By Ann Von Dehsen, May 7, 2020 — I don’t know if I’ve had a “best day” but the thing I look forward to the most is something I call “Balcony Visits”. And that’s because I live in a very small apartment, but it has a balcony. My daughters live nearby; they have kids, and they were calling all the time. And one daughter would call me every day as she was taking a walk with her baby in the carrier. So we were talking, and I was inside the apartment but I said “Well where are you now?” And she said, “Well, come out on the balcony!” So I went out on the balcony and there they were, on the street, waving and all. And she got the baby out of her carrier and put him down on the ground (he just turned a year) and he started walking. So I got to see, pretty much, his first long steps! So it was great, it was just a really nice visit, and that started a whole new theme to this. Then my other daughter started coming over. I’m only on the second floor so it’s not far, but eventually, we decided I could come down on the street. We just stood like 6 or 8 feet apart so it was a little bit closer. So my 5-year-old grandson began doing things like he came over on a scooter a couple of times and showed me how he liked riding on the scooter. And he would sing certain songs, tell me a lot of things… and just in general we’d catch up. It makes a big difference to do it face to face.
So, our last balcony visit with everybody was on Sunday. And I was down on the street and Max, the 5-year-old, had a big box. (This is a side street, there’s really no cars on it.) He went out and put this box in the middle of the street and told me, “Come get the box, Lama!” So I got the box and it just cracked me up … the things in it from a 5-year-old. There were two pieces of chocolate candy (very important!), there were a box of colored pencils and some random crayons, and there were torn sheets out of his coloring book for me to color. There were mosaic chips since he and I worked on mosaics together, so he gave me some mosaic sticks. A glue stick, because I was always running out of glue sticks when he was over. And the first Harry Potter book, because he and my daughter had been reading Harry Potter all through this. So he gave me the first Harry Potter book. And all along I’ve been thinking, I don’t ever really want to read Harry Potter; you know, that’s for kids and everything. So guess what? I’m almost done with the first book! And they’re coming back on Sunday, so I’ve become a Harry Potter fan.
So that’s a good thing, out of this whole quarantine. So I guess basically I just feel extremely, extremely lucky to be healthy and to be able to see the people that I care about most. And it’s very nice to see everybody today because I care about you too.