It Won’t Happen to Me

 

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.