Here's what to do...

Because the kids were home from school, doing school at home, I too stayed home but did no school. Sacrificing school was fine, I told myself, because summer would come and teachers would be home too, and I’d pick up my research again like an old friend, and push ahead with plenty of time for my own study.

So bright and perky on that first day of summer, I checked in with the archives and got an e-mail after the weekend was over, to inform me that the archives are closed under provincial restrictions.

Small spaces with lone researchers are taboo places for Covid cases. Things like old paper shuffled in the silence of concentration in air-conditioned rooms, just lay welcoming viruses, you know. And then I suppose that when the province puts archives into the same category as libraries and museums, disgruntled historians are too few in number, too shy in disposition perhaps, to make the necessary ruckus required for 25% capacity… or 50.

“I’ll bet you,” my husband said, “I’ll bet you Thermëa is open.”

And he was right.

So I took my pale skin to Thermëa, with him, where we shocked our systems hot and cold and laid in the sun, where I temporarily, really, only for a moment, forgot that I could not go and spend time looking through Langevin’s letters under high-ceilinged fluorescent lights.