By noon yesterday the sun had come out, and I went on my downtown stroll yesterday in my broad-brimmed sun hat, wrapped from eyes down in home-made face mask. I felt as if I were wearing a chador. All anyone could see of me were my eyes.

I took the route I used to take when I walked to work. Stopped at the little window where I always said hello to the two little white dogs. Only the smaller one was there, curled up to sleep, and he just opened his eyes briefly to glance at me before returning to his nap. I considered walking through Huntington Park, but it looked too crowded with people. Lots of bare oily skin glinting in the sunlight. I walked around it and headed down the hill towards downtown.

On the surface things seemed normal, except that cafes that usually had at least a few diners were open for take-out, but empty, lights out, chairs piled on tables to prevent anyone from sitting down. I passed occasional boarded up windows and doors, often with signs reading “We’re OPEN!” and instructions for buzzing in or walking around to a smaller entrance. Normally the Union Square area has a lot of pedestrians from the hotels on Saturday, but very few people were out, almost all masked.

San Francisco’s Financial District is always a desert on weekends, even more so now. When I reached the library, locked up and dark, not a soul was in sight. I peered through the library’s glass doors, noted the empty desk where a security guard usually sat, the mostly empty stand with a few event flyers I’d set out on my last day before the quarantine — all crossed by a diagonal banner with the optimistic word “POSTPONED” in bold caps. I had to resist the urge to try the door. At that moment I would have given anything to be able to just walk in, greet the guard, and ride the elevator up to the fourth floor and my office.

The only sign of humanity on the block was a solitary, makeshift homeless tent across the street, a blue and white igloo made up of odds and ends of cardboard, Styrofoam, and plastic sheeting. It had a weird, self-contained dignity, that tent, and a care and detail that implied to me it had been there awhile. I hope the cops have decided to leave whomever is crouched inside it alone rather than rousting them and forcing them to the petri dish that is the Tenderloin. I’ve been told lines of tents choke some of the sidewalks there.

I crossed Market, which had no traffic I could see other than occasional buses and lines of young, often unmasked bicyclists pedaling past in segments of three, five, six. Alexander Book Company had not boarded their windows, but had covered them on the inside with brown paper so they looked as blank and desolate as if they had. Someone wrapped in a sleeping bag slumped in their doorway.

There were things I wanted to pick up, so I took the long way home, climbing the hill back all the way to Polk Street and going into the Golden Market to pick up vegetable oil, celery, and a tin of anchovies. Outside, I kept having to pause and lift my mask to breathe fresh air. As I said, I’ve never been able to stand my mouth and nose being covered, and wearing a face mask exhausts me.

Michael is still filling his days organizing and cleaning. As soon as I walked in he wanted help taking down and cleaning the light fixtures in the kitchen and bathroom, an exhausting, harrowing chore. This apartment is over a century old and the ceilings are high. We borrowed a ladder. Michael climbed up, and, as I held his waist to secure his balance, unscrewed the kitchen light fixture and lifted it down to me so I could give it a wash. Then the long, nerve-wracking ordeal of climbing the ladder again and getting the glass fixture screwed securely back into place so it doesn’t fall on our heads during the next tremor. The bathroom fixture defeated us. I’m afraid the screws were rusted. Michael had to content himself with running a sponge over it. We are both too old for this, and the ladder too short.

As I’d promised, I made beignet dough last night for today’s breakfast, then I used up the avocados for guacamole and made some black bean nachos. We opened a nice bottle of pinot noir, which we had with our meal. Like all good wines, a glass of it leaves you with a sense of security and well-being. We watched Montalbano, listened to the eight o’clock howl as darkness fell.

Outside we could hear the gazebo people laughing and clinking glasses. “Bastards,” Michael muttered.

“You’d like them if you talked to them,” I said. “You always do.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“Yes you would and we both know it.” Michael is a curmudgeon only in the abstract.

This morning the beignet dough bulged beneath its plastic covering in the refrigerator. I fried up some beignets to have with my coffee. Later I’ll make some more and leave a plate of them, liberally dusted with powdered sugar, outside some of our neighbors’ doors. Outside the usual mountain of fog marches past in the west, but breaks up overhead into white puffs of clouds against blue sky, and sun hits the buildings in the distance.