COVID-19 won’t kill me, but the uncertainty sure might. I’m not afraid of the germs. I’ve dealt with germs before. So far, I’ve always won out.

And I’m not afraid of what might happen. I’ve dealt with might-happens before. So far, what was going to happen happened. And then something else happened. Not much is certain in this new world we’re in, but one thing’s for sure: something’s going to happen.

What worries me is having to make decisions and help other people make decisions when none of us really knows what will happen or even what just might happen. We’re all in front of the big slot machine of life in a time of plague. We don’t know what will happen if we pull the handle. We don’t know what will happen if we don’t. Something is inevitable, yet everything is uncertain.

My wife and I have a guest house we rent out on Airbnb. Our current guests are refugees from New York City who got out just in time. But they reserved only a month. They’re trying to run two small but international businesses over cell phones at the woodsier end of New London County. I don’t know exactly what they do, but I think it involves perfumes from France, manufacturing in China and clients in New York. Nobody in any of those places knows what’s happening now, let alone next week.

Then a mother and a 4-year-old — more refugees from New York — want to rent the place next month. Before accepting, I offer to let the current people extend their reservation.

They don’t know what to do. Going home seems pointless. A quarantined apartment in the desert of New York is no closer to Paris, China or a Manhattan storefront than a guest house in the woods. The world is now as close as a cell phone pressed to the ear and as far as a space probe crackling in from Neptune.

The mother and child could come in June, but another guest is scheduled for the middle of that month. He’s coming from South Carolina to build a church in Jewett City along with 150 other people.

Is this church urgent enough to have 150 Baptists coughing on each other for a week? It’s hard to say, and it’s not his decision. He has to wait. I have to wait. The mother and child have to wait. God has to wait.

In the limbo of uncertainty, I tried to paint a picture. I took a stab at a hypothetical bunch of pink and blue hydrangea, carefully dabbing in hundreds of tiny petals one by one as if each mattered. It came out looking like something painted by someone who can’t paint anything but leprous tennis balls. What I’d expected to be a pretty picture turned out to be a painful reminder.

I’m better at manhandling firewood. My wood yard looked like a muddy battlefield where the trees had lost bad. Limbs and logs had been lying there for half the winter.

I didn’t care that it was raining. I couldn’t solve the coronavirus problem, and I couldn’t tell what might happen in a week or a month, but I could pick up a hunk of wood and throw it where it had to go.

If it needed splitting, I heaved it into the to-split pile. If it didn’t, I flipped it over to the to-stack pile. If it still needed to get sawed up, I left it where it was.

Moving firewood around is delightfully simple, all brute tactility, every move obvious, every result predictable. No big decisions, no mistakes possible.

Tossing my logs hither and yon, soft rain dripping off my hat, gloves slimy with wet lichen, I thought about the more difficult triages happening in New York. People had to decide if a cough is just a cough. Dispatch had to decide where to send the ambulance.

Some people were getting into hospitals; some were getting turned away at the door. Some got respirators; some didn’t.

Every decision was big, and they were all mistakes. Every possible decision was a mistake.

I thought about what’s certain. This, too, shall pass always holds true, but what happens after that? We knew this was going to happen is certain, but only looking back. Same goes for the inevitable “I told you so.”

I stood there in the soft rain, thinking about hard rain, wondering about uncertainty and inevitability and which I would pick if I were the one to decide.

Glenn Alan Cheney is managing editor of the literary press New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@cheneybooks.com.