Five days is nothing. But having recently experienced one of the world’s longest lockdowns, Melburnians have a pronounced sensitivity to their prospect
It’s Valentine’s Day, and two large sheets of paper rustle on the clothesline. These are my daughter’s paintings — wet swirls of yellow, green and blue. Beneath the clothesline is her small easel, upon which she begins her third. Admiring my blue spiral, she cheerfully requests more in the other colours.
It’s day two of our “short, sharp” lockdown, and was to be the day of her second birthday party. She’s happily oblivious to the cancellation, but more mindful of her grandparents’ premature return to South Australia. The suspension of her party is one of the more trivial casualties of our pandemic, but the suspensions and cancellations are accumulating for us: her West Australian grandparents haven’t seen her in a year; her uncle’s recent flight here was cancelled. Many other birthdays, funerals, and weddings have been scrapped, limited or jeopardised; last year, friends mourned a child inside a bubble.
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