LIVING IN LIMBO – the Corona Chronicles
Stuck – just plain stuck in limbo.
As if my feet are planted in mud while the rest of me continues to function.
That’s how this period feels, and as a person who loves to move her feet….this is no no no bueno!
Shannon Alder wrote: “Fear is the glue that keeps you stuck. Faith is the solvent that sets you free.”
After several house-sitting assignments in San Miguel de Allende, from December 1st until March 2nd, we took a break and went to a resort near Cancun. We had visited this area individually, but never together in our 36 years of married life.
Two weeks spent cossetted in a jungle environment were more than sufficient to lull us into imagining we were almost on another plane; it turns out we were!
Small Disney like trolleys carried us around an enormous campus where buildings were concealed by palm fronds, trees and dense jungle. Beaches with billowing, blowing curtains on massive sunbeds, towels neatly folded on pillows, summoned us to whittle our time away.
Bliss at the Beach
Day by day we watched the news trickle in regarding the pandemic. Reading the news items on my I-Phone while lounging by a tranquil, turquoise pool, I had the sense that we were living inside a bag of cotton-wool: truly limbo.
It was the first time that I realized it was possible to read something disturbing, yet my mind, my imagination and my brain felt frozen. I simply could not and would not imagine this pandemic into existence in my world.
After traveling in Europe and Mexico for almost a year, we were subject to an other-worldly sensation that had crept in.
As if through the very act of travel itself, we had somehow been transformed, to where or what, we knew not – but we were certainly a different cup of tea than the people we left Denver on June 16th, 2019.
A very kindly hero of mine, Pico Iyer said, “A person susceptible to “wanderlust” is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.”
This transformation felt more like a domino train falling over all over the globe. Stunned we watched China, Italy, South Korea, Israel and Spain become infected. This cotton wool experience was like looking through a porthole in a submarine.
As the primary ways of life outside our jungle were becoming disrupted, I wondered what sort of new normal we would discover when we arrived at our next house-sit, but first another mini-adventure on the way back to San Miguel.
Queretaro Aqueduct
The decision to explore Queretaro had been made several weeks earlier when a house-sitting colleague strongly recommended we visit the downtown colonial center of this city. Santiago de Queretaro is the official title of this UNESCO-listed historic center. Our three days spent walking, exploring and discovering were indeed a treasure to tuck into our memory-banks. We would revisit and draw upon these images despite all the public spaces closing for the pandemic.
However, while we were in Queretaro, our next month long house-sit was cancelled just three days before it started because our hosts’ flights to Australia were canceled, and they has to stay home in San Miguel. Thrust into limbo again.
Needless to say our re-entry back into the “real world” came as a shock, not simply because we had to find somewhere to live in Mexico, but for how long? Questions galore flooded our minds, what was the situation in San Miguel, would it follow the trend to shut down like Seattle, Denver and other cities we were paying attention to?
Would it be best to be home in the US, or to wait this out in Mexico?
Ultimately after much wrestling with hot potato like decisions, each one being a facet of our lives, we arrived at the conclusion that it was a health hazard to travel. Our health professional friends and neighbors all approved our confirmation bias. We remained in place in San Miguel in a small golf community just on the edge of the city. We hunkered down and prepared to wait out Covid-19 – for almost four months.
Misplaced in Mexico
If fear truly “is the glue that keeps us stuck” I have been watching myself being frozen for several weeks, in the knowledge that life may be dramatically different at the end of this particular tunnel.
We look forward to that Emergence from Limbo – will it be heaven, purgatory or hell!