I butchered my husband’s beard.

This was never the plan. The plan was just a bit of control for the mass of hair sprouting from cheeks and chin.

These months of living 6 feet apart have unleashed a feral streak in us all, and there’s no place where it’s made itself quite as apparent than on the faces of men who’ve suddenly come to sport beards…and scraggly ones at that.

One survey I came across claims some 40 percent of men between 18 and 64 are sporting new facial hair since COVID came to town.

And why not? More were working from home, where office dress codes ceased to apply — not just from the waist down.

And for months on end, hair stylists and barbers were unable to work at all, the intimate nature of their craft a particular problem in a social distanced world. Even as the world slowly opened back up, the particular placement of a mask has made the trimming of one’s beard in a professional setting rather difficult.

Which brings us back where I started.

To the butchering.

In all fairness — to myself? — the comb had somehow gone AWOL. And the scissors? I get the sense that someone had been using them to cut through metal or some such because they’d seemingly gone blunt.

Still, I persisted.

The scraggle had to go, if only because I’d tired of looking at it. If only because it was evidence staring me in the face that we’re still in the thick of this pandemic.

If times were normal, the hair growth would never have happened. Not like this.

If times were normal, he’d have long since gone to our hair stylist and asked her to to make sense of this scraggle.

But times aren’t normal.

And they’ve turned me into a butcher.