April 7, 2020. My fourth blog post in the Coronatimes

There have been a lot of funny memes floating around about all the shacking up going on and how in nine-to-ten months there will be this percentage of divorces and this percentage of Coronials being born. At the onset of this quarantine I didn’t give much thought to what it would be like spending literally 24/7 with my other half. And while we’ve been married nearly twenty-five years and know pretty much everything about each other, would he have been my first choice to quarantine with week after week? Well, for the sake of my marriage, the answer stands at yes.

But, if you give it thought, who would be the safest person to spend this type and amount of closeness with? If you said your sibling(s), I’d say you’re on to something for a few reasons. First, you probably spent this same amount of time cooped up in the backseat of a car on family vacations or in the same bedroom growing up and have a really good frame of reference and knowledge that you will survive it. Second, you can’t divorce your sibling, they are attached forever and ever and ever. If you can’t get along, mom pinches you really hard on the arm or leg during church to stop kicking your sister. Third, it’s not wise to have children with your sibling, but that is an entirely different post. (See Seth Myers Quaran-teen Definition of Lannister High on YouTube.)

Not to brag, but I would have been lucky in the sibling quarantine buddy department. My sister is my boo. Growing up we were different, but also very alike. We were The Lindsey Sisters, The Lindseys, The Lindsey Girls. If you said Lindsey, we both said, “Yes?” We are only twenty-one months apart in age, so we literally grew up together: The full days of listening to records and dancing in the upstairs hallway, the stack of cassette tapes of fake newscasts that we made on a tape recorder, the weekends of Barbie marathons, maybe even throwing a party (or two) that we shouldn’t have. There isn’t a memory from my formative years that doesn’t have Cathy in it at some point.

Obviously we are sisters, girls, close in age, so it wasn’t all roses. I definitely remember dark afternoons that ended with me chasing her with a knife, obviously not to catch, but to scare. Chill – it was a long time ago. I just didn’t want you to think that we were weird Stepford sisters that always played nice. But for two girls that spent as much time together as we did, we really lucked out having each other.

These days, she is still my best friend and if we were quarantined together today like we were as sisters growing up, we most assuredly would have already figured out this world peace thing and developed at least three new card games, of which I would never win. But, we’re not and we haven’t. Maybe next pandemic.

LLM