Funny Story...

Thinking of what to write today. I had an idea for a subject but nothing really clear, it was about 2020 so out of curiosity I went back to see if I wrote anything on May 6th, 2020. Then after I read the blog closest to that date I did the same for 2021, 2022 and 2023. It's interesting to me to see what was important enough in my head to commit to a blog.

Then I decided to go back to the before times. I looked at 2019 and then had to laugh. And shake my head. 

It was the first installment of a story I did. It ended up being a 20 part story. I mean! TWENTY parts! And it took over 3 months to get them all done. That's not my usual. But that wasn't the funny part. The funny part is that the other day I was watching a news story and I told Brent that it reminded me of book I read years ago and then couldn't remember the title or the author. Just the general story.

Oh. I wrote it. It was a short story/novella that I wrote. And forgot that I wrote. Because me...

I swear when I get really old I'll just sit down with all of my fiction and read it like it's brand new. Maybe I'll become my own favorite author. 

Or maybe I'll think, I don't know what her issues are but they must have been hard to spell!

OH and in 2017 I wrote a tear jerker.

I hadn't remembered that one either but it made me cry which was also funny in its own way. But do trust if you cry reading it, I cried writing it. And apparently reading it again. 

So back to the original idea for today. I was thinking I'd write something about how the first part of the pandemic was actually sort of enjoyable. Those first two months, for me, were kind of nice. Brent was working from home, restaurants and groceries and such were all figuring out the whole delivery thing. The weather was nice so we were taking walks through the neighborhood and sitting on the front porch together at the end of the day. It was actually really nice. 

For us. 

For that moment. 

I know that it was never okay for a lot of people. There were people who had to keep going to work through it all and were worried about getting sick the whole time. There were people who didn't have an easy way to just keep going, business owners who couldn't figure out how to keep the lights on when they were being kept from their places of business. Part of what I wrote about in 2020 was that it was a choice the government was making not to subsidize businesses and workers. Which they finally did do the Pay Check Protection Loans and a few stimulus checks. There was actually one stimulus check working its way through negotiations at that time as well. It ended up being delayed even more because the president at the time wanted to send physical checks with his signature on them. So it got there too late. 

Too late for Ann to cash her check. We found it in a stack of mail she had opened but not dealt with.

See because that was the next part. If I was in 2020 I'd be a week or so out from the first death to touch us. Then two more would rapidly follow, one of those being Ann. There would be more. We lost friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances. 

Those first few months of the pandemic, when things were really uncertain and kind of scary in the moment were also really nice. Quiet can be good. It was a chance to recharge a little when we didn't even realize how much we would end up needing it. 

Once Ann died things went to surreal really quickly and kind of stayed there. Each new death we heard about was just a layer to add. Each new "this shouldn't be so hard to deal with" thing in settling Ann's estate was just a layer to add. We did find a "new normal" and sort of settled into that but it never got back to that peaceful, quiet, feeling that it was at the start. 

It's weird to think that a world wide pandemic started out so well but that's what I think about. 

When the world shut down it was really sort of pleasant at first. Until the death came too close. 

It sounds like a writing prompt for a weird piece of fiction that I wrote and then forgot I wrote it doesn't it?