Jewelry and Tinted Lip Balm

My mother always told me that there were two things a woman should wear every single day when leaving the house: lipstick, and a fine perfume. And I did try to uphold my mother’s standards, until every perfume I wore provoked allergic coughing fits, and my obsessive-compulsive tendencies had me so endlessly touching-up the slightest imperfections in saturated lip colors that lipstick became a stressor I could no longer endure and still maintain mental health. So with apologies to my beloved mother, my womanly routine shifted to wearing some amount of jewelry every day, and swiping on a tinted lip balm where the sheer color allowed lapses in coverage to blend seamlessly into my own skin tones.

The number of days on which I’ve adhered to this routine now number in the many-thousands, and  so ingrained in me is it that if forced to leave for the day without earrings, finger rings, and subtly-shaded lip coating, I literally feel only partially clothed. But in spite of my need to decorate myself with these items upon leaving home, I cannot stand to wear jewelry around the house. So it has long been pretty much automatic upon leaving each day, to select whatever earrings and necklace either coordinate with my outfit or suit my mood, and slip on my Zuni-crafted silver and turquoise wedding band along with another patterned sterling ring that is a particular and comfortable favorite. And as surely as I’ve adorned myself each time I’ve left the house, every day when I’ve returned, my first stop after dropping my purse has been to remove my jewelry, each piece of which seems to magically transform into cumbersome 10 lb weights as soon as I walk in the door.

When our statewide “shelter-in-place” order was issued in March, I had already implemented this practice for our household a week earlier, insisting that my high-risk husband cease all shopping and errand-running and that I be the one to make as few trips as possible outside the house for necessities. On these rare outings for groceries and pet supplies, my hairstyle and attire were geared toward minimizing both the potential for contamination while I was out, and the perceived need to decontaminate items upon my return. Since I was now home almost all the time, the vast majority of my life had already become jewelry- and tinted balm-free existence. But as earrings became another item I was tempted to decon every time I returned home, and the nitrile gloves I began wearing to shop obviated the purpose of finger rings, and face masks rendered tinted lips unknown to anyone except myself, the last vestiges of my adaptation of my mother’s daily requirements for women fell entirely away from me.

As much as I am an introverted homebody who sheltered-in-place naturally long before it became a state mandate, my husband lives for seeing some aspect of the world outside of our home each and every day. And while as a biologist he understands the need to minimize opportunities for disease transmission under the current circumstances, it no less wore on him to be confined to our house, yard, and even neighborhood, as days turned to weeks and ultimately more than a month. Realizing that we could venture out and still honor the spirit of “shelter-in-place,” which was to avoid opportunities for COVID-19 transmission, we one Saturday in April decided to go for a human interaction-free drive to see something—anything, really—other than the house and yard on which we’d been laying eyes almost exclusively for more than a month.

As we prepared to go out, although I readied a couple of disposable masks and pairs of nitrile gloves for use in the event that we needed to interact with other humans, I realized that this was intended to be an excursion that more closely approximated “normal” than anything either of us had done for well over a month. And while “normal” was the feeling I was going for when I reached for the large silver and turquoise earrings that were most certainly over-dressing for coordination with the T-shirt and cargo pants I was wearing, I instead felt absolutely giddy just readying myself to go out in a manner that I had performed, almost thoughtlessly, literally thousands of times before, until so recently.

I threaded the earrings through the holes in my earlobes. Their weight, which would have felt burdensome had I planned to stay at home, instead served up a familiar comfort. Because the earrings were admittedly a bit much for the T-shirt and cargo pants I wore, I selected a simple silver naja necklace for my neckline. As I slid my wedding band and favorite engraved silver ring on my fingers, I felt a flicker of what it had been like, just a couple of short months earlier, to prepare to step out of the house without a barrage of thoughts of my own mortality. A final swipe of tinted lip balm, and I could almost convince myself that it was a normal day, during a normal weekend, and that we were going for a normal drive in a normal Southern California. Instead, as we walked toward the door to leave, I picked up our masks and gloves, and wondered if anything outside the walls of our home would ever really feel normal to us again in our lifetimes. And if that might be the day when my husband or I would somehow, without even realizing the transfer of a virus-laden droplet had occurred, contract COVID-19.