March 29, 2021 Almost a year has passed since my first post. Hard to believe. And so much has happened in the interim. Too much, if I am honest. Too much and not enough. My father died in August of last year, an indirect victim of the Covid-19 Pandemic. A foal whose life my eldest saved died just shortly thereafter. Jason had to make to brave but painful decision to let his beloved 20 year old cat die. My children have been struggling with their friends' life threatening depression , as well as their own - depression that may have had its genesis BEFORE the pandemic but which was multiplied a thousand times by the shut-down. The adults in the house have been struggling with other issues, issues related to health, both mental and physical, for which the isolation that the pandemic forced on us all has exacerbated.
In the beginning... we ignored the words. We had heard, in that vague way of people busy with living in a rush, that there was an illness, that it had started in China and appeared to be spreading in Europe but there was no sense of urgency to the news. In fact, the biggest stories seemed to center around Russia spreading disinformation about the disease ( Coronavirus: US says Russia behind disinformation campaign ) or a re-direction of concern from Covid-19 to the seasonal Flu ( There's a Virus Spreading in U.S. That's Killed 10,000: The Flu ). And we had something else that needed doing, something which seemed infinitely more important at the time: We were taking a short, week long, trip to Tucson. The trip was served two critical purposes and one less critical: I was going to go see my father whose Alzheimer's disease seemed to be on the fast track, we were taking my 86 year old mom back to visit her friends (She had just moved up to live with us in May of 2019 and ...