Evocations of COVID

I've been checking my 2018, 2019, and 2020 journals to see what I was doing in mid-October in various years.  

It's been very instructive.  For one thing, I realised with a start, that in the past three mid-Octobers,  I had already begun addressing Christmas cards.  (So I started.)

I also realised that, at this time last year, my cousins caught COVID.

In a cruel twist of irony, elder daughter was exposed because she was in quarantine.  She had gone straight  from Heathrow to my cousins' home in Wiltshire, where she was isolated in a self-contained bedroom belonging to one of her second cousins, who was miles away, attending university.

Unfortunately, the other second cousin was attending secondary school, and he brought the virus home with him.  (This was long before vaccines became available.) First, we heard my cousin's wife had been troubled with migraines.  Next, elder daughter reported that her teenaged second cousin had "a cold".  Our hearts sank.  Nobody was getting colds any more.

The second cousin at university urged his parents and brother to get tested.  All three of them had COVID.  Five days later, elder daughter FaceTimed me to tell me that her senses of smell and taste had vanished.  

We were terrified and helpless, eight time zones away.  As it turned out, all four had completely different symptoms, and all four recovered within days, although they were locked down for longer.  The secondary school, as you can imagine, was thrown into turmoil, as the younger second cousin's classmates were isolated and quarantined themselves.

We didn't tell anyone but close friends and family.  As it was, cousins on both sides of the Atlantic had weighed in with their opinions on elder daughter's move to the UK.  The most vocal of the dissenting cousins have no children themselves, and seemed to forget that elder daughter is a fully fledged adult.

And besides, this hadn't been her fault.  She had followed protocols to the letter.

Today, elder daughter returned to Canadian soil for the first time in over a year, in order to attend a friend's wedding.  The ceremony has been postponed three times.

COVID touches and smears everything.