一种小刺绣我在卧室里挂在我和我的丈夫，我的猫，以及有时候我的孩子。它描绘了一艘双桅船直接进入天堂，帆船展开。但这艘船没有被风推动。外部罐和固体火箭助推器连接到其船体上，将其爆炸到满天星斗的天空中。几年前，设计的想法来到了我，而我正在读书Leaving Orbit由玛格丽特拉撒路迪恩'94，关于美国太空飞机时代结束的美丽，忧郁的书。我拼命思考前沿和探索和诺伦兰。

这些天,我花了很多时间凝视这piece of cloth and thread. Our bedroom has become an office for both me and my husband since our town, Natick, Mass., closed public schools on March 13 to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Our room is the preferred location for Zoom calls if you want a fighting chance of not being interrupted by one of our kids, ages 7 and 10. (Our cat, Maddie, abides by rules of her own and has shown her fluffy haunches to many of our coworkers.)

When I study my ship now, I think less of travel and adventure and more about long-term isolation in small quarters. Early in the days of the quarantine, I brightly told my kids over dinner that self-isolation in our small, 1880s-era house would be decent practice for making a trip to Mars. The next day, my daughter and I watchedThe Martian一起。（也许它可能算作科学课，我觉得乐观地。）我评论了，虽然我们可能低于面粉，但至少我们不必像马特达蒙的角色一样吃土豆。

适合杂货店购物肯定会像准备太空走道一样复杂。我的丈夫和我留下自制面具的房子（谁知道我的缝纫技巧在国家紧急情况下是如此有用？），为我们在离开市场之前和之后部署的珍贵瓶子清洁剂。

Perhaps my love of space travel comes naturally; before I was born, my father worked as a software engineer at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory on the Apollo project. He is currently weathering the pandemic with my mother in their Concord, Mass., home, with some frustration. I was distraught in the early days of quarantine to learn that he had gone to the Five & Ten to get a replacement button for one of his jackets. “Why did he think that button was mission critical?!” I yelled over the phone when my mother told me about his unsanctioned trip. She sighed.

There is plenty of turbulence on our own little ship, which doesn’t have much soundproofing but does have a 7-year-old who communicates mostly at a shout. I’ve developed a deep admiration for my children’s elementary-school teachers, who have had to rework their curriculum, on the fly, using online tools that work with varying degrees of success. (I loathe Seesaw.) But as the weeks have gone by, my goals have shifted from replicating my kids’ pre-pandemic lives to just making sure they’re not complete jerks and spend一些time reading instead of playing Minecraft or Roblox. I have also, perhaps, slightly lowered my own expectations for myself as an editor. (If you discover a misplaced comma in this issue—my bad.)

我还学会了强调给我们带来快乐的小事。我丈夫向Dungeons和Dragons介绍了我们，这是一个长期休眠的热情。我的儿子喜欢我们的旧浣熊和霍布斯书籍。Chrissy Teigen的香蕉面包配方。让我的孩子穿上泳衣，啤酒杯，并清空几罐剃须膏。从丈夫的脑袋里乘船的意外刺激。Schitt的溪。

While my family is decidedly grounded for the foreseeable future, some things miraculously move ahead anyway, regardless of the stay-at-home advisories. On a particularly beautiful April morning, we all took our bikes to the empty parking lot at the end of our street. My son, who had abandoned training wheels last fall but hadn’t quite mastered balancing on his own, decided to give it another go. After much cheering and encouragement from his sister, and a little push from my husband, he wobbled past one parking spot on his own, then another, then another, keeping up his typical all-caps commentary the entire time. Lift off.