In the deli at the grocery store, there is an age-old feud between the morning-shift people and the night-shift people.

Nobody knows exactly when or why it started, but everyone understands why it’s lasted as long as it has.

I’m a rookie, and therefore expendable, so I have worked both shifts, and I can confidently say that there’s a palpable difference between them.

Morning shift people are responsible for turning on the lights and the machines, for uncovering and unwrapping the foodstuffs, for prepping ingredients and setting up processes and making up prepackaged meals. Morning shift people are very particular about things being just-so, which I suppose I can understand. They have to maintain an exhausting level of urgency and perfectionism, and create things, and push back against entropy, and I think that it’s often exhausting. And if the night-shift people have left even one small thing out of place – and we usually have – they tend to grumble about us, loudly.

Whereas the night shift people are – well. It’s like Newton’s third law.

We are responsible for turning off the machines and lights, for covering and wrapping the foodstuffs, for taking things down and putting them away and throwing them out, if they won’t keep, and scrubbing surfaces until they are gleaming. And we tend to wind up cleaning up the halfway-through-a-day-in-a-kitchen messes left by the morning-shift staff, and we tend to grumble about it, loudly.

Night people undo the work of the morning people, and morning people undo the work of the night people, and there’s a bit of unsurprising friction, to be sure. But we balance each other out, and complement each other, and that is how the kitchen continues to function over time.

And I think it’s a little funny that I seem to have gone from a relatively objective outsider to someone who has already decidedly chosen a side in a little bit over a month.

I like night shift energy.

I wouldn’t say that it’s less work, but I think that the atmosphere is a tad more peaceful, more laid-back. We are still pushing back against entropy. But I think maybe setting things up is like trying to swim upstream, whereas taking them down and apart is like – kicking along with the current. It’s still work, but it’s the kind of work that leaves room for thought and conversation around the edges.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because right now we are all essential personnel. Because even in the midst of a pandemic, people have got to eat. And I’ve gone from applying for a job on a whim a couple of months ago to risking my personal health, my family’s health, to leave the house and interact with the general public, for hours, several times a week.

When I tell people that I work in a grocery store, I sometimes feel embarrassed

I’ve been steeped in this academic-oriented culture and the message is that I need to go on in school and better myself and get a “good job”

but in the middle of a crisis, we are the ones that are still out here – on the front lines, if you will. Because we’re essential to the fragile way in which this society works, essential to supporting so many of the little things that I know that I have sometimes taken for granted.

Last week, when all of this started to really hit home, I didn’t have time to feel embarrassed about working in a grocery store. I was too busy serving the rush of stressed-out customers who had come to us for one of the most basic human needs – food. And all I could do was smile at each customer, and care a little for each one of them, for just a second. No matter how shaken they seemed, or I felt.

Together my coworkers and I take turns shopping for each other on our breaks, and get caught in untrue rumors about martial law. We watch the bread supply in the aisle across from the deli dwindle from half-full shelves to empty in one afternoon.

And today, I do have time to feel all this, and reflect on it, because the store is getting so little traffic that they didn’t need me to come in today, because people are practicing social distancing and holing themselves up in their homes.

I feel lucky to be witnessing this pandemic through the eyes of a blue-collar job. It’s been eye-opening.

This has also been the second or third week of watching the schools shift from in-person to online, from open on-campus housing to students being sent home. It feels like the Harry Potter stories I grew up with, and I can’t help thinking of Harry saying “Hogwarts is my home.”

I am thinking of FLCC.

The shift on the academic front feels unprecedented, and sudden, and neigh on impossible.

Behind-the-scenes work is being done by so many people as we try to adapt to this, as we try to work out how to support each other through this. I am so proud of everyone.

I think about such tiny particles – so small, impossible to see – that seem to have the power to close down nations. The libraries, the restaurants, the schools, the coffee shops. I think of the people in Italy, singing with each other from their balconies. I think of the cruise ship off the coast of Japan, or close to the shores of California. I think of my little sister’s senior year, of all the events that will not happen. I think of the markets, the music industry, the basketball season, the nursing students, the old folks’ homes. I think of the domestic abuse situation that has just gotten jarringly worse. I think of mental health and social isolation. I think of the college students with no access to internet. I think about the people with no homes. I think of another epidemic, and of all of the people who didn’t care.

And I think of the blue skies in China, and I feel a tiny flicker of hope

I have too much time to think, when I’m sweeping the floors, washing dishes.

I think of the twitch of a butterfly’s wing, far, far away.

We are going to get through this.