Life Lesson Number 26: Spend Time With the People You Love
Tonight, Rooster and I went out to dinner with some of the people in our family. We sat around a long table at a local restaurant, and everyone had a great time. My two great-granddaughters were there. They were born two months apart. Both of them have curly hair. I don’t know where that trait came from. It certainly wasn’t from our side of the family. The girls were born during the COVID lockdown. The memory reminds me of how quickly everything can change. Spend time with the people you love.
Rooster found himself in the hospital when my granddaughter gave birth to the older one of the two great-granddaughters. He lay in a hospital room two floors up from the maternity ward—the nurses brought him regular updates on her progress coming into the world. He called, worried he was so sick that he might never see her after she entered the world. Rooster lived. My great-granddaughter was born. The story had a happy ending.
Spend Time With the People You Love
Human beings have short memories. Those two years of extreme anxiety surrounding COVID are a thing of the past. We forget how we all hunkered down in our homes, trying to prevent the spread of the virus. My daughter and her family parked at the curb in front of our house to keep the dreaded disease away from us. Our youngest grandkids visited us through a closed storm door.
It took months before we figured out that no matter what we did, we’d have to learn to live with the virus. We couldn’t stay away from one another forever. There were no weeks to flatten the curve. Most of us figured out pretty quickly that the experts didn’t know what they were talking about. Herd immunity pretty much was the answer from the beginning.
Spend Time With the People You Love
I mention this because a person never knows what the next big thing might come down the pike. Death is a reality we all have to deal with. We need to spend time with the people we love. That should be near the top of everyone’s to-do list. Nobody can steal your memories. There might come a time when that is all that is left of a person—enough of this morbid rambling. It’s time for me to move on to the next topic, but for what it’s worth, one of my big life lessons is to spend time with the people I love.
Who is Molly Shea? Molly Shea is an accomplished fictional short story writer from Indiana who writes short stories and novels about a fictional town called Tecumseh. To read more of her short stories and adventures, click here. Be sure to follow Molly on Twitter!
So, true. I have always been a germaphobe. COVID terrified me from the start. Our grand child was born during Covid. I was devastated when my daughter wanted me to fly home. We didn’t met her until she was 15 months. I was the one who caught Covid when it was novel. I had been doing all the shopping due to my husband’s age. I was so glad we didn’t lose any family or friends. We were truly blessed.
We lost three friends but no family members.
I am sorry that you lost people in the Pandemic. I knew from the get go it was going to be bad. My great-grandmother lived through the Spanish flu of 1918.
That’s so lovely – I’m glad you guys all got together <3
Thank you.
It seems bizarre now, we were in and out of lockdown, the rules changed frequently; the number of times family things were cancelled, either because we were all told to stay home or someone Had caught Covid.
Thank you for reading. or reading.
It was a good reminder to treasure our loved ones 🩷
Thank you.