I was actually quarantined once in my life before, although not quite like what the world is facing today. I was 13 years old, and my step-father had been assigned by the United States Information Agency to a post in Hiroshima, Japan. This was in 1955, not that many years after the end of World War II. We left the United States on our long journey across the Pacific before the end of my 8th grade year, and headed for a city in which we would be the only Americans in residence. I was scheduled to start high school in the fall at a boarding school in a city located four hours away by train, but that was not until the beginning of September. Three long months stretched before me.
My parents were both engaged in settling into a new home and job, and I was left pretty much to my own devices. We lived in a Japanese style house, taking off our shoes at the front door so as not to dirty the tatami flooring in the rooms. Shogi screens divided the rooms from one another although we had the luxury of Western style furniture such a chairs and beds. Our collective knees were not up to sitting on the floor to eat, rest and sleep.
I tried to replicate my old room as much as possible setting up my collection of horse statues and favorite books. Obviously there were other thirteen year olds in the city, but we were distanced by a gulf that was not only linguistic but cultural. Add to that, the fact that my country had conquered theirs a mere decade before. No one was that interested in having an American friend, and I was too shy and diffident to try and overcome the obstacles.
In a bid to find something to do, I made an alphabetical index file by author of my books which took up a satisfactory amount of time. I also read voraciously, hung out in the kitchen with our delightful Japanese maid/cook, watched the Koi in the pond in the yard, and waited for life to begin again. Although this was a form of quarantine there was one major difference between then and now. I knew in the fall it would be over. While I wondered about the unknown school and the new roommate I had yet to meet, fall meant an end to my isolation. What makes it so different today is the lack of certainty of when things will return to normal. We are left swinging in the breeze between politicians, the government and medical experts. If only we could know, as I did in that far away time, that life would begin again in the autumn.
