Jennifer Thornburg

A Sentence on Counting Exposures

Fall 2020 the first exposure begins when a student from the rural part of the state sends an email: professor I’m afraid I have bad news I’ve come down with Covid will need to miss at least ten days of school is that okay, okay I respond but what does that mean for me and the rest of the class do you know I don’t he says but the health department will likely call you so I wait and they don’t call and I wonder what to do because I am not allowed to tell other students in class they may have been exposed which seems silly and unfair and even dangerous so after four days I call the health dept. and they ask how long I was in contact with the student and I say he was across the room from me and they say then you are not considered a contact because you have to be within 6 feet for 15 minutes to be a contact and I feel a whoosh of relief then ask what about the students who were near him and the health dept. worker asks isn’t the campus socially distanced and I say in your dreams those desks are not all six feet apart and she says if the student reported them as being closer they will be contacted but I have to tell you that the contact tracing is far behind they are working as fast as they can and I say okay but meanwhile the students nearest him should probably be isolating and she says it’s not a perfect system we are doing the best we can then two weeks pass and another student emails that she has been exposed and is in quarantine and what can she do to keep up and I tell her get on D2L where I post all the assignments and I think they should all know this because I’ve been telling them all semester literally hundreds of times already but I will repeat this far more than a hundred times to students who are panicking worried about their grades and about failing and about getting sick and I ask how they are actually feeling and some say they are not sick yet just bored and some say they’ve got cold symptoms and some don’t respond maybe they are too sick and then the emails and texts roll in like a wave exposures multiply I’ve been exposed I’m sick I’m in quarantine let me know what I can do to catch up my roommate brother mother sister father grandmother tested positive then a student writes that her best friend skied over a cliff at Fairy Lake and fell onto rocks and that she skied down as fast as she could and gave CPR for an hour but when the medics got there she was pronounced dead and I curl into a tight bean of sadness and horror and wonder when when will this darkness pass this semester be over and she asks if she can write about her friend’s death instead of turning in the final paper and I say yes yes yes please do and then I worry is it too soon but she sends me the beautiful stark poignant words: feathers trigger me my friend was wearing a down jacket when she fell I don’t like seeing feathers lying around on the ground now–my breath catches when I read it grateful she has found the words and I am undone by her honesty by the raw bare truth and I lose count of the exposures and finally finally the semester ends but the pandemic doesn’t.

Jenny Thornburg grew up in the vast, desolate beauty of northeastern Montana. Her family carved a living on the Highline for generations, stubbornly surviving wind and weather. In writing about her rich and complex childhood she realized that the present is held in the longs arms of the past. She agrees with Faulkner who said, “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.” She’s found that writing memoir is a way to make meaning and bring about consciousness. Jenny studied writing and geology at Montana State University in the late seventies. She returned to school in 2010 earning a BA in both Liberal Arts Quaternity and Writing. She earned an MA in English in 2012, and an MFA in Creative Writing at Vermont College in 2014. She has been published in magazines, poetry books and most recently in the anthology, “The Kindness of Strangers.” She and her husband live in Bozeman with their super-model cat, and are happily involved in the lives of their five grown children and two grandchildren. Jenny teaches Creative Writing at Montana State University.