lauracovidblog

So Much Harder Than I Imagined... on the Main Line

Hello Neighbor! This is much harder than I imagined.  I’m a rule follower.  Always have been.  So the stay-at-home order was easy for me to abide by.  Clear cut, easy to follow rules – stay…

Hello Neighbor!

This is much harder than I imagined.  I’m a rule follower.  Always have been.  So the stay-at-home order was easy for me to abide by.  Clear cut, easy to follow rules – stay at home unless you needed something at a pharmacy or grocery store.  No socializing of any kind.

Now we are about to go to GREEN.  Very exciting!  Finally, some breathing room!  We can all finally start to be a LITTLE human again! But the rules?  Not so easy to follow anymore.  It’s not that each particular rule is not clear enough – the rules are pretty clear (although change so often that if you just sleep in one day and miss the morning news, you may be thinking you’re living in a different reality than everyone around you!)   But I digress.

The point is, that this “middle” ground may be fairly clear on paper, but it’s much harder to navigate in real life.
Case in point:  I was lucky enough to get out of town for a bit last week… up to NH where we usually spend a lot of our vacation time.  We have some very dear friends that live up there, so we finally got to see them.  It had been almost a year!  Typically when we all see each other at the beginning of the season, it’s one big hug-fest!  But this year we said: “No hugs, 6 ft apart, spend most of our time outside, no sharing food, masks on when we are in super close contact.” You all know the drill.

Well, on day 1 the rules were followed to perfection.  But as the days went on, and we started to just do our normal thing (and ENJOY ourselves!), things loosened.  Just a tiny bit each time.  By the end of day 3’s visit? Masks were in our pockets, “6 ft” turned into “6 ft when we thought about it, otherwise… who wants to hang over my shoulder and look at this picture?!”  We were good about not sharing food (we stuck to that one!), and washing hands was definitely not as immediate or as important as on day 1.

This is not to say the intent was not there.  It was!  And we all honestly tried.  But once you start to enjoy life again and you are in the moment instead of being in “covid-practice” every second… things just seem to fall apart.  So what is my point in all of this?  I guess it is to say that unfortunately we just can’t let our guard down quite yet.  We still need to be vigilant.  But we are all human and all doing the best we can.  And we’re going to slip up here and there.

Let’s all hang in there just a little longer!  In this new green phase, it is going to be awfully hard to stay vigilant – but we can do it!  We have to if we don’t want to go back to living locked in our own houses for 3 more months.

Hang in there everyone!
Laura