I waved at the mailman Monday.
I’d wandered out mid-morning, wearing sweatpants and a fresh-scrubbed face — I may never wear mascara again — and, from two houses down, the man in uniform raised a blue-gloved hand in return.
I’d been thinking about mail carriers. Here for us through rain and sleet, blizzard and now pandemic, how important it seemed to have the U.S. Postal Service on the job, the reassuring appearance of bills and flyers for replacement windows and cheap pizza inside the metal box at the curb.
Postmarked pieces of normal.
I’d been wondering how they kept safe, reaching in for our spit-sealed envelopes day after day, so that blue glove made me happy.
It’s quieter in Lincoln these days, except on the police scanner, where people still steal and plunder, run red lights and hurt the ones they’re supposed to love.
People are also reading…
Like you, I’ve been thinking about heroes, the ones we take for granted at hospitals and urgent care clinics and doctors’ offices. The cops and first responders and firefighters, joined now by grocery store clerks and cooks and servers, shelf-stockers and office cleaners and child care workers and teachers. The minimum-wage employees at the window of the drive-thru handing you your doughnuts, your burgers, your lattes, hoping you’re not sick. (Don’t be that person, please.)
It’s been 14 days since I returned from Arizona on a plane packed with Midwesterners fresh from a taste of desert spring.
We’d watched the Huskers play softball in Tempe — college athletes in the sun — during what would be the last series of a season cut short. We wandered down Mill Avenue, trading hand sanitizer with our friends at every meal.
It was a trip teetering on the edge of upheaval.
Preparing to board at the airport, I heard a cough, and a voice: Careful, or they’ll put you in quarantine.
Dark humor, funny, but not funny.
“It’s been a 100-day week,†I wrote in my journal three days later. “I need to find peace with it. I see people coming together in the face of a pandemic and I see resistance, denial, backlash.â€
And now, everywhere I look, I see a ripple.
The Starbucks without tables — no work for baristas. The Max Tan without tanners (the pale with nowhere to go). The dentist offices without patients (patients without jobs).
The empty parking lot at Kohl’s, the crowded aisles at Target, walkers on the bike trail granting each other a wide berth.
I see strangers signing up to deliver groceries to the elderly or make masks for health care workers, new Facebook pages teeming with tips.
And Lincoln’s TEDx guy, Randy Bretz, dreaming up a new nightly ritual, a la Italy, inviting neighbors to take to their front porches at 8 each night for long-distance socializing.
KLIN’s Jack Mitchell networking on the radio and emerging with a .
Suddenly, there were virtual concerts and virtual yoga classes, virtual classrooms and virtual offices, virtual church services and virtual 12-step meetings. (Maybe we don’t need the Keystone XL after all.)
There were columns by astronauts and columns by anxiety sufferers, columns by epidemiologists and economists, offering equal doses of hope and hard truths.
There were stories — so many stories — about ghost-town cities and the lives behind the rising death tolls and news that the Army had plans to convert hotel rooms into hospital wards.
And all the while, in our small pocket of the planet, it was still on the surface. Ordinary sorrows happened, a cancer diagnosis, the start of hospice, a last breath in a long life. And ordinary joys, wedding vows, babies born.
Drive-up testing for COVID-19 would start soon, our mayor said, but for now, just two confirmed cases in Lincoln.
Last week, my sister sent me a text message. She wanted a hot bath, she said, and a cup of tea and, after that, a two-month nap.
It sounded pretty good to me.
Instead, I woke up Monday and put on real clothes. (Confession: only because all of my yoga pants were in the wash.)
I went out for a walk and counted robins along the way.
And late in the afternoon, I watched a dump truck back into my driveway and leave behind a mountain of fragrant brown mulch.
Because there will be spring.
Spring will not be canceled.