THETFORD — Like millions of Americans, Jennifer Goodspeed of Post Mills woke up on Monday morning to a new reality. With Vermont schools shutting down for at least three weeks to combat the spread of coronavirus, Goodspeed’s 10-year-old daughter, Adrianna Hayes, is stuck at home, and Goodspeed still has to work.
So, on Tuesday morning, Goodspeed, a single mom who runs her own cleaning business, brought Adrianna along on her cleaning jobs.
“I’m thankful that she can come with me, but she’s going to get sick of it,” Goodspeed said in a phone interview after returning home from cleaning houses in Thetford. “I feel sorry for people who are more affected by this.”
With schools, child care centers and many businesses shuttered and a wide swath of the working population now doing their jobs from home, families all over the Upper Valley are making do in a variety of ways: bringing kids to work, setting up makeshift home offices, adjusting their work hours to care for and school their children and scrambling to find alternative child care. They’re also making difficult decisions about how much risk to take and finding ways to stay positive while life as they know it grinds to a halt.
For Goodspeed, taking time away from work isn’t an option. “It would be a total loss of income,” she said. Nor does she have family in the area. So for now, she’ll carry on, bringing Adrianna along much of the time.
Only one of her clients has canceled due to coronavirus concerns and that client still plans to pay her, but Goodspeed worries that others may opt not to have her come as the number of cases rises, and she knows having her daughter tag along may raise additional worries.
She’s also uncertain how she’ll manage remote schooling for Adrianna, a fifth-grader at Thetford Elementary School, while keeping up with her own work.
“I haven’t sorted that out yet,” she said. “She has the capacity. It’s just getting her to focus.”
For Sage McKinley-Smith, a junior at Hanover High School, life looks almost nothing like it did a week ago.
“I’d go to school eight hours and then I’d go to hockey practice for two hours and then I’d go home and do homework for four or five hours,” McKinley-Smith, 17, of Norwich, said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “It’s been a little bit of whiplash for sure.”
McKinley-Smith is now spending her days at home with her brothers, Micah, a freshman at Hanover High, and Ezra, a seventh-grader at Richmond Middle School. (Her parents, for now, are still going to work, but that could change.)
“It’s definitely been an adjustment to figure out how to give each other space and not get on each other’s nerves too much,” she said.
The three siblings are trying to get outside every day and stay busy as they wait for remote learning to begin next week. McKinley-Smith has also stayed connected with her friends through technology.
On Monday evening, they all played charades via Facetime, and they’ve been discussing hobbies they plan to take up such as photography and sign language.
“I’m personally trying to see it as kind of an opportunity,” McKinley-Smith said.
Damian and Christina DiNicola of Randolph are weighing childcare options for their children, 7-year-old Bella and 4-year-old Sophia.
Sophia goes to the Robin’s Nest Preschool at Gifford Memorial Hospital, where Christina is a pediatrician.
Bella may be able to get a slot in a temporary child care program being offered for children of health care workers at Randolph Union Elementary School.
But because Christina is one of just two pediatricians at the hospital, she’s taking every precaution to stay healthy for the sake of the community, Damian said in a phone interview on Tuesday. And that may mean keeping the kids home.
“It will probably come down to how my wife feels about the risk vs. the benefits,” Damian, a private practice attorney in town, said in a phone interview on Tuesday.
The DiNicolas both have parents in town who may be able to fill potential child care gaps, but because the grandparents are in a high-risk age group, the children may need to stay isolated for a few weeks before the couple exercises that option, Damian said.
Over the coming days, he may find himself bringing some of his work home, working at odd hours and cutting back on his schedule.
The situation has highlighted for the couple how important the public school system is to working families, Damian said. It’s also made them realize how fortunate they are. “It’s difficult for us, but we’re well-positioned. There are a lot of folks out there who don’t have this flexibility,” he said. “How long can everyday people manage?”
The coronavirus pandemic feels oddly familiar to Kim and Scott Genzer of Norwich. The couple met as Peace Corps volunteers stationed in Gabon in the ’90s, and Kim was still there during an Ebola outbreak.
She was immediately evacuated and spent the next six weeks in limbo in the capital.
In 2010, the couple was living in Kingston, Jamaica, with two small children when the U.S. government, in the process of extraditing a drug lord, instituted a weeks-long citywide lockdown. Scott, who was working as the principal of an international school, implemented online learning for his students.
“People thought I was crazy,” he said in a phone interview. “It was a lot of experimenting. A lot of hit and miss.”
Coping during those uncertain times taught the couple valuable life lessons, they said.
“I think the biggest thing is to let go of the desire to know what’s going to happen a week from now or a month from now,” Scott said. “I think we also learned that so much of what we have in the West is superfluous.”
Scott, a data scientist for a Boston-based software company, and Kim, a self-employed tax preparer, are both used to working from home as well — although having their daughters, Katie, a high school junior, and Sarah, a first-year ballet student, home with them has added a new wrinkle.
“We’re big proponents of … having a clear separation between where you work and where you live,” Scott said. “Even if it’s just two rooms in your house.”
The day after celebrating his 18th birthday with friends, Trevor Siegel, a senior at Hanover High School, got the email announcing the closure of New Hampshire schools.
The governor’s directive specified three weeks, but based on what he’d been hearing, Siegel suspects his senior year may be over.
“The first thing I thought was, there goes my prom. There goes my graduation. There goes the senior trip … there goes my tennis season,” Siegel said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
A few days in, however, Siegel is clinging to the positive. Because his father is a doctor at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Siegel and his family are keeping themselves as isolated as possible. He can’t even see his girlfriend.
Instead, he’s written 60 pages of a novel — his third — he’s helping his mom around the house, and he’s making the most of the extra time with his older brother, Matthew, home from his sophomore year at Tufts University, and his younger brother, Izaiah, a fourth grader at the Ray School.
“My mom is always telling me, ‘Perspective, Trevor, perspective,’ ” Siegel said. “This all sucks. It really does. But there are much worse things that could be happening to us. We have to feel lucky that we’re happy and safe and together as a family.”
Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com or 603-727-3268.