Light switches

It’s been barely a week, but already life has changed in ways both large and small. The small changes are in some ways the most interesting. Like leaving the lights on. A child of the Jimmy Carter turn-down-the-thermostat-put-on-a-sweater era, I’m usually obsessive about turning off room lights to save energy. That healthy habit, borne of an instinct to save energy, actually becomes an unhealthy habit in a quarantine household. Turns out that my devotion to minimizing electric consumption was multiplying opportunities to spread the virus.

Like you, I had no idea how many times in a day my hands touched light switches. Into the kitchen. Flip two switches. On the way out, flip them off. Turn on the light in the dining room. Hit that again as I go into the family room, where I turn on the reading light. Another switch. Sit down. Oops, I forgot my glasses in the kitchen. Get up and do it all over again, in reverse. Repeat on the way back to my seat. Add it up and I realized that I must run my potentially pestilent hands over one light switch or another at least a couple of hundred times every day.

My efforts to save the planet from climate change were turning into a conspiracy to help the coronavirus get a foothold. It was time for some compromise.

After some internal debate I resolved to send Jimmy Carter a prayer seeking forgiveness and just leave the damned lights on. Now I walk back and forth the length of my house without touching a switch or a dimmer of any kind, each day depriving the corona virus of hundreds of opportunities to fester.

It is not easy.

Each time I enter a room my hand rises as if guided by a master puppeteer, moving in the direction of the switch. Then I remember that the light is already on. Each time I leave a room, I fight decades of ingrained conservationist instincts. It’s like an arm-wrestling match in a saloon scene from an old western, my energy saver hand straining against my corona fighting hand. When reason trumps instinct, more than half the time now, I leave that light on. I’m getting there. My house is well illuminated and my switch plates are, I hope, less infested.

Then there is the matter of cabinets and their assorted rounded knobs and curved handles. If I can slop a finger under a handle, I just use my pinky to pull open a cabinet door. Using that same pinky to snag a coffee mug, I then bump the cabinet closed with the back of my hand. No broken coffee mugs so far.

Yesterday I was so inspired by my deftness in the matter of the cabinet doors, that I had an insight. Why not simply leave the doors open all the time? Leaving them open would eliminate the need to finger the handle and pull with the pinky? I could save hundreds of contacts between my hands and a hard surface, once again depriving the coronavirus of the opportunity for the contagion it so craves! I went about my business making lunch and then some tea and, by mid-afternoon every blessed cabinet door was flung open and its contents on display to all the people who were not allowed near our house.

The next time I opened the silverware drawer, I took out a teaspoon and just left the drawer open. If leaving the cabinets open was a good public health measure, then leaving the drawers open was positively brilliant! Why not leave them open as well?

Why not?

Because I’m married, that’s why not. Coronavirus or no Coronavirus, Ellen was not about to have the kitchen looking like we had just been burglarized. I saw the look. I didn’t need to hear the words. I carefully bumped the drawer shut with my hip, and closed the cabinet doors with my forehead, restoring a semblance of order to the kitchen.

The lesson is that, in these days when so much is changing as we wait for this virus to do its thing, we need some things to stay the same. Drawers closed like they were before. Doors closed, like they were before.

The lights I’m leaving on.