When I started putting this blog site together years and years and years ago I had no idea how badly it would eventually be needed.
The idea was for me to have a place to share my thoughts and empty my ever swirling noggin.
Life took over as it often does when you don't prioritize and mange your time well and I went about five years without posting here.
It seemed unbelievable when I realized it.
It was after the pandemic was underway when I was looking for something to take my mind off of the world and everything that was happening in it - so of course I dug back into genealogy.
I would love to be able to spend hours a week on genealogy but generally there's no time.
It's not that the pandemic has provided more time for us. I've worked throughout it. I'm essential I guess. I said that kind of tongue in cheek, but I don't take it lightly. My job is very important to me and I do feel that what we produce to the community daily there is important and needed.
The news shifted. Rather than events and regular type news - the topics shifted to Covid-19 mitigations and local numbers.
Our numbers weren't high in the beginning. In fact when the "shut down of society" began on that Friday, March 13- we didn't have any local cases. It was April 1 before we saw any local cases and fall before we would see a surge that was fairly frightening.
Our funeral announcements at the radio station were seven minutes long for a bout a week. I came in the door one day and said to E, "At what point do funeral announcements become a programming issue?" He said, "Wow.. I don't know. How long are they?" When I told him he was astounded and suggested that I might have to revise the funeral announcements to air 50/50 and make it clear to the listener that there would be a second funeral announcement airing in the next hour.
Now here I sit on Labor Day. The second Labor Day of the Pandemic.
Labor Day is a blue day for me. For starters it's a reminder that winter and cold weather and gray days are coming, but it's been a nostalgic type of melancholy for a while now. Labor Day growing up was always spent at Granny and Grandpa Anderson's on fifth street.
We would all watch the parade from the porch. In the earlier years the overflow reached down onto the steps. As years went on and the family grew the attendees overflowed into the yard.
There comes an age in your life when you think you're tool cool to pick up candy at a parade. That time came for me during those years. Fortunately the urge to pick up parade candy will return later in life when cool is not as much of a concern and by that time other life changing events will have occurred to leave Labor Day a somber day.
I drove by their lot today as all of this fluttered about in my noggin. The house has been gone for a few years now and a business office now sits on the lot. I could picture the house on the lot and the trees and all of the lawn chairs if I really focused - but then I thought, "Holy Sh*t! You're driving! You've got pictures somewhere... focus on the driving!"
