We have a large magnetic whiteboard hanging in our dining room, which used to be the school room when the girls were younger, but now is half my husband’s home office and half what used to be my standing desk area and now is just a place where junk accumulates. (Note to self: it’s time to flylady the hell out of that space.)

So, this whiteboard has been hanging there for almost 15 years now. I used it to teach any number of subjects to my daughters, or sometimes to just post their assignments and chores for the day. Sometimes it became a place to leave notes for each other and to hang time-sensitive school-related or extracurricular papers, like permission slips or order forms. Or to make shopping lists. One memorable year, for my eldest’s 13th birthday, all her party guests filled it with birthday wishes, inside jokes, and cheerful sketches. Right now it’s got Mom and Dad’s work phone numbers on it, a sketch of a raised garden bed, a bunch of work-related notes my husband put there, some tax papers posted on it with magnets, and an electronic note pad stuck to it on which I copied out an old Japanese haiku for my husband. (To paraphrase John Mulaney, it’s not important for you to know why I copied a haiku onto an electronic note pad and then stuck it to the whiteboard, but, since I’m describing it, just know that this is one of the items currently on our whiteboard.)

A couple of days after the official start of the sheltering-in-place, as I was walking through that room on my way to the kitchen, I noticed something new down in the lower left corner of the whiteboard:

This is my husband’s handwriting. I didn’t think much of it, except I figured it was probably as a good a note as any for the way March was turning out. And it’s not like my daughters are too young for this sort of note. We all tend to curse a little from time to time. My 16yo’s private music teacher actually asked her once, after a frustrating session, “Do you curse? Because if you do, this would be a good time to do that instead of berating yourself.”

No one in the house remarked on this benign little expletive for quite a few days. And then sometime last week, I noticed someone had added a little sumpthin to my husband’s F-word:

That’s my youngest’s handwriting.

It’s been a long time since I felt the urge to photograph anything on our whiteboard. But this one took the cake.

When people ask me how we’re weathering the shelter-in-place, this is what I will always think of.