Carol watched as I completed fastening the top of one of the pergola posts to one of the cross supports. The idea of leaning the post on a steep slant by balancing it on our kitchen step stool in order to reach it and secure it to the cross support had been my idea. That way I could work at ground level and once fastened together, lift both the post and support back into an upright position. It was still a struggle to align the pieces correctly, but I finally succeeded.”I told you this would work,” I said smiling triumphantly.

It arrived in the middle of southern California’s first heat wave of the season. The directions to assemble read like an IKEA divorce decree. Ever the optimist, even Carol was doubtful. “I don’t think we can do this,” she said, as she surveyed the posts, arches, cross structures, staves, supports and enough hardware to start our own Ace is the place.

As I slowly morph into the couch I occupy daily, Carol strives to maintain social distancing from the spore of a mushroom I am inexorably becoming. The problem for her, I believe, is that she fears I’m not afraid of becoming “fungible” (to coin a new and unexpected meaning of the term), And in this, Carol is correct.

In 2017, Mike Madigan’s life ended abruptly on April 19 in a car accident. The end of Carolyn Marquardt’s life began on April 17th, with hospital treatment for a leukemia she was not to survive. For Carol and me, April has been the cruelest month for the past three years.

One positive thing the coronavirus has demonstrated is the broad adaptive range of the human mind. People have been doing amazing things to remain active and engaged within the confines of stay-at-home quarantining. Still, there’s great impatience to get daily life back to normal. In other words, hitting the snooze alarm and wishing it was Saturday rather than Tuesday. Getting the kids up and ready for school, figuring out a meal plan for dinner, fitting the routine errands around your work schedule, commuting traffic, blowing off the trip to the gym because you’re just too exhausted from all of the above. In other words, you want back what used to drive you to the edge of insanity day in and day out.

I was thinking of those film clips of Germany’s invasion of Poland at the start of WWII. The rampage of men, tanks and cannons over the Polish countryside looked a lot like the way Carol was attacking the mildew on our porch roof. It was a blitzkrieg of cleaning, with Tilex and mops and brooms scouring the porch landscape like it was the Poznan forest being overrun by German panzers.

One of Carol’s high school friends recently posted how she’s drawn to the bookshelves of news commentators broadcasting from their private homes and apartments. I confess to the same nerdy curiosity. I also confess that I almost exclusively read ebooks, and my “library” of bound books has shrunk dramatically over the years as a result of multiple moves.

;The other day after returning from a jog, Carol observed, “You know, Reid, you sweat a lot, but you don’t stink.” The alarm bells sounded immediately. Loss of smell can signal the onset of coronavirus. But later that day she noted, “I think they’re cooking fish next door.”

I look at the coronavirus as an easily transmittable form of a serious lung disease. It may start as a flu, but it heads straight for the respiratory system. When that happens, it’s deadlier than any flu you’ve ever had. While not being tracked officially, a report in Physician’s Weekly suggests the mortality rate for coronavirus patients needing a ventilator is somewhere north of 50%. Maybe way north, up to 70%. Think tuberculosis before the cure. I want no part of risking getting this “flu.”

Carol has been handling the stay-at-home quarantine quite well. She’s fidgety, bored, misses people and increasingly restless to run errands. In other words, she’s behaving like a normal human being. The other day she excitedly and repeatedly offered to drive to Target for a curbside delivery of a bottle of sherry, the only ingredient we lacked for a veal marsala recipe. The thing is, Carol’s trying to avoid my calorie-rich recipes during this period of physical inactivity, so picking up the sherry would be a double-edged sword. I finally calmed her down by adding the sherry to my biweekly wine delivery, but agreeing to a pickup of grocery items at the local Mother’s food store on Monday. She’s counting down the days till Monday.