Desperate to continue the tradition of a family beach week, I hatched a plan that would allow some mask- and sanitizer-enhanced semblance of normality.
We hadn’t seen my two 20-something children in months. They’d spent the lockdown in Brooklyn; one of them most likely had the disease in late March, before testing was widely available. My mother had died of COVID-19 in May.
So a few weeks ago, I rented a cute house on the Delaware shore. It had a screened-in front porch and a little cottage out back, in case someone needed to quarantine.
I asked my son, who had participated in several protests and had been at a small outdoor July Fourth gathering, to get tested before he came. Testing had been recommended by the governor and the mayor, and many centers were offering an anticipated 48-hour turnaround.