Anniversaries

There is so much happening today! It is St. Patrick’s Day, for some weird reason celebrated with enormous enthusiasm in the USA. Many Irish immigrants came to the US in the 18th century, and joyfully brought their holiday with them. Apparently, the first St. Patrick’s Day parade in this country was in 1737. We’ve got a long tradition of it. Yesterday at a birthday party, we heard bagpipes in the distance.

It’s also a COVID anniversary for this country. My first blog post to mention COVID was March 17, 2024. I posted about sea lions piled on top of each other, bodies heaped together and their combined breath mingling in the frosty morning air. I said, “The sea lions did not get the memo.” It is now four years later.

Four years later, most of us still keep the pandemic memories somewhere at hand. At that same birthday party, one person wore a mask because she was not feeling well. “It’s not COVID though!” she said, explaining that she had tested herself. Because she, like Pedro and I, keep COVID testing kits in the house. It’s still remarkable to me, the way the pandemic continues to impact us all.

Not that we want to hear it, but I’m recording this for my own interest: The Economist magazine keeps a running estimate of excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths above what was expected from pre-Covid trends. The global total is approaching 30 million. The confirmed total (the number of people whose death was officially recorded as due to the virus) is less but still astoundingly high: 7 million deaths. The 1918 flu killed somewhere between 20 million and 50 million people.

There is another anniversary today:

I started blogging in 2007 because I was unemployed and going stir crazy without something to do. I blogged at a different web host. When that host had to close, I switched over to Word Press, and posted a very short Hello post to get it started. So, while the congratulatory message from WP says I’ve been here for 14 years… I’ve actually been blogging consistently since June 2007. That is nearly 17 years. And, while that sounds like a lot of years, before the digital version I had a paper version. I began journaling when I was 7. That is 46 years ago.

I think it’s pretty amazing to have felt the need to document what was going on in my life for all those years. What compels a person to record their daily life? My mother did it, too. I have a stack of books that are her journals. It’s a small stack, though, and I wonder where the rest of them went. I tried hard to keep all of mine. I have lost some. My best early journal – an entire notebook filled with silly little girl thoughts in my pre-teen and early teen years – was destroyed when I left it outside in a rain storm and the colorful ink I had used just melted away. And some just….got shuffled away as things do when you move 20 times. But I have kept many, and I cherish them. All the versions of me so many years ago.

This is what many of you do: those of you in the blogosphere, I mean. Here we all are together, documenting our own lives and connecting to each other because of it. I hope you are having a good weekend. I hope the change in the weather is working out for you (whether it’s turning into Spring or Fall, they are two wonderful seasons). I hope Covid is taking a back seat in your mind, and making way for today’s healthy decisions. I hope you are living a life worth remembering, by spending time with somebody you like, and finding a way to laugh about it all. Hugs! ❤