I liken my experience of living through the first part of a pandemic to spending 13 months in a minimum security prison.  Scary at first because everything was new.  I didn’t know all the rules and the risks of this abrupt new existence.  Just what I imagine the first days and weeks in any prison would be like.

A friend shopped for me, I opened boxes on the patio, congratulated myself on having a year’s supply of toilet paper on hand.  I learned to love the smell of Lysol as I wiped down everything that came into the house and wiped down everything in the car that I might touch when I had to drive.

I bought a Kindle when the library closed.  Never did learn to check out books with it but bought a few and a friend who uses Kindle exclusively loaned me many best sellers and new releases of some of our favorite authors.  I also bought books (way too many) and was able to mostly bypass Amazon by shopping with Elizabeth’s of Akron, a member of a national independent bookstore association, where the discount was almost as generous as Amazon’s.

I knew early on that this was a 100-year pandemic as I frequently saw it compared to the 1918 Spanish Influenza which killed millions worldwide.  I read John M. Barry’s book The Great Influenza so I had an idea about what was coming.  March 15 our California governor asked everyone older that 65 to self-isolate.  Having turned 80 yers old the previous month I took it seriously.

March 23 I ordered The Year of the Plague, by Defoe; The Plague, by Camus; and Masque of the Red Death, by Poe.

By March 31 I was taking my temperature several times a day.  I knew this pandemic was bad, thought I knew the risks and what I had to do, and just hunkered down in my apartment for what I knew could be as long as 18 months.  To me, 18 months in 100 years seemed doable.

In May I told a friend that if our situation was like the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 that the time of sickness and death would probably extend to 18 to 24 months.  She laughed at my prediction and said she was going to start calling me Cassandra.

Thanks to science and a big push from the government, backed by lots of money ($1 million of it from Dolly Parton), many lives would be saved in wealthy countries by production of vaccines in record time. On February 12 I got my first Pfizer shot and March 5 the second.  On the way home in March I picked up a Double Double and fries at In-n-Out.  Don’t tell me I don’t know how to celebrate.

And now, vaccinated and still healthy, I feel like I’ve been released to a halfway house.  Still wearing masks in public, still social distancing from most people, but the parameters have been slightly relaxed.  A couple of weeks after the second shot friends and I went to breakfast (outside) at a favorite restaurant for the first time in 13 months.  Last week I attended my first dinner party (all vaccinated old people) in 13 months.

It’s not over.  People are still getting sick with COVID-19 and still dying from it.  There are variants we don’t know much about. I won’t say my experience was easy, but probably it was much easier than what large numbers of our citizens experienced.  I didn’t have children locked in with me, I wasn’t trying to help children learn to navigate school on Zoom, I didn’t lose a job then not be able to get unemployment insurance, I didn’t face eviction or foreclosure, I did not go hungry, I did not get COVID-19, I did not have any friends or family die from it.  Plus, I’m an introvert and used to spending time at home, alone.

Maybe by Christmas we can say it’s over.