By Sallie-Elizabeth Clayton, May 7, 2020 — I was having a very, very rough time trying to find out a good day within this quarantine period as people were speaking, but fortunately, I found the place. It was more than three weeks ago before the pandemic became “panic-demic” and my daughter called me to come over. She always wants me to come over and stay a couple days and she wants me to stay longer than I really want to stay, but she’s a momma’s girl and she is the only child so I came! When I got there, everybody had a mask including myself but we were not social distancing. Everybody, when I say everybody it included my daughter, her husband, their son, my niece who they adopted, both out of college now, she just graduated, my godson who is a fully grown man has no children of his own and he went to his sister’s which is my daughter because he was moving from one state to the other and he didn’t have an apartment. And my niece brought a pal from college with her.
So this night, my daughter said “We’re having a card party,” and she knows that I do not how to play any card games except “I Declare War” and “Pitty Pat” from the 1950s, so they were gonna teach me. But I looked around this table as we were playing the cards and I brought hummus and pretzels and everybody was getting their own dip from the hummus and getting their own pretzel place. So we began to have this beverage — I think it was lemonade and I think some of them had more in the lemonade than just the lemonade. But they were having a good old time, so I said, “Look at this, guys! How is it that through this awful, awful time that everybody that I love the most be sitting around this table?” We took our places, I don’t want you to think we were careless, while we stayed there for three days. Everybody had a place in the house that was different from somebody else’s place. They only two people who stayed together was my daughter and her husband. I just felt so grateful that I really get that, that we’re all together at one time, and this place and this time was chosen out of all places and times for us to be together.
And in the last two months, that’s maybe been the only real happy time I have had because I have had an awful time adjusting to this. I need people, I want people, I’m definitely am a homo sapien because it means a lot to me, and so God gave me what I asked for. I needed it in perilous times, I need it in regular and good times, so this is a comment of thankfulness that I did have a wonderful feeling during an awful time in my life, something I have never experienced in my entire life. I am now seventy-one and I have seen a lot of things, but I have never seen this, but how good is this gratefulness?