\u2019 room than in each of our own that year. Our relationships with those boys only lasted four months after that, but our relationship to one another has continued almost two decades later. (Also, I feel I should mention that our mothers are now best friends, too; they\u2019ve known each other since they, themselves, were in college, and they actually have a funny anecdote about living in the same apartment building\u2014during a snowstorm, one had to ask the other for a roll of toilet paper, because she had completely run out.)

Fast-forward to July 2020, meeting my friend\u2014who now lives in Chicago\u2014for a drink, and she told me about how she and her husband, Josh Stoolman, had adopted a puppy who had been found on the streets in Arkansas, then shipped to a rescue in Tennessee, and was en route to them in Chicago. She also told me how they had been trying to get pregnant for a few months and all that entailed\u2014it isn\u2019t as easy as they led us to believe back in high school sex-ed.\u00a0\u00a0

Just a few weeks later, though, she updated me that she was, in fact, pregnant\u2014with twins, due in March 2021. They had just bought a new house in a different neighborhood for their expanding family, as they had been renting a duplex that would not have been cohesive with two of everything, plus the new puppy, (named Kolache, after the Czech cookies that Quinn used to make with her grandmother). She asked if I could come down in the new year to paint a mural in the nursery. But because of the continuing pandemic, which we all had hoped would have been \u201cover\u201d by then, I wasn\u2019t able to visit in January\/February 2022, as we had hoped. Nor in April\/May after the babies were born, because our newspaper business usually ramps up right about then, and it was too stressful to coordinate a visit with my work schedule.\u00a0\u00a0

So this brings us to now.\u00a0\u00a0

With my work having a slight lull after the fall catch-up from the busy summer season, and just before the close of the fiscal year, I had a break right before Thanksgiving, so I scheduled a flight from Traverse City to Chicago for Tuesday, November 15, hoping to stay through Tuesday, November 22, arriving back home just in time to spend the holiday with my family.\u00a0\u00a0

Only, Josh had started feeling sick right before my arrival. Quinn had warned me that he had some sort of bug, but he had taken three COVID tests and all had been negative. I thought about staying home and delaying my trip to Chicago once again, which would have meant more than a year of waiting to journey down to help out with changing diapers and lulling babies to sleep, which was now the priority over painting the nursery. But ultimately, upon discussing with another friend\u2014who notably has four children and a fifth on the way, so I trust her judgment\u2014she reminded me that this was probably when Quinn needed me the most, when one parent was at less-than-peak performance.

Packing a very light backpack with only a couple changes of clothing\u2014since I knew it was very unlikely that I\u2019d be leaving the house much\u2014I got on a plane in Traverse City at sunset, and then took the train straight from the Chicago airport to a stop that was about a 15-minute walk from their house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Aubrey
Packing a very light backpack with only a couple changes of clothing, the author got on a plane at sunset and arrived in Chicago around 7pm local time. Airport selfie by Aubrey Ann Parker.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYour fairy godmother has arrived!\u201d I said, gifting Quinn and Josh each a book that I had grabbed from the Free Little Library next to their house. (Good manners say never to show up without a hostess gift.) \u201cNow give me a baby.\u201d

By this point, Quinn was now feeling sick, as were both of the babies, and actually Josh was feeling somewhat better. Moreover, the babies hadn\u2019t been sleeping well since getting sick, so Quinn wasn\u2019t sleeping well either.\u00a0\u00a0

Those first couple of days, I helped out mostly by cooking fruit-and-veggie-filled meals to boost immunity, and I took their now-one-year-old puppy on hour-long walks. I also was, obviously, holding babies and feeding babies and changing babies and helping with baby bath time.\u00a0\u00a0

I never got to paint the nursery, but it wasn\u2019t really needed; by this time, the nursery had a \u201cpenguin theme,\u201d in part because an artist friend\u2014wanting to make them a special piece for their wedding\u2014once had asked Quinn, \u201cIf you and Josh were animals, what would you be?\u201d She immediately answered \u201cseal,\u201d for herself, because she has been told on more than one occasion that she looks like a seal, thanks to her large brown eyes.\u00a0\u00a0

\u201cI think that Josh would say he\u2019s a tiger,\u201d she had responded, stopping to think for a minute. \u201cBecause that\u2019s always been his favorite animal. But he\u2019s a penguin.\u201d

Now, an ink drawing of a seal kissing a penguin on the cheek hangs in their dining room, and there are penguin-shaped blankets, toys, and rugs in the nursery and scattered around the house. On the last night of my stay, I eventually did a quick watercolor painting of two baby penguins holding hands beneath the aurora australis<\/em> (Southern Lights), to make up for not having been able to paint a mural in their nursery\u2014but I\u2019m getting ahead of myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Aubrey
On the last night of the author’s stay in Chicago, she did a quick watercolor painting\/ink drawing of two baby penguins holding hands beneath the aurora australis (Southern Lights), to make up for not having been able to paint a mural in their nursery. Image by Aubrey Ann Parker.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

By Thursday morning, just 36 or so hours after having arrived in Chicago, I was starting to cough and had a runny nose, but I still felt fine, otherwise. But it hit me on Friday.

At this point, Quinn was still feeling pretty poorly, so she went to Urgent Care to rule out RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), which can be particularly bad for infants. However, we all were pretty surprised when her test results came back; they had actually tested her for RSV, Influenza A, Influenza B, and\u2014you guessed it\u2014COVID-19. The last of which she tested positive for. Since I had begun feeling sick that day, I took a rapid COVID test at their home, and, sure enough, I was positive, too. Moreover, Josh\u2019s childhood friend and their current nanny, Hannah Seppanen, also tested positive for COVID that day; she immediately moved into the Plague House with the rest of us, since she did not want to infect the people she was living with.

According to the CDC, a \u201cmild\u201d case of COVID is currently considered \u201cover\u201d when the patient hits six days from the onset of symptoms; we thought I probably had a \u201cmild\u201d case, because by Sunday, I was feeling better\u2014still had a cough and some sniffles, but the body aches and fever had passed. (Unlike Quinn, who was not sleeping and probably already had a pretty run-down immune system compared to mine, so her symptoms were lingering; in that case, the CDC\u2019s recommendations for a \u201cmoderate\u201d case of COVID is 11 days of quarantine from the onset of symptoms.) So for me, that would have been Wednesday, November 23, and I was scheduled to fly out on Tuesday, November 22. So I called the airline and rescheduled my flight for just a day later. No biggie.

Only, when I tested myself again at home on Tuesday evening, I was still positive; so were Quinn and Hannah. (Josh had been testing negative this whole time, and we weren\u2019t testing the babies.) So, I called and once again postponed my flight; this time opting for Friday, November 25, just to be on the safe side.\u00a0\u00a0

This meant that we had a \u201cFriendsgiving,\u201d the first that I\u2019d been to in a decade. Of note: Back when I first graduated from college, I felt bad for my friends who had moved across the country and weren\u2019t going to be able to go home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, so my partner, Jordan, and I decided to go to them for a week surrounding Thanksgiving and get a glimpse of what their post-college lives were like. The first was in 2009, just a year after college graduation, and it was spent in New York City; the next year was in Baltimore; 2011 was spent in Syracuse, New York; 2012 was spent on the West Coast this time, in San Francisco. But when life got just a little more complicated\u2014aging grandparents, weddings, babies\u2014the Friendsgiving tradition, sadly, came to an abrupt end. So getting to spontaneously reintroduce this tradition 11 years later, and with friends who had never been able to attend any of the previous renditions, was fun and unexpected, even if it did mean that we were all relegated to the Plague House.

We made the best of it, though, and we each made a dish or two. In some ways, it felt good to have been able to push my return trip, but I could tell that my mother, especially, was missing me on the holiday\u2014she was sending lots of text messages and pictures.\u00a0

When I tested later that day on Thanksgiving, I fully expected to test negative; Quinn had tested negative on Wednesday, finally, more than a week after her symptoms first began. But no such luck for me. So, I called and pushed my flight once again, this time to Monday, November 28.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Aubrey
Though the author had a “mild” case of COVID-19, she kept testing positive well past the recommended six-day quarantine. Photo by Aubrey Ann Parker.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By Saturday morning, however, I was feeling kinda low, and the novelty of getting to stay an extra week and celebrate Friendsgiving was starting to wear off.\u00a0

I was missing my own puppy at home, though I\u2019d been spending a lot of time with Lache, who was sleeping with me every night and begging for a walk every morning\u2014remember that I had taken her on long walks on the first two days that I arrived, then went into survival mode once COVID hit me, so I didn\u2019t take her for another walk until the day before Thanksgiving. Since then, Lache and I had been taking long 60- to 90-minute walks every day.

This meant that every day I was exploring neighborhoods in a different direction from the home base of Quinn and Josh\u2019s house\u2014walking about 30 minutes North, and then circling back; the next day, going 30 minutes South, then circling back, etc.\u00a0

That is how, on Saturday, I found myself, accidentally, on a dead-end road in an industrial parking lot, with very few cars, except for the few unlucky folks who were apparently working at the factories there on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.\u00a0

Telling Lache that we needed to cut through the parking lot and onto one of the main streets again, I noticed something moving in the grass between the sidewalk and the parking lot. Small and yellow, with hints of bright green.\u00a0

A parakeet. I recognized it, because my childhood friend\u2014notably the same mother of four, soon-to-be-five, who had encouraged me to come to Chicago in the first place, despite Josh being sick\u2014had parakeets when we were younger, and she actually adopted some about a year ago, so that her children can now go through the experience of having birds; despite her husband\u2019s displeasure. \u201cThey are so noisy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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