Four Seasons Quarantined on a Canadian Island

Thousands of miles away from our Northern California home, our place of shelter is a farmhouse in rural Canada, rented on the fly in late February 2020, when shit began to get real and visions of meetings in Montreal evaporated. We navigated to Prince Edward County, an island in southern Ontario on the northeastern shore of Lake Ontario, knowing only that a friend of a friend had a summer house there.

One suitcase each, a yoga mat and a few road staples don’t make a home. But a box arrived with wind chimes and Japanese incense, and the house has a functional kitchen, Wi-Fi for work, a big bed with a decent mattress, and good light for reading. Touchstones in various time zones and a steady delivery of local whisky help blur the ghosts that come with the rural blackness of evening, the only illumination the waxing and waning moon.

As the Pandemic worsened, ripping through Ottawa and Montreal to the north and New York to our south, many of our fellow islanders appeared Covid-unconcerned. My wife and I agreed we wouldn’t shop in the island’s stores, the final nails in the traditional retail coffin taking the shape of cups of coffee served to us in a local café, the unmasked barista’s fingers on the lips of our mugs.

Far from anywhere resembling home, in need of grounding and having just a handful of now-locked-down…