Featured Refresh
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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
Tuesday evening, 23 March 2021 at 8 p.m. all over the United Kingdom, people lit their doorsteps and front windows with candles, flashlights, and phones as a "Beacon of Remembrance" for those who have died in the pandemic. 23 March marks the anniversary of the UK's first Covid lockdown. Here in Scotland, my family and I shone our flashlights at the people in the house across the street from us, whom we've only come to know since the pandemic began - standing at our garden gates and shouting encouragement to each other from across the street. On Wednesday, 24 March 2021, I did my third stint of volunteering at a local Covid vaccination centre - and got my own first vaccination at the same time, right in the middle of my volunteering shift. It was so uplifting! Everyone there was in my own age cohort, as they roll out the vaccine by age group - but also, because I was in a local vaccination centre, I met so many people that I knew as they came in for their own vaccination appointments. Within 40 minutes of ushering people to vaccinators (NHS - National Health Service - nurses and the Army were both giving vaccinations), I had met four people I knew - two friends and two of my grown children's former teachers. When it was time for my own vaccination, I was made to feel like a poster child for the entire programme - someone had to fill in for me for ten minutes while I stood in the queue, all the other marshalls laughed and joked with me as they gave me the necessary information, and half a dozen NHS staff all exclaimed, "You should have told us you had your vaccination letter, we'd have slipped you in earlier!" When it was done I went straight back to marshalling. I am an American ex-pat living in Scotland; I have had dual citizenship since 2016. My heart absolutely swells with pride to see how my adopted country is rising to the challenge of vaccinating its people, and to be able to help out with that a little bit.
March 29, 2021
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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
Reluctantly, we decided to send our children to their usual summer day camp -- retooled to follow COVID-era precautions: questions and temperature checks at drop-off, no buses to/from camp, which is a good 1/2 hr away from where most kids live, brown-bag lunches, socializing only in tight groups/pods, masks on staff (but not kids), no late nights or overnights, no hand-clap games, backrubs, or usual camp hugging, touching, or roughhousing. As I write about these restrictions they sound awful. And yet the kids are THRILLED to go there every day. They get away from their cranky and exhausted parents, from the perfectly comfortable house (with a playroom! and a backyard!) where they've been stuck since March, from zooms and screens and nagging and chores. They're swimming in the pool, fishing in the lake, doing dance routines at flagpole, making lanyards and friendship bracelets, and building wooden boxes in woodworking. And they come home filthy and sweaty at the end of each day. It's not normal camp -- for sure. But this little taste of summer is such a blessing, and a gift. This week, Tropical Storm Isaias pummeled the coast and sent them home early one day, only to be stuck at home the next because of power outages and storm damage. In anticipation of the storm, our little one came home with this piece of art yesterday -- marker on a hunk of wood from the woodshop -- and told us it represents a tropical storm. It's chaotic, and beautiful, and a testament to the fact that in this CRAZY time of asinine and criminal political leadership, economic freefall, deeply embedded racism, environmental destruction, etc., little kids are absorbing this mad world -- and, sometimes, refracting it back to us as a place of beauty.
August 10, 2020