Love in the time of sanitizers

 

It was a bright and warm day in April and the clocks were striking twenty-one. Days of lockdown that is. Who has the ability to keep time by the hour when the seconds and minutes have congealed into a gloopy mess of hours, she mused.

It was a momentous day, and she got up with not a little trepidation. The previous

day, worn down by her incessant proselytizing, the home sanitization protocol was adopted in the household, with unanimous approval. The usually unwilling member immediately accepted his duties (which not too long ago had been relegated to the one-person clean-freak of the abode).
This, then, was the first day of the new protocol and she was anxious to see what the day would bring.

Wake up and smell the roses, the poets used to sing in another era. But here she was waking up to the most reassuring smell in the world: heady fragrance of protection-granting, life-affirming sanitizer. With which the aforementioned member had swabbed the surfaces of the house, in accordance with his allocated duties. She felt woozy in delight, or it may just have been the effect of all the alcohol (strictly not less than 60%) in the air.

Even as she was revelling in the headiness of it all, she overhears snatches of father-toddler conversation from the other room.  “Clol Ekideen” she thinks she hears the toddler lisp.“  The beaming spouse looks up as she walks in, and says brightly, waving the spray bottle of sanitizer. “I just taught her the word of the day. It’s Chlorhexidine.”

And just like that, she fell in love all over again.