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Maybe it’s not such a terrible fate, this Stay At Home order. One doesn’t need to dress up, except maybe to get the mail. I like my hair long. I like calling my friends at the end of my workday, and they are home, not at a show or a restaurant. Conversations without purpose, just to talk, are a treat. My house was custom-built, with two offices, with doors that close so the virtual meetings on speaker phone are muffled. I already worked from home, for the past decade, so my routine is less up-ended. We weren’t social butterflies before, seldom threw parties. But here in Hawaii, we had a stream of visitors and got to know our guests on a whole different level. I got to show them such beautiful places, fixed meals together in the kitchen, then ate and laughed at the table, gathering up the dishes, remarking on the flavors of different courses, re-living mutual adventures. I am still tempted, whenever talking to my friends, to invite them over, hanging out on our lanais, watching sunsets together. Am I supposed to come up with a new definition of “together”? There is such a cornucopia of projects back-burnered, like scrap booking, culling files, donating unwanted things, like writing new stuff, like editing the old stuff, like entering contests, like clearing out closets, but the there are so many people so many people suffering, dying by the tens of thousands.

Maybe it’s not such a terrible a fate to re-consider what’s important, to look inside, like our great grandparents did and find the emotional strength to keep on going and then to remember it’s always been there, a gift from our ancestors. They survived worse or we wouldn’t be here.