‘Baby Sis’ has made my Lockdown 3.0 more than just bearable

Lockdown has become a way of life. It was a year ago yesterday that Leo Varadkar announced the first full national stay-at-home order, and at first there was a certain novelty value to it. Oh, how we laughed as we batch-cooked the food we would throw out three months later when we found soggy quiche at the bottom of the freezer. We made banana bread for the first time, and pretended to work out every day with Joe Wicks when in truth we were slumped on the couch eating chocolate Kimberleys for breakfast.

It helped that the weather was great, and when we actually did get around to proper cooking, we ate lunch and dinner on the back step, and looked at the fence and muttered ‘that needs painting’, before cracking open another beer and leaving it all to a next week that never came.

Then we had that brief flirtation with summer, and we zoomed around to all arts and parts, conscious that a second wave probably would arrive, and not one we could bob up and down on at the nearest beach. The second lockdown that came in October was harder (or the third, if you live in Dublin, Kildare, Offaly or Laois). The nights were closing in, there was a distinct nip in the air, and only the prospect of Christmas kept us going. Sadly, we all know how that turned out.

And so we came to Lockdown 3.0, with everything closed again. There were new milestones I would rather not have faced, especially the first death of a family member, one of my aunts. I’m not saying Covid was hypothetical to me, but it did bring home the fact this was a deadly disease.

I’ve always been a glass-half-full person, someone who looks for the gold edging on the silver lining, and that came from a very familiar source. I live alone and spent the first two lockdowns mooching around an otherwise empty house, but in early January, my younger sister – Baby Sis, as I call her, because there are five and a half years between us and that’s how our parents introduced her to me – had surgery, and I took time off to look after her in her apartment in Dublin.

A quick chat with a nurse changed all that. She said there was no need for my sister to stick close to the hospital, so I brought her down to my house in Co Wexford to recuperate for a couple of weeks.

On Friday just gone, those two weeks had become ten. As soon as we realised lockdown was going to go on for quite some time, we had a chat and agreed it made little sense to heat two homes and cook individually when we just could see it all out together. Her first observation was telling. Unknown to me, I seem to spend a lot of time thinking aloud, which maybe goes to show how isolation can have an effect you don’t even notice. A dozen times a day, she would say ‘what?’, and I’d go, ‘ah, don’t mind me – I’m just talking to myself’.

The corollary of that was that I had internalised laughter. Watching a comedy television show or movie on your own, you tend to smile but not belly laugh. Prompted by someone else, it’s as contagious as a yawn, and hearing laughter livening up a dreary house has been a joy.

We cleared out my junk room and I found an old IKEA desk in the shed, so I set up an office for her to work from. We keep to ourselves morning and afternoon, but we meet up for lunch and dinner and talk about our respective days – and we share a bottle of wine when we want to and give each other space when we need to, and we have enjoyed sharing time we otherwise would have missed.

Neither of us would dream of saying we would prefer this to having our normal lives back, as we hopefully will post-vaccination, but it has been a lovely pause from the uncertainty of everything to have someone physically present, a patient, listening ear with whom I can talk it through.

So, for now, I’m making the most of it. There’s talk of a relaxation of some of the restrictions soon, so the clock is ticking. The very second they reopen the golf courses, I know I’ll see the back of Baby Sis’s car disappear in a cloud of dust, and while we each will reclaim our own spaces, they will, I think, be all the brighter, warmer and happier ones for the weeks we spent together.