When this pandemic started, I remember thinking my 48-pack instant coffee supply from Starbucks would certainly get me through. Surely this isn’t going to go on through 48 mornings?

Today is Day 99 for me.

New Orleans officially locked down on March 14th, but I started the week prior. On March 7th.

I gave my last hug (to my friend Sam Mercer. It was his birthday, after all), and I bought pounds and pounds of meat and rice, cans of chickpeas (which still haven’t been opened) and instant ramen (which has necessitated repurchase. Seriously, this is THE BEST instant Thai food in the world).

I “hunkered,” as we are fond of saying Down South. Hurricane a’comin? Hunker. Tornado sirens going off over the strip mall? Hunker. Boyfriend found cheating? Key his car. And then, take to the bed and hunker.

I’m particularly adept at hunkering. If you give me good TV, a fast-paced novel or a bunch of instant ramen, I can easily treat my home like a nuclear fallout shelter.

But it’s not the noodle+MindyProject binges that I will recall most from these days. It’s the sweet, calm quiet of the world’s busiest blocks. It’s the continual thought of, “We are experiencing something once-in-a-century. Look around. No one in your lifetime may ever have the French Quarter so empty. So locals-only.”

The beginning was eerie. I wasn’t in this particular frame of mind back then.

I walked one evening at sunset, disturbed by how many blocks I’d gotten from home when suddenly there were no lights. No neon winking to life. No restaurant lanterns to guide my way back. “Will anyone help me if I scream out here?” It was a thought I had in those early, dark, saddest days. The streets resembled an empty movie lot; it felt like you could shove a house over with your bare hands.

While I was grappling with a new existence, it was definitely not the French Quarter’s first rodeo with virus lockdowns. The city was a refuge for ships avoiding winter storms on the open sea. Dirty, tired, often-ill sailors and voyagers disembarked and headed straight for the tavern or the whorehouse. Cholera broke like a wave across the town. That year was 1833.

That cholera epidemic carried on and slammed into a Yellow Fever epidemic in 1853. Can you imagine? No. No we cannot. Nearly 8,000 people died of Yellow Fever in the city that year. The cisterns used for collecting drinkable rainwater were to blame. The mosquitos had bred furiously.

I like to remind myself of those ancestors of ours, who braved ship crossings and prayed over the feverish bodies of loved ones. I like to acknowledge their bravery and use it to remember my meek inconvenience in all this.

It’s not to say my biggest anxiety was running out of coffee or even the loss of my job.

My biggest anxiety was dying alone in a hospital bed. I lay in bed that first week, trying to sleep, thinking about it every night. What if I just couldn’t breathe? What is this scratch in my throat? Why do I want to cough? Is this it? I would get up and take my temperature with trembling hands.

My parents are together. My brother is with his family. Me? I am solo. And I wandered around––mentally and physically––in those very first days, thinking about mortality and history.

About my own mortality and my own place in history.

I’ve thought daily about the people who built and watched these streets go from cobblestones to pavement; from carriages to cars. I think they’d smile that we still use gas lanterns; that we’ve sacrificed insulation to keep their brick-between-post architecture.

Bourbon Street is so shiny now. Stripped of trash and tawdriness. The characters we know and love still blast a trumpet or a sax, busking outside of Rouse’s or Verti Marte. There are two Tarot Card readers in Jackson Square, in masks. More will likely return this week, as we slowly crack open.

I like to think of all those brave souls in the pandemics that came before and I feel more tied to this place than ever.

We share that same electric current of fear in the earliest days, and I like to think we share that same joy in the ensuing fact that we got her all to ourselves for once.

The French Quarter might never again in my lifetime look the way that it has these last 99 days.

Let’s hope not.

But, also … let’s enjoy it. I’m going for a walk now.