I blame the quarantine. Before the forced house-arrest Coronavirus I bought ten bundles of cedar sidewall shakes and some pressure-treated lumber to fix a forty-year-old crumbling gazebo that squirrels had chewed apart in my backyard. I hadn’t gotten very far with the project until I was trapped in my house, sixty-plus years old, trying to dodge the Corona deathtrap. The gazebo is twenty feet tall, steep roof slope, and most of the work has to be done from a ladder. Earlier I talked to a roofer and he took three seconds to tell me the gazebo was too flimsy and dangerous for his crew to roof.
So now here I am either watching Dr. Oz and Murder She Wrote or work on the Coronazebo. We live on an acre lot next to fifty wooded acres. Each day I stand on my shaky aluminum extension ladder bouncing back and forth a bit with each ladder rung that I climb. Birds tweet in the woods. I see white poop drops, insect casings and spider webs on shake shingles. Bats fly out of the woods and I know bat per will give me Wuhan wet-market virus for sure. My mind wanders. How long do I have?
Somehow I step on a nail in a shingle that goes through my tread-bare old running shoe. I rush into the house and squeeze half a tube of Neosporin on my puncture wound. I find a jug of Clorox and pour some in a Tupperware shoebox with water to soak my throbbing foot. Within five minutes the top of my foot burns and turns red. I pull out my foot and drain Neosporin and half a box of bandaids to cover the pain. I blame it all on the quarantine.
–Joe Pleser
