Corona relaxation exercises

Is the first quiet after the corona storm the first taste of retirement? Mikael Krogerus reflects on the new silence at home.

Now the children are no longer in the house. But we are still here, because only homeschooling is over and the home office is still open.

As soon as they get out in the morning, the flat is quiet. There's no muffled rap bass coming from the son's room and no chattering WhatsApp conversations from the daughter's room. Nobody bangs the doors anymore, nobody calls through the flat to see if the washing is ready.

It is strangely quiet. Not like the calm before the storm, more like the silence after the gunshot.

The cats sneak through the children's abandoned rooms with interest, sniff at the daughter's clothes that have been carelessly thrown on the floor, crawl through the rubbish under the son's desk. Cats are known to love places more than people, so when their owners leave one house to move into another, they prefer to stay in the old building. Are they perhaps looking for our old flat under our son's desk? Now they lie down in our daughter's bed and fall asleep peacefully. Do they enjoy the fact that nobody is there? Or is it the other way round, that they miss the hustle and bustle? Or maybe they feel like me: I enjoy the peace and quiet and miss the hustle and bustle. There must be more than everything, the great philosopher and philosopher Charlie Brown once mused.

I enjoy the peace and quiet and miss the hustle and bustle.

Before the coronavirus, we left the house in the morning and returned in the evening like soldiers from the front. Exhausted, full of impressions and stories.

During the corona period, we experienced: nothing, but that together.

Now, in the post-corona era, the children are leaving and we are staying. They are slipping away from me. It's a kind of foretaste of the time when they no longer live with us and we no longer work.

Loud footsteps in the stairwell tear me from my early autumn reflections. The front door is ripped open with a bang, a sound that only teenagers and children are capable of eliciting from a door latch, my daughter calls out from the hallway: «Can I stay over at my friend's tonight», at the same time my wife calls from upstairs: «The bottles still have to be taken away», my daughter again: «The cat is throwing up in the hallway» - and I remember that I haven't been shopping yet.

We will have to wait a little longer for the silence.

Mikael Krogerus is an author and editor of «Magazin». The father of a daughter and a son lives with his family in Basel.

He now writes a column once a week on the topic of coronavirus.

More from Mikael Krogerus on the subject of corona:

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