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Dear Babies Wonderful,
I've spent the past 10 minutes staring blankly at the computer screen, wondering what the title of this post should be. Not only has it been a loooooong break in posting (so sorry!) but I couldn't decide how to caption this scribble I thought might never be written. Should I categorize it under the World Turned Upside Down posts that have dominated the past year? Or should it be a Baby Wonderful episode?
I finally decided that honestly, it's both. By the time you're in grade school and the other kids are interviewing their grandparents about what it was like to live through the Great Pandemic of 2020 I may have forgotten everything, including my name a few details of this so I'm giving you permission to turn this in as your fourth grade history assignment.
See that picture up there? That's your handsome grandfather sitting across a restaurant table from me. He had taken me out for Mediterranean food to celebrate Mother's Day 2021. But you'll want to notice a few details that are a bit different from typical Facebook I'm-on-a-date updates. (Do kids still have Facebook? What do you mean the cool kids didn't even use Facebook in 2021? Huh.)
It was the first time we had eaten inside a restaurant in 15 months.
Notice that the tables around us are completely empty. That's because we were at this restaurant on a Friday afternoon at 4:00. Your grandfather suggested that maybe we should move our date up two days rather than patronize what he accurately described as "sneezed-on Mother's Day buffets." And maybe we should eat our falafel and hummus at the senior-est of senior citizen hours to avoid crowds.
He knows me so well.
He knew that I have spent the past year in the most prolonged state of fear I've ever experienced. I honestly did not think that all of my loved ones would survive the pandemic. It seemed so capricious--old people were dying from it, but so were young and healthy people. Hundreds in Small Town became ill, and many died, but even more were ill and didn't know it.
The worst part was knowing that even if we did every single thing we could do to stay healthy (and we did--we isolated, wore our masks when we had to be out, stopped going to any in-person gathering, Zoomed everything including coffee dates) it might not be enough. The virus could find us.
Now extrapolate that worry to the people we loved the most. Would you two precious wee ones be safe? Would your parents, your uncles? Your great-grandfather and your aunts and uncles and cousins? I discovered that worry compounds exponentially, not arithmetically.
I don't want to make this a long slog about how awful the pandemic was because while I recognize how scary it was, I also recognize how lucky we were to have the luxury of choosing isolation. So I will just say that when we ate in that restaurant, I may have had to choke back a tear or two as I realized that vaccinations and caution mean that the world that has been upside down for a solid year might be tilting toward its correct axis again. The weird epoch during which we found pulse oximeters in our Christmas stockings, and were grateful for them, may be coming to an end.
It doesn't mean the pandemic is over--hospitals in other parts of the nation and the world are still packed with desperately ill patients. In Small Town we are still seeing obituaries of people who have been taken by this horrid virus. We are still wearing our masks inside and in close quarters with persons we aren't sure have been vaccinated. We are not yet hugging indiscriminately.
But oh, my precious ones, you just can't imagine the joy of the steps we're making back toward normalcy. We are experiencing the upward bounce that began with vaccinations.
I am wearing lipstick again, and smiling at everyone I see.
God willing, right-side-up is just over the horizon.
Much love,
GrandmaQueenBee
