Moving in a Pandemic

July 25, 2020

Moving in a Pandemic

The last few weeks in Corpus Christi were a blur of selling stuff, throwing stuff away, and saying goodbye to friends. This was all complicated by the pandemic and the massive spike of cases in Corpus Christi. We went into June feeling very optimistic about our last six weeks in Corpus. Positive Covid cases had remained very low and it seemed like we were spared the surge of cases that New York City, Louisiana, and the northeast saw. The kids went to a Harry Potter art camp for a week, we saw more and more friends, and Hans and I even had our favorite babysitter, Holly, over for an evening so we could go to the best restaurant in the city, the Yardarm. In retrospect that all looks like a golden blur. Cases spiked in late June and by the beginning of July the hospitals were filling up and the city leaders had called for help from the federal government. The kids and I stayed home again while Hans split his time between working at the reservation in South Dakota and the hospitals in Corpus Christi.

Hans worked a lot. That’s an understatement. He worked or traveled for 28 of the last 30 days that we were in the States. He spent two weeks in South Dakota and the rest of the time was in Corpus Christi. The vast majority of his patients were Covid positive. We left on July 21 and the cases continued to go up and up. The Governor finally issued a mask order which people were following and the city closed the beaches to vehicular traffic in an effort to dissuade visitors to the city. Still, as we drove to the airport, the parking lots of the restaurants and big box stores were full.

Since Hans was working, emptying the house, selling the cars, a final yard sale, and arranging all the bureaucratic stuff like mail forwarding, address changes, final doctor’s appointments, health insurance, and more fell to me. So many lists. So many nights staying up till midnight and waking up at first light with my mind already spinning.

The last of our stuff in our final yard sale. By 10AM it was all FREE, and by lunchtime it was all gone.

It all has to fit! Thankfully I had a great packing buddy.

The weather was hot (summer in south Texas is not for the weak) and we couldn’t spend time with friends because of Covid. We didn’t want to get sick before traveling and we didn’t want to get anyone sick because of our proximity to Hans and his patients. Freja and Matilda played together, sometimes fought, generally entertained themselves while I worked on the computer, or emptied cupboards or found buyers for our stuff on Facebook Marketplace. I started the job in a frenzy but soon realized that my stress was transferring to the kids. Our scheduled naturally evolved into me working till lunchtime, then we would do something fun in the afternoon. Beach, swim in the canal, and one day we played mini-golf.

in our empty living room the day we left Corpus Christi

Moving in a pandemic was one of the strangest and anti-climactic moves I have made. We have moved a lot and we have always had a big party right before we left. After college my parents threw us a graduation/moving party; when we left the DC area to go cruising we rented a big house and friends came from all over for a weekend-long party; leaving Philadelphia we had a big bash at the marina; and when we left Jacksonville we had a big party and bbq. I spent the last week in Corpus Christi emptying and cleaning every morning and visiting friends for an hour or two, outside, in the afternoon. We couldn’t hug goodbye, we couldn’t have a party, and we had to see everyone individually, mainly at the park or the beach. There were some friends we didn’t get to say goodbye to in person, and other friends we only could wave to.

Saying goodbye to our residency & post-residency friends. They drove down from New Braunfels to spend a few hours with us.

It was a relief to leave. I had crossed everything off my lists, the house was empty, a team of cleaners were thoroughly cleaning the house, and I made my last run to Goodwill on our way to the airport. As the airplane wheels lifted off the runway I felt like we were escaping a city that was being overrun by the virus (as of July 21, the city estimated that 1 in 8 people were infected, approximately 550 people per 100,000, and over 30 people per 100,000 were in the ICU). To compound the dire situation, a tropical storm was aiming directly for our island, due to arrive a few days after we left. It never felt better to leave somewhere, but also made my heart sink because so many people are in such a precarious situation.