Presence

Down Came the Snow

December 31, 2021

And out went the power.

Probably not a good time to head out to the deck for a little sunbathing. What I saw when I dared to open the door to the deck yesterday.

Five days now, and counting.

But if the power hadn’t gone out

If it hadn’t snowed.

I wouldn’t have borrowed a generator. Wouldn’t have learned how to use it. Would still be a little afraid.

Wouldn’t have gone to the auto parts store, and felt a sense of blessed relief when the first employee who saw me after I walked in, apparently looking a little shell-shocked and distressed about where in that big store the gas cans resided, asked me, so politely, “Are you looking for a gas can?”

“How did you know?” I asked.

I must have looked that out of place. Not like someone who was working on her car for fun on a Thursday afternoon, bopping in to get the right replacement part.

He then disappeared into the back of the store, deep into the bowels, and returned five minutes later with my most new very precious thing: a five gallon gas can. Apparently, most of the world in these parts has been flocking to stores, desperately searching for generators, and then looking for gas cans in order to power those things. Fifty thousand of us have been without power here. I found one on my first try, in a store that I traditionally avoid as much as possible, because it is full of the auto parts, which I know very little about, and also the auto parts salesmen, who sometimes tend to be a little man-splainy.

If the power hadn’t gone out, I wouldn’t have gotten help from a man at the gas station, who was kneeling on the ground at the bank of pumps behind me, filling up eight smaller gas cans.

“What (the heck!) do I do with this thing? Is there a trick?” I asked him. Continue Reading…

Presence

Our Merry Covid Christmas

December 25, 2021

(And that headline is no lie. It was a merry Christmas, even though we had Covid in the house, because of the vaccine. The Covid vaccine, so far at least? It’s changed everything.)

Two very clear lines= a positive Covid test. Not something you ever want to see, but especially not the week before Christmas.

My son came home from school a week ago with a cough and stuffy nose. Not something that normally would alarm me, since it is cold (and flu) season, and the common cold is called “the common cold” because it is, well, common.

He is an internet sleuth, though, and informed me that this new annoying strain of Coronavirus, the one that sounds like a Marvel bad guy (Omicron!), often presents like a cold.

“Very well!” I sighed. “If you insist. We will try to find a home test. But! I am sure it is just a cold.”

We hunted down Coronavirus rapid tests (not so easy), found some at a CVS, bought the limit that we were allowed to purchase, sat in the car, and administered the test.

Once again, I was wrong about something that I was quite sure about.

It was not just a cold.

He had the Covid.

I developed similar cold symptoms a few days later.

My daughter, happily home from college for her winter break, got her Moderna booster Monday. The pharmacist warned her, “You might feel a little sick for about a day.”

Not surprisingly (because this is how our week seemed to be going), she got more than a little sick, and it lasted longer than a day. Basically, she was down (mostly on the couch) for about three days. One day this week, because it was raining and there wasn’t much else to do that we felt like doing because of well, the Covid, we watched five movies. Five!: “Love Actually (racy but sweet),” “Bridget Jones’ Diary” (don’t judge us), “Mrs. Doubtfire” (who knew the kids had never seen that one?), “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” and a Netflix Christmas rom-com that was mostly silly and entirely forgettable.

At one point, after my son had started to perk up after a day or so of Covid cold symptoms, and my daughter was still miserable on the couch, he told his sister that “he probably got less sick with actual Covid then you did with your booster!”

He will probably not win any “Brother of the Year” awards with that kind of remark.

Here is our good after-Christmas news. All of us are feeling better. Still a little sniffly snuffly, with an occasional cough or two, and I am still feeling unusually tired, but generally we are on the mend. I’m so grateful for the Covid vaccine, for the booster that I got a few weeks ago, for the fact that our experience of Covid was basically like coming down with an annoying cold. Not fun at Christmas time. Not fun ever. But manageable. Not earth shattering or life changing or something that brings with it long-term effects. Just like a cold.  Such a sea change from last year, before the vaccine, when we all were huddling in our houses, afraid to be out in the world because of what was lurking there.

Of course, the Covid is still lurking. But for most of us, if we are vaccinated, it is no longer  threatening (at least for now) in the same way: with a potential hospital stay or with debilitating long-term effects. Still, California lost 78 people to Covid on December 23, and more than 4,000 people were in hospitals with suspected Covid.  How many of those folks would still be alive, or would be home with their families enjoying the holidays, even with stuffy noses and sore throats, instead of in the hospital on ventilators, if they had been vaccinated? Most of them, right? Wouldn’t it be most of them?