DAY BY DAY

June 29, 2020

Today begins our 16th week of sheltering in place. It is also is the time of year I start a new daily diary. I keep an ordinary calendar for our appointments. But I also keep a small notebook with a couple of pages devoted to each week. In it I enter the things I need to do --- laundry, mail --- and the things I want to do --- reorganize a drawer, write a blog. It's just a way to motivate myself to keep moving and not get way-laid and there a certain satisfaction in crossing things off the list when I've completed a task. I often don't accomplish all the things I've written down, but left-overs can always be moved to the next week.

The notebooks I ordinarily use have enough pages for half a year. Since this week is the transition from June to July, it is time to start a new notebook. But I didn't have any more notebooks of the old type, and I didn't want to venture out to buy more unless it was really necessary. So I rummaged in the cupboard, and found an unused notebook that would serve the purpose. Instead of room for six months, it actually has enough pages for 18 months. That made me stop and think.

When I wrote on the first page that the diary would cover July 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021, it made me wonder how life at the end of 2021 would be different. Will this notebook carry me though to the end of the Covid-19 pandemic? Or will we still be sheltering in place? Will I even be alive? No one knows, but whatever happens in the next 18 months, we'll never go back to the beginning of 2020. I can only hope that when 2021 ends, the world is a better place.