Was out of the house early, traveling through the dark before dawn. Grabbed some coffee and kept going, a morning ritual savored on weekend mornings when there are few cars on the road. I love the silence of early morning, most of our local world still slumbering. Houses dark. Cars parked in their driveways.
This morning there would be no sky washed with the golds, peaches, and crimsons of sunrise. A blanket of clouds left the moon just a faint glimmer of paler gray.
Picked up the local Sunday paper downtown at Cumbies across from our grocery store. A machine moved across its parking lot, sweeping the previous day away. Some cars already filled parking spaces belonging to employees getting the store ready to open.
Who sees these people, these people who rise hours before dawn to make our days possible? The man at Cumbies who sold me the paper. The driver of the 18 wheeler that pulled on to the road. The people who made my coffee at Dunkin Doughnuts. Those restocking shelves in the grocery store.
I drove on.
It has been my morning ritual since the pandemic began. A way of getting out of the house during lock down. A needed reminder that every new day is a gift. Each passing season and sunrise a reminder of the Earth’s constant beauty.
A much needed balance to the local paper’s daily Covid case and death counts.
Yesterday was one of those mornings. Grabbed coffee and drove off into the rising sun. Ended up doing one of my "great circle routes" because it was all so lovely. The full moon silver white and still high in a crystalline blue sky. The morning’s early light slanting through tree branches and across fields. Drove up to the highest point in town and headed down into a wide vista - western Maine and New Hampshire stretching out to the Presidential Range, a scalloped line in the distance.
I kept telling every thing how beautiful it was - the moon, trees, fields and expanse of sky. The deer that crossed the road. Ducks in a pond. Wild turkeys having breakfast on someone's lawn.
I'm so thankful for all of it.
Wish everyone was. It would be a different world we live in.
Instead, I came home to the news that Covid modelers were predicting Arizona will once again see exponential growth into December mostly due to the state's lagging vaccination rate of 54.2%.
Is the same going to happen in Texas with its almost identical vaccination rate? How about states of the old south which have even lower vaccination rates? Cases in the Upper Midwest are already exploding.
And winter is not here yet.
All of this is insane.
And it's personal. My youngest sister lives in AZ and is vaccinated. She's also in the midst of six months of chemo. Her second round of treatment. That means she has a weakened immune system and is highly vulnerable.
My son the ICU CC RN has been on the front lines of this pandemic since before we knew there was one. Now our state is experiencing the pandemic's highest level of cases and ICU beds are filling up.
Our frontline health care professionals are exhausted and furious, rightfully so. This surge is preventable. The vast majority of people filling up our hospitals and ICU’s are unvaccinated.
Even so —
...A poll of 1,080 Maine people released last week by the Maine People’s Alliance, a liberal advocacy group, shows that among those who are unvaccinated, 46 percent are open to getting the vaccine, although only 11 percent said they planned to get immunized.
There were sharp ideological differences among those willing to get the shots, with 29 percent of people who said they were “very conservative” saying they would refuse vaccination, and 17 percent who labeled themselves “conservative” also refusing vaccination. Ten percent of moderates and 3 percent to 4 percent of “liberals” or “very liberal” respondents said they would refuse vaccination….
I don’t know what to do with such people. How do we go on with so many adverse to facts, to science, to saving themselves and others? How do we go on with so many who can not be trusted?
..Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said there’s been a “gradual acceptance” among scientists, who initially believed eradication was possible, that the delta variant – among other factors – has deep-sixed elimination of the virus as a goal. But that doesn’t mean the virus can’t be controlled, he said.
“I’m hoping that in 2022 we can contend with COVID on the prevention front and on the treatment front,” Shah said in an interview….
What is not said is that those who refuse to get vaccinated, to work together for the common good, have brought us to this.
What the doctors and nurses are seeing in Germany is happening here. Hospitalizations lag cases, and younger cases = longer stays, equals less capacity.
The Violence of the Fourth Wave — "One Thing We Have Learned Is that COVID Is an Asshole"
Doctors and nurses at the intensive care ward in Leipzig University Hospital are fighting desperately to save the lives of corona truthers. It can be a thankless task.
…."COVID takes the satisfaction out of nursing," says Knauth, saying that caregiving at a COVID intensive care ward has very little to do with the training he received. The primary goal here, he says, is not that of reestablishing health, rather it is a desperate battle aimed at somehow keeping the patient alive. In other words, it’s better to survive with an ugly scar on the thorax than it is to die beautiful. Knauth has a term for it: "survival pragmatism.”
Like here, they’re seeing younger patients who stay sick longer. Like here, cases and hospitalizations are expected to rise.
The SO and I are in lock down mode. Not that we ever fully stopped. We’re both high risk, the children terrified we’ll get sick. So we got our boosters, wear our masks, and socially distance.
Our lives don’t matter to those who refuse to get vaccinated. Their lives do matter to us.
That is the heartbreaking great divide.
I’m going to go outside, grab the clippers, and cut away some plants crowding the path to the heating oil fill pipe. Perhaps later I’ll go for a walk down at the trails and see if the Blue Heron is still there standing motionless in one of the fields, waiting for a snack.
There will be familiar faces and pups to say hello to. Ducks, geese, and sea gulls will be floating on the rain filled pond. The light as always, changing everything.
We struggle for balance. I’ll continue to drive through the early morning light. Listen to music. In my own way - pray.
We all find comfort, strength, and peace where we can. We have to.
Cat and dog videos. The daily videos put up by a wild horse sanctuary — the horses running free, safe, and cared for. There are good people doing good things. We’re some of them.
The smile and wave of a stranger behind the wheel of a car we let into the rush hour traffic line. Letting the clerks at the grocery store know they matter, their safety matters. Holding the door open for someone. Sending meals to our doctors and nurses on the frontlines. A smile.
This community and its caring of one another.
There are a million small acts of kindness that we do, must do.
They add up to make a huge difference. Never doubt it.