Anytime I run water now I start counting. I’ve always been fastidious about washing my hands and have been counting to at least twenty seconds since I was a server; in more recent years, that grew to 35–40 seconds after I read that that’s what doctors do. So, it’s not that counting while washing my hands is itself new, but the frequency with which I wash my hands has increased dramatically, even at home, especially after coming back in from outside, which requires a series of washes as I change from outside to inside clothes, etc. And so now anytime I run water, I start counting. It takes seven seconds to fill one of our water pitchers, and something more like twenty for the other one; five seconds is usually good for washing rice (three or four times, though).

I’ve been thinking lately about all the little things COVID will change, the small habits that will become routine in the way things become an indelible, uncontrollable part of your life and remain that way long after you remember why. There are the big things — we now have a reusable mask for every day of the week, each, and I imagine we’ll continue using them for the sake of common courtesy while ill, as is done elsewhere already. But there will be the little things, too, even things I might not immediately tie to COVID, like being hesitant to go out to crowded public events based on ineffable feeling, or keeping a spray bottle filled with rubbing alcohol around, or wiping down groceries and putting what we can in separate containers.

In ten or twenty years, it will just be what we do, and it will feel like it’s what we’ve always done. Some things will go back to normal, but others are ruptured and will become a new normal. The big changes will be obvious — I’ll always remember why we have all those masks now when we never did before. In twenty years, though, I won’t remember why I count every time I run water — it’ll just be one of those things I do now.