I'm at What I Think is a Crossroads

And I'll bet I'm not the only one.

Good morning, friends. Something has changed and I’m trying to figure it out. I feel calmer. I feel lighter. I feel—hard as it may be to understand—younger. It could just be that it’s spring and the days are getting longer. I’m not waking up to darkness.

It could be because I’m home, where I’m happiest, where the crocuses have escaped the flower box and are blooming anywhere they want to in the woods, where the daffodils are bravely budding, even when snow is falling, where the ducks and geese are coaxing their babies onto the water because they can, now that the ice is gone, where last year’s fawns are teenagers now, learning to fend for themselves.

But I think it’s more than that.

You know I’m the eternal optimist. (Pessimists hate that but I’m here to tell you it would be a sad, sad world without us.) But last year, when Donald Trump, that pompous, ridiculous joke of a ‘president’, was still holding us hostage, even while hundreds of thousands of us were dying in a pandemic that didn’t have to happen, when we were huddled in our houses wondering when we would ever see and hug our loved ones again, when Joe Biden won the election fair and square but it looked like we might have to fight like hell to install him in office, and when hundreds of would-be insurrectionists mobbed our Capitol building in an attempt to keep a known monster in an office he didn’t deserve, I joined with millions of other Americans who fell into a funk and struggled to make it through the day.

I didn’t realize how awful I felt until I didn’t feel it anymore. Part of the relief, I think, comes because I’ve been vaccinated against COVID. Maybe even most of it. I worked for months to find a place to get that vaccine and when it finally happened, I behaved like someone who had been given my life back. I thanked everyone who helped us in that facility, so profusely they must have thought I was a madwoman. I left there feeling like crying. It was such a relief.

I worried for me, but I worried even more for Ed. He is older by five years, he had just come through cancer surgery, he has heart problems, and the last thing he needed was a bout with a killer coronavirus.

Now we feel safer. Not totally safe, but safer. At last, we can pick up our lives again and think of something else. It’s not as if we’re free as birds; our house, left empty during the winter months, is not so patiently waiting for some badly needed repairs, our health is always an issue at our ages, and our state, Michigan, is still a COVID hotspot.

We’ll distance in public and wear our masks until the danger is over. It’s not a hardship. But the good news is we’ve already been able to hug certain vaccinated members of our family. One goal at a time.

A lot of us are feeling as if we’re coming out from a storm shelter into the sunshine. The damage is still there—a lot of work ahead—but we have the energy now to get to it. I feel it everywhere. I’m seeing it and hearing it. It’s a whole different vibe, and I like it!

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