Thank you for all the wonderful birthday wishes on Don’s birthday! I didn’t respond to the comments as they are really for him and he will read them later today. We had a lovely quiet and peaceful day. He loved his presents and I even made him a card as I had none on hand and wasn’t about to go into a store to buy one. It was a great day and a privilege to honor my husband and shower him with love.

The other day, I cleaned up the office upstairs. It was cluttered and Don’s desk was a mess. Plus, during the pandemic, we store some of our canned goods up there as we only have limited space in the kitchen. I took some pictures for IG and one of them was of this box, which is incredibly precious.

And this is the text I wrote to accompany it – I’ve made a screenshot of the post.

That last sentence is “It is far from over” – it’s been a bit obscured by the watermark.

When I think back to that time and what my grandmother shared with me, I am haunted by the loss of those young women. Grandma said they could see funeral wagons going down the road several times a day. She had returned to the family farm from nursing school to take care of her sisters. She also came down with the flu but she survived.

Since I have their funeral cards in my great-grandmother’s tea chest, I looked at them to check on the year they had died. 1920. Two years into the pandemic. 10 days apart. I can’t imagine what the family felt, the heartbreak of doing everything possible to save Rhoda and Maggie only to lose them in the end.

If you follow IG, you might want to read the post because some of the commenters have shared their experiences with people mocking them for wearing masks. In one case, my dear friend Deb shared that friends of hers who were wearing masks at the beach were spit upon.

Why such a reaction to wearing a mask? Why such animosity? And why such a determination to act as if it’s all over with, that all is well? We can lay some of this on Trump, of course, but not all of it. I know the answers – these are rhetorical questions – but this willful ignorance and anger and mockery continues to shock me.

The numbers don’t lie. And now we have the Trump administration turning its back on the epidemic – stupidly, because it won’t help his ‘numbers’ and it will result in more deaths due to their negligence.

Stay sharp and stay safe. I know that I am basically preaching to the choir here, as most of us are being very careful indeed. Don and I have already decided that we will hunker down here for as long as necessary. We managed a birthday celebration without going out to buy anything. I called it “Happy Birthday, Lockdown Edition.” We are fortunate that we can order online, that we can get necessities without too much contact with others. We have masks. We use them. We wash our hands continuously.

Stay home, my friends. Don’t start thinking that because some states have opened up that everything is okay. The numbers we have seen in the past few days tell a very different story. New York is doing well; relatively, of course, as there are still people who are ill. But because Cuomo was so strict about everything, we are seeing great improvement. The challenge is not to act as if we can go back to what we were doing before March. We can’t. Whether in NYC or on the prairies, we still need to be vigilant.

Stay safe.

Happy Thursday.