NORTHAMPTON — On Friday, Sarah Buttenwieser got a text from a friend, who is a single parent. If I get sick and go to the hospital, it said, will you help take care of my kid?
“There was not question about the ‘yes,’” Buttenwieser said. “The harder conversations are, how do we enact it?”
Buttenwieser and her husband, Hosie Baskin, have four children, including two — Remy and Saskia Baskin — who currently live in their Northampton home. In recent days, Buttenwieser and Baskin have come to an agreement with the single parent who sent the text and requested to not be named for this story. The deal? They’d limit their contact with others outside their homes to include only each other. “We’ve been calling it our circle,” Buttenwieser said.
Other families in the Valley have made similar agreements. Public health officials are urging everyone to practice social distancing — creating at least 6 feet of space between people to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Buttenwieser’s neighbor has two homemade, neon-green signs in front of the house: “The thing about social distancing,” one sign begins … “When it’s all over you won’t know the names of the lives you saved,” the one next to it finishes. While not everyone is able to stay home — many health care and food-delivery workers don’t have the option, for instance — those who can are figuring out how to socially distance themselves without socially isolating themselves. And some, like Buttenwieser and her friend, feel a sense of duty to take care of each other, while still taking precautions.
“We’re not going to anybody else’s houses or anything like that,” Buttenwieser said. “We’ve locked down in that way.”
But they are still going to each other’s houses. “We’ve made a pretty tight pact to figure all this out,” she said. “We’re not casual about it. But obviously, if people get sick, we could end up in a slightly different situation. It’s going to evolve because things are happening outside of our control.”
Lori Shine, her husband, Jay Johnson, and their kids, 8 and 11, live in Easthampton and have come to a similar understanding with another family they are close to in Southampton. Both families, who have kids of the same age, are limiting their exposure to just each other.
“Well, it was a little bit like asking someone on a date,” Shine said of posing the question to another family to socially distance themselves, together. “You really wanted them to say ‘yes.’ You wanted to present it in the best light, but you wanted them to be open with you and preserve a friendship if it was a ‘no.’”
Their chosen family is headed by Erica Carlson and Josh Stearns, who have two kids, 7 and 11. Carlson was in touch with Shine earlier this month when it started to look like schools might close. “I think as the schools were closing, we were scrambling to figure out how were we going to make this all work,” she said. In talking with her husband, “There was some debate,” she added. “Do we just quarantine ourselves, our little nuclear family, or do we try to work together on this?”
It made sense, Carlson said, to team up with Shine’s family. “It seemed like a really natural idea to stick together,” she said. They are strict, though. “If we’re hanging out together, we’re not hanging out with anyone else … We’re sticking to that.”
Figuring out the details of the arrangement, “that was a more delicate conversation,” Shine said. “I think we just agreed to take it as it comes and take all decisions together.”
The group was still working out a grocery store plan last week, for example. “Are we going to choose one store? What are the rules around that?” Shine said. A few days later, they had decided to wear gloves when they shop and minimize the amount of trips they take.
During the workweek, each of the four adults takes on shifts watching the four kids — helping them with schoolwork and finding ways to keep them busy — while the others work from home.
“We’re very fortunate in that,” Shine said of their ability to work remotely. She and Johnson both work in advancement at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Carlson works as an academic counselor at Holyoke Community College, while Stearns is the director of the Public Square Program at the bipartisan foundation The Democracy Fund.
“Right now,” Shine said in a phone interview on Thursday, “my husband is in the garage with all four kids, and they’re having a dance party and eating Fruit Loops.”
But a lot can happen in a week. On Monday, Gov. Charlie Baker announced a stay-at-home advisory and the shutdown of nonessential businesses starting Tuesday.
The two families aren’t sure how, or if, their agreement will continue.
“We’re going to share care today,” Shine said Tuesday, “but we’ve thought about what it means to follow the governor’s orders, and we know that since we’ve been locked down together for a week, we’re not increasing our exposure at all by doing this.”
She added, “That said, we’re going to take it day by day.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.