By G. E.
Shuman
The month of
January 2020 was a tough one for Lorna and me. It was about one month before
that dreaded covid 19 bug became the worldwide disaster that it ended up being.
That month Lorna was pretty sick… I was pretty sick, with something that we
took for a winter flu, which it may have been.
Since then, though,
we have wondered if what we had might have been covid. If so, we were the first
kids on our block, or maybe in our town, to get that dang disease. Maybe not,
but at that point no one knew what it was, anyway. Still, just because you
don’t know what to call a thing, doesn’t mean you don’t have it. Right?
How things
have changed over the past four years since we were sick at that time. Masks
have come, and nearly gone. So has Dr. Fauci. Ventilators and vaccines were
ramped up, (Remember Project Warp Speed?) and boosters have come, and more
boosters have come, and all those things are, pretty much, gone from national
and private thought. No one really talks about those things anymore.
Families
fought about it all, companies fired people, and schools closed, all in the
name of protecting the population from a little understood and deadly-dangerous
disease. Kindergarteners who once knew their teachers and classmates only with
masks on have passed through that fire and now enjoy more ‘normal’ school
experiences, thankfully.
Throughout
all of that, Lorna and I were here, bopping along day by day, in our big old
house in our small Vermont town, ‘kind of’ social-distancing (Remember that
term?) kind of not social distancing, and sort of like me when I go fishing,
never catching anything. We knew that covid was real; in fact, during those few
years, we lost two family members to it.
Still, we
did some traveling, vacationing, not stay-cationing, shopping when we needed
to, and generally enjoying life, safe, we thought, in the fact that we lived in
a state where there just weren’t that many folks to pass the thing around.
There was a saying then that Vermonters have always social distanced… which has
some truth to it. At the time there may have been some strange advantage to the
standoff-ish nature of New Englanders. ‘We just ain’t quite as kissy and huggy
as people from more southern places, bless their hearts.’ The bumper sticker I
once saw that said simply: “Welcome to Vermont… Now Go Home” was a bit rude,
but a bit funny, and may have expressed a lifesaving attitude, at least for
those years, if you think about it.
So, we, here
at my house, avoided the dreaded ‘cove’ as I have called it. We never got ‘the
cove.’ That creeping crud of a disease just passed us by, thankfully, for one
reason or another.
I hated today
to even write a column about covid, as it’s a sore subject and one whose time
had seemed to pass. Our home has not dodged every bullet in life, but we seemed
to have dodged that one. Still, lately I’ve noticed more masked faces at the
grocery store and have wondered if the disease was reemerging.
Well, I need
wonder no more! Last week I, and a few days later, Lorna, tested positive for
covid. Drat! It finally got us! (As you read this, we are both fine and
recuperating, but have sadly passed covid on to our daughter and her family in
the process.)
I know
people who have lived for years as though they were immune to the dangers of
life; things that happen to other folks will just never happen to them. Unhealthy
habits and lifestyles often prove such people wrong. I guess I was living as if
covid had never bothered me, so it never would… until it did.
Let’s be
careful out there.
