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of this before, but nothing brings it home like floor washing, vacuuming, and attempting to keep surfaces clean and disinfected—especially if they require bending or crouching.
Number two: my lungs are not what they used to be. After doing just about any of the above activities, I run out of breath quickly and have to pause to check my blood oxygen level. If it drops more than ten points below normal, I quit to avoid being carried out on a stretcher. This tends to slow progress.
Number three: not having had to clean on a regular basis
for the seven years we’ve lived here at BC, we were short on supplies. We heard that store shelves were devoid of cleaning provisions—not that we could have gone to the store anyway, since we were confined to campus, and we couldn’t find them online either. Even when we hauled out our vacuum cleaner, we realized that unknowable life-forms might have multiplied in the old bag which hadn’t been emptied for as long as we could remember. We were fortunate to be able to get new bags from Amazon. The Dustbuster was our only help in the meantime.
I hope this has given you an inkling of what life is like when we do our own housekeeping. Please know that when you finally return, we will shower you with rose petals and chocolates and never, ever again turn in a complaint card for as long as we live. Please come back!
Yours truly,
Mary Ann and Jim Ryan
News
I am a news addict. I check the headlines multiple times a day on my iPad to scan for anything new, and I watch the evening news on television. During the pandemic, this addiction has induced a state of perpetual anxiety. Even depression. So much of the news is bad, from the exponential increases in COVID-19 infections to the rising numbers of deaths to the millions out of work due to the crashing of the economy. Yet I can’t stop watching it.
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