The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

You're stuck with me for a bit longer, I'm afraid – as of last Wednesday, in-person classes at Notre Dame Law School are cancelled for the rest of the school year. I should probably finish unpacking my suitcase.

My mom's birthday was on Sunday. Not being able to leave the house to buy her an expensive present, even on the spurious assumption that I could afford an expensive present in the first place, I did the next best thing and made her a cake shaped like an expensive present. One batch of fluffy white icing and a dozen strategically cut-and-stacked cookies later, I managed a pretty convincing roll of toilet paper.

I'm just full of pandemic jokes as of late. This afternoon, I was asked about my state of mind and replied that its governor had issued a shelter-in-place order. A few weeks ago, at a law school social, I broke the ice by saying I came "from Washington...but not within the past fourteen days."

Sadly, though, the jokes increasingly seem to write themselves.

When asked for details about my brief trip to Seattle a couple weeks ago, I describe the situation at the only shop I dared enter west of the Cascades – a candy store in Issaquah. Not the fact that the usually-bustling place was a ghost town, nor the fact that I felt the need to wipe down a vacuum-sealed bag of imported Belgian fizz candies before I dug in. No, it was the half-empty bottle of hand sanitizer in front of the cash register – more specifically, the fact that in a store that stocked nothing but candy, a lone half-empty bottle of drug-store-brand hand sanitizer had to be labeled "not for sale."

I told a friend about this when we went out for coffee before all the restaurants stopped sit-down service. She laughed and said she'd seen boxes of hand wipes duct-taped to check-out counters. I wouldn't know, since I haven't really left the house lately, but I've been informed that there is truth to at least one shelf-stocking horror story – when Mom visited Albertson's the other day, the paper products aisle was empty save for two sad-looking rolls of compostable paper towels.

And on the subject of bare grocery shelves, I'm sure I'm not the first person to tell you not to buy more than you usually do, but this affects me rather personally. My diet is very limited (ask any of a long line of frustrated daycare providers) and on our last grocery run we barely scraped together enough of my staple foods to make it to the next grocery run. I'm not the only one in this situation, I'm just in a good position to bug you about it - so consider yourself bugged.

If you want to skip the grocery-store madness altogether, why not try growing a garden? Besides providing food, it's a good cure for the stir-crazies and a safe way to get fresh air. Peas, spinach, and squash are all nutrient-rich and easy to grow. And if you're looking to go a little further and supplement your income with a cash crop, you can't beat Verbascum thapsus – a tall, fuzzy, native biennial better known as the Toilet Paper Plant.