Chronicles of the Virus Day 14

I'm tired today.

I'm tired on three counts. The first is that I went to bed late. The second is that I got up early, and the third is that this morning we put in the potatoes.

The regional government decreed last week that all the rural households could work their fields as long as they were within five hundred meters of the house. This morning you could hear the growl of tractors in nearby fields.

At the beginning, it had been our intention to go at it just the two of us, but then my mother-in-law insisted on coming to help. So did my brother-in-law, despite living in the next township and having to come by car. The two of them wore masks and gloves. My mother-in-law and I finished first while the other two were tamping down the earth. We came to the back door and she took out a re-purposed spray bottle and starting spraying herself. "Is that bleach?" I asked.

"Non, muller, non. É caña."

She was spraying herself with caña, or augardente, a spirit distilled at home from the leftover grapes after making wine, much like the Italian grappa. She swears by it because her grandmother swore by it. I tried to point out that it doesn't have enough alcohol content to actually disinfect on the outside, however much it might do so down the gullet, but to no avail. "Just be sure to wash your hands well when you get home," was my final mumble.

That, she believes in, at least.

So, now we're resting. My husband is sleeping his siesta, after taking a shower and eating lunch. The growls of tractors have faded, and not even one car is going by now. It's sunny, with cauliflower clouds, and there isn't a breath of a breeze, though the temperature is agreeable. 

I just remembered this afternoon, that tonight we have to change the clocks one hour forward. On top of the inability to go out and enjoy an extra hour of daylight in the evening, we have to now adjust our body clocks to the change. That also means that the sun will come up later in the morning and that it will be chillier. Not fun.

There's really nothing new today. I tried to find interesting tidbits online but they're becoming rarer. People seem to be getting used to the confinement. I only found a small article describing how a man dressed up as a dog in Toledo to go for a (four-legged) walk. Okay.

Not everybody is content to stay at home. Nor patient to return to earning money. A bar in the next parish was caught with its back door open to patrons. The police shut it down and fined the owner over thirty thousand euros. I don't know what the owner was expecting. Police are very serious about keeping to the rules of confinement. The better we stay away from others, the faster this goes away and life can start returning to normal. 

Normal is something that might not happen for quite some time. Even when the confinement is lifted, I bet that there will be aspects of it still in place. At least, until a vaccine is on the market, and the second wave has passed in the coming autumn and winter. Let's see what the future brings.

Life continues.