A distant relative lived and worked on this Northside Street. Team Lingo walked here last week.

“I wonder why one candle is dripping more than the other,” wondered my husband

“I wonder if those Adirondack chairs are plastic or wood?”

“I wonder why they didn’t tear down this building/paint this wall/put on a new doorknob, and where exactly does the sidewalk end?”

That’s what my husband, my beloved quarantine partner, does all the livelong day: wonder, wonder, wonder in Seinfeldian fashion about things that are completely inconsequential.

And I wonder, how two such completely different people could have stayed married for 17,406 days. But who’s counting.

It’s not just that he’s curious about everything, and that I am mostly oblivious.

It’s that he is so regimented, setting his phone timer to remind him to take his (placebo) zinc for his (imagined) Covid symptoms.  How he organizes his money in his wallet by denomination.  How he flosses regularly.  How he has exactly three meals a day—I mean it, who does that?

And then there’s his glass-half-empty attitude. How he “hopes for the best but plans for the worst,” whereas I just assume it’s all going to turn out okay.  Plan?  No, I don’t do that.

He exercises every day using resistance bands and walks until he accumulates 10,000 steps.  I am a pet rock.

He says travel makes him feel alive.  He takes a photography trip at least once a month and has international trips scheduled into 2022. I love my own bed, my own shower, my own zipcode.

But in the 51 years we’ve been together, we’ve accommodated these differences.  Where each of us was extreme, we’ve been pulled closer to the center because of the other’s influence.

Up until a month ago, we had been coasting, which is the reward for a long marriage.  You can risk not working at it, not just because your marriage is solid, but because you’ve got inertia on your side.  It’s just too much trouble to leave, and where on earth would you go?

Most pre-Corona days, I played with friends, worked with writers, shopped like it was my profession, then came home in time to change into my pjs, then ate dinner at the kitchen counter, while Rick ate dinner from a tray in front of the living room tv.  We eventually landed in our matching recliners watching whatever Netflix offered up.

But now we had to gear up for this Covid challenge.

In the beginning of our sequestration (a word I thought I would never have to learn to spell) I grieved for what I had lost:  recreational grocery shopping when I perused shelves of truffle oil and non-dairy milk; my daily lunches out with girlfriends; my writing groups; my granddaughter.

And for the first few days of our confinement, it felt like I was in a holding pattern, a space where daily bathing, makeup, wardrobe, jewelry just didn’t matter, because who would see me, right?

But a few days in, I realized the totally obvious:  My husband would see me, and he mattered.  In fact, in this strange world, when all our peripheral relationships had been temporarily stripped away, our marital relationship was the only one left to tend.

We were in this together.  We had one job, to keep ourselves and each other healthy.  Which took murder off the table.

I wondered if I could stand being with only him for who-knows-how-long.

We have it easy compared to most people.  We are healthy for our age.  We have good health insurance.  We have no jobs to lose.  Our children are still employed.  We have food and shelter and enough money for now.

We have toilet paper.

We have each other.

We have everything we need to stay healthy and positive, but we might have to work at it.

We started planning our days like my daughter plans for her one-year-old daughter:  meals; recreation; exercise; rest.

I printed up a kids’ scavenger hunt and we took off for Smale Park to look for “something yellow,” an “animal in a tree,” a “puddle.”  We never found an anthill, but it was surprisingly fun looking.

I challenged him to walk with me without talking (or wondering) and look for five places that reminded him of our past.  The library reminded me of where we said we were on school nights when I was sixteen.  A firetruck reminded him of the fire alarm that brought firetrucks to our daughter’s wedding reception.

I started setting the dining room table for dinner, rotating the four sets of china and stemware we inherited, lighting candles, planning balanced meals.  A friend commented, “You are keeping the romance alive.”  Oh, lordy, no–just keeping us alive.

Each night at dinner, my husband showed me a picture of someplace we’d been together, and I had to try to remember where it was.  A Lithuanian restaurant.  A Death Valley sand dune.  A Smoky Mountain waterfall.

He ordered twelve pairs of wacky socks for $25 from Amazon, and every morning he laid out a pair for me to accessorize my outfit.

For a week I picked my outfit to match the color of his, but that got tricky since my wardrobe is pretty much fifty shades of grey.

I pulled Walking Cincinnati off the shelf.  It was a book I had given him for Father’s Day2015, promising we would take the tours together. “Okay,” I conceded a month ago, “I guess I’ll walk.”  Every day now, he drags me out for a two-hour walk of a neighborhood.  I admit, it’s fun-ish.

Technology helps fill our days.  He is taking an online photography class; I am taking writing classes.  And we Zoom.  Not sure who those old people with sagging necks are in the boxes on the computer screen.

We head off each other’s worst inclinations.

The other night he came to the dinner table and opened with, “Did you hear about the 27-year-old, perfectly healthy, an athlete even, and he . . .”

“Stop that,” I said.

“And you, stop touching your face,” he said.

Another night he informed me that he had bought a baby monitor.  Why on earth?  He bought it so that if one of us gets sick and sleeps in the other bedroom, we can communicate.  We live in an apartment.  The second bedroom is practically in the master bedroom.  “You know how I can’t hear you when you are in the other bedroom,” he explained.

“It’s because you don’t listen, not because you can’t hear.  Put that thing away!” I said.

“Stop touching your face!” he said.

When I drag my feet, literally and figuratively, before our daily walks, he laces up his sneakers and waits for me at the front door.

When either of us complains about being bored, we remind the other that being bored does not even move the needle on pandemic problems.

Last week marked a month that we have been home with each other, only each other.  Along with all the other Americans sheltering in place, we did a collective sigh.  We felt a sense of accomplishment that we had done our jobs and, here and there, we had some fun.  But how to break up the sameness?  How to remain vigilant?

“Let’s have a book club, just you a me,” I said last night as we were turning off the light for our 32^nd day of sequestration.  I could hear his eyes rolling in the dark.

This morning I broached the subject again.  “How about the new Eric Larson, the one about Churchill?  Would you want to have our own little book club?”

He took a deep breath, then said, “I would love to be in a book club with you.”

While “book club” means “snacks” to me, for him it means “facts.”  We both know, though, that this diversion is just another way of staying alive.

When we get on the other side of this pandemic–and we will–we will grieve for those who lost their lives.  We will worry for our financial health and our country’s.  We will learn how to lubricate society without handshakes and hugs.

But we will be stronger as a result of it.  And so will our marriage.

While we walked today, he talked about constellations and igneous rocks, generators and General Grant.  He knows a lot of stuff, I thought.  Lots of useless stuff.

“I wonder why Episcopal churches have red doors,” he wondered.

They do? I thought, and also, Who cares?

But it made me want to keep walking and looking, just to prove him wrong.

“Stop touching your face,” I said.