Columnists

"Houston, we have arugula!” Mary cried after hanging up with One Stop Market, which has been wonderful, providing curb service during these trying times.     

Whether you qualify it as “social” or “physical,” dis­tancing is not how any of us anticipated spending the spring of 2020. This week, the actual and psychological distances we have to travel to get through this thing just seemed to keep growing.     

The news about the city folk emptying the South Fork supermarkets is frightening.

It felt like a drug deal. We made initial contact in an email exchange. Over the phone, we arranged payment. I drove to Sag Harbor. Gwen opened the door a crack and handed me the package. There it was, the goods I had been trying to get hold of since the weekend — a 1,000-piece Ravensburger jigsaw puzzle.     

The admonition from health and government officials that everyone stay in place in order to curb the spread of Covid-19 suits my husband and me just fine.

Amid the coronavirus crisis, many thoughts around the East End have turned to gardening. There is both time now, what with movement more limited than usual, and a sense that supplementing one’s own food supply with homegrown fruit and vegetables is a reasonable precaution.

So, there I was, on Wednesday last, with a stuffy head, and a very, very occasional cough, rheumy eyes — as usual — but wondering.

The E.M.S. and fire community has indeed come together to support Randy Hoffman, a critical care tech from East Hampton who in December underwent a routine spinal procedure and came out paralyzed due to unexpected complications.

The Indian Wells tennis tournament was canceled the other day, then came the Coachella music festival, and then came us. Postponing a trip to Palm Desert, Calif., where one of our daughters lives, seemed the rational thing to do, and JetBlue, wonderful to tell, came through.

Among the positive impacts of our coronavirus isolation has been what you might call found time: hours and hours each day for the books I intended to read, television programs I wanted to watch, and operas I didn’t want to miss.

My grandmother on my father’s side told me to always wash my hands — and I have tried to as often as possible ever since.

The possibility of housebound quarantine to avoid Covid-19, the coronavirus, took me back to my childhood in Bayonne, N.J., where my family belonged to an orthodox synagogue. Each autumn at Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish observance, the observant fast between breakfast and dinner. My family did do that when I was very young; and then, after World War II, did not.