by: Susan M. Squier
We started our Coronavirus lockdown on March 7, 2020. That was the day I cleaned my henhouse, too. I had decided it was too smelly in there for the chickens, which is why they were no longer laying inside. Over an hour of shoveling, I cleared out a mountain of chicken poop (throwing out my back in the process).
I know these things now because since the previous November, I had been keeping a Daily Diary. I’ve been working in the field of Graphic Medicine for a decade, and I had wanted for a while to try out a drawing practice modeled by cartoonist Lynda Barry in her brilliant book Making Comics (2019): Get a standard Composition Notebook (with that cow-mottled black and white cover). Write down what you DID and SAW on the left-hand page, and list seven things in each category. Then on the right-hand page of the composition book, draw what you did, and below your drawing write about it in the present tense.
The point is the process, Barry explains. “Your Daily Diary assignment will give you a way of paying attention to the world that is critical to making comics. You will start to notice things to include and to begin to eavesdrop on conversations or hear things people say that you want to write down.”(Barry 2019, 84) Even before the Coronavirus, my experience tallied pretty well with what Barry predicted. But once I went on coronavirus lockdown, although I didn’t have many chances to eavesdrop and I definitely suffered from the Covid brain fog so many were now experiencing, I found that this drawing practice helped me remember more of what I did that day. And as I remembered what I did, I examined it more carefully and started to see more deeply into my surroundings.
Here’s the drawing on the diary page for Saturday March 7, 2020:
And here is my what I wrote below it:
We are at home—semicoronavirus self-isolation—and I discover that the chickens aren’t laying inside much anymore. Three grimy white eggs are tucked into the tall dead weeds near the beehives. So, I get on my high boots, and my EJI hat, and go out to clean the hen house. No mask, because there may be more important reasons to put it on LATER. The hen house has absolute mountains of poop. I shovel them out into a rubber pan and carry them out to the hen-yard compost pile. Owwww! Not great for my back!
By Monday March 9, the Coronavirus had become widespread. Because we are both in our seventies, members of the high-risk group, my husband and I were hunkered down at home. It was a cold spring in Pennsylvania.
On March 11, I recorded in my diary that my son (a medical student in St.Louis) had taken his fiancée (also a medical student) to the ER for a sore throat. The next, day, I recorded that my son: he “had a slight fever, which is scary.”
On Monday March 16, my drawing was headed “Day 1 of the Quarantine. Trump says it could go til July or August but with “resets” at 14 day intervals.”
I drew family faces, seen on zoom calls. I reminded myself that the point of the drawing (as Lynda Barry says) is the process.
Spring crept along. On March 23, it was still rainy and snowy. I suddenly decided to order day-old chicks from Murray McMurray: 10 Columbian Wyandotte Chicks and a 15-chick assortment of Brown egg layers. The woman at Murray McMurray told me they were selling fast. I guess I wasn’t the only one with that impulse.
On April 15, the day the chicks were due to arrive, it was sunny but cold; there was hoarfrost on both fence posts and ice in the water buckets in the morning. We got a space ready for the chicks in garage, after going to Tractor Supply to buy a heat lamp (by curbside delivery). And waited. We called the Post Office again and they said they should have come in by Express Mail at 1:30. But no sign of them.
On April 16 we were still waiting. My “Did” and “Saw” lists for that day sound more like a poem to me.
Thursday April 16, 2020
| DID | Saw |
| 1. Woke up & waited for chicks. | 1. Saw a robin pulling out grubs from lawn as I waited for chicks. |
| 2. Ate breakfast & waited for chicks. | 2. Saw sun and clouds come and go & waited for chicks. |
| 3. Drew & waited for chicks. | 3. Saw fly on the outside of my study window & waited for chicks. |
| 4. Did dishes & waited for chicks. | 4. Saw that Gowen [my husband] had fed the hens as I waited for the chicks. |
| 5. Talked to Virginia & waited for chicks. | 5. Saw a violet in the cold grass as I waited for chicks. |
| 6. Watched Gowen getting logs for a fire as I waited for the chicks. | 6. Saw that there were no eggs in the nest boxes as I waited for the chicks. |
| 7. Timed the ABC song for washing my hands and realized I need to add “Chocolate” at the end of it to get 20 seconds while waiting for chicks. | 7. Saw the plastic bags from Tait Farms greenhouse on the hook as I waited for the chicks. |
My Daily Drawing: “Snowy Sad Thursday as I wait for the chicks.”
And I wrote beneath it:
Saw it snow as I waited for the chicks. Light, hard, almost popcorny flakes. Dropping heavily. Almost torpedo-like, against a backdrop of lighter, sideways-blowing flakes. Bouncing softly off the bushes in front of my study window. Sifting down like a digital rain across the meadow. Clicking down, paced and steadily, almost Brownian motion, twirling, reversing, popping up, sideways, and down, spinning and shaking down and down, a pinpoint white pattern across the green lawn and the green and tawny meadow, a fast and foggy interference between me at my desk and the big fir beyond my meadow as I wait for the chicks. 9:52 a.m.
We had to wait four long, cold days for the chicks to arrive at our post office, because Express Mail was delayed due to Covid. When I finally picked them up from our village post office, three of the chicks were dead of the cold; they’d been shipped from Iowa through Minneapolis to Pittsburgh, and then trucked to our small village.
The good news was that twenty-three seemed likely to survive. It was now so cold out that we put the others in our dining room. We found a 3’ x 6’ cardboard shipping container in the garage, equipped it with aluminum foil extensions to keep the chicks from hopping out, and placed it on our dining room table, with two heat-lamps duct taped to the chandelier above it. We settled our surviving chicks, now five days old, on the Editorial Page of the New York Times, and dipped their beaks into the nutrient enhanced water as instructed by Murray McMurray
I wrote this as my Daily Diary for April 17:
Chicks, I am discovering, are hard to draw. Their beaks start up on their head between their eyes and are pretty small, and the proportion of head to body is also hard to get. But what is amazing—and I really don’t want to jinx this even by writing it—is how they seem on the verge of ‘crumping’ –as med students would say—and then recover. Their energy and curiosity are stunning.
This morning, my husband said that the uncertainty was really getting to him. I reminded him of what our daughter said to us: “We were always in free fall. We just didn’t know it.”
CODA:
It is Wednesday, August 5. There’s no end in sight for the Coronavirus in the USA. But for the last several weeks, my husband has been building a hen house. When it’s finished, we plan to move our old hens into it and devote the larger hen house to the younger Coronavirus Quarantine hens. With eighteen hens and one rooster, we’re hoping to become chicken self-sufficient for the future.
Susan Merrill Squier is Brill Professor Emeritus of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and English at Penn State University. Her most recent publication is PathoGraphics: Narrative, Aesthetics, Contention, Community, edited with Irmela Krüger-Fürhoff. (Penn State Press 2020). Her other publications include Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke 2017), Graphic Medicine Manifesto (Penn State Press 2015) (with MK Czerwiec et. al.), Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (Rutgers 2011), Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Duke 2004), and Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (Rutgers 1984). She has been scholar in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (2015), the Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung, Berlin (2014), The Bellagio Study and Conference Center (2001), Visiting Distinguished Fellow, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, Melbourne, Australia. She is Advisory Board Member of SymbioticA Biological Arts (Perth) and of SLSA. She is a section editor of Reproductive BioMedicine and Society, and a member of the editorial boards of Configurations, Literature and Medicine, Journal of the Medical Humanities. Her co-edited special issue of Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology on “Graphic Medicine” was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2014, and she is co-editor of the book series Graphic Medicine at Penn State University Press. She is part of the Graphic Medicine collective and she serves as co-organizer of the international series of annual conferences on comics and medicine.