Is It Over?

Life Finds a Way

 

My sister, the nurse who has worked this pandemic, says no. But this Thursday there was a glimmer of hope. The CDC said those of us who had received both vaccines and made it past the two week max antibody development marker could go without masks. Outdoors or indoors in less than max capacity situations but maybe not maintaining social distancing go barefaced into this brave new world.

For me the news hit just as I was getting dressed to meet with other artists to decide if we could actually have an art season. I paused in my search for a mask (one of hundreds I made during this last year) to match my outfit. I did not abandon it but put it in my jacket pocket just in case. You never know. But I had decided to attend this event because I knew everyone who would likely be attending. They were all vaccinated. I had been keeping track on posts in social media. Our numbers are always small so it would not be packed. They would all be respectful of others. And if I at last could hug friends, this is where most I wanted to hug would be assembled.

Oh, the joy. At last some hope. A glimpse of what the new normal could be. As artists we were perhaps one of the most injured groups in this pandemic. Self-employed we had no unemployment compensation payments. Our governor had ruled us non-essential. And yet as artists we had to continue to produce art for our own sanity while every public event where our art could be exposed was shut down and locked up. I had survived financially through making and selling masks and scrub caps, doing a doggy day care service, the always late stimulus checks, and cash out from a timely refinance of my house.

I kept my sanity by flights of fantasy in fabric (easier to store than paintings), photography (which stays in a computer until the image is sold), and investment in a rehabilitation of my empty apartment into a hopefully pandemic safe short term vacation rental. My sister said I should save my money. You have no idea how long this will last. The 1918 pandemic was almost three years long. Hope appeared as a vaccine. And in spite of my historic allergic reaction to some vaccines, I lined up nervously to get the Moderna two shots in my arm. I cried after the first shot. Thursday night I was rewarded by getting to hug my art friends who had done the same.

Just the smiles, and being able to see those smiles would have been worth it. But as we joyously (if a bit nervously) put our hopes on, at the very least, a fall studio tour, I felt like that pansy taking root in a crack in a crumbling sidewalk in front of a crumbling church in Wagon Mound, NM. Hope is what life is about. Even in ghost towns.