Not A Happy Anniversary

A year ago near Grinnell, Iowa....

 Well...........it's been a year.

Only one year. Seems like it was ten years ago now that I was down doing final recon for the now defunct C.O.G. 100 event we were hoping to put on at the end of the month. 

I remember almost immediately afterward everything changed. Daily, almost hourly stories about a 'novel corona virus' were freaking us all out and no one knew what to do for sure. I will say that within three days of happily cruising what I thought would be the final version of the C.O.G. 100 course I knew we weren't going to be using it. I'd pretty much made up my mind by March 12th, but we waited a few more days to 'officially' call it just in case we were being over-reactive. Turns out we weren't. 

Then we just descended into a morass of conflicting directives and the darkened days of 'lock down', whatever that may have been for you out there. I wrote my bit about this on the last day of 2020 here. Now we are into one year with maybe an end in sight? We still really do not know for sure. The only thing I know for sure is that too much hand sanitizer exacerbates sunburn, Sunburned the back of my hands in late April last year. It was no joke!

Instead of speculating, here's where my head is on this most unfortunate of anniversaries. 

I've seen some things so far in my life- The end of the Vietnam War, a presidential scandal which rocked the nation and made folks distrust the government, gas lines, fear of a nuclear holocaust, Middle Eastern wars and terrorist attacks. I've seen life fundamentally change. But whatever happens next, one thing I know- It ain't ever gonna be like it was before COVID. We've moved on to a new era now. 

Someday 'this'- the whole deal we're in now- will pass. Maybe soon, maybe not... But anybody who thinks we'll just fall back into a 2019 way of doing things is crazy. Those days are long gone forever. What will things be like? Hmm.....I cannot say for certain, but there are a lot of people gone now forever that maybe wouldn't have been yet without COVID, and that is one thing that will change the future. We will do things differently going forward, and some of that will be a good thing, some of it not so much.We'll sort it all out later....

So today I mark as a signpost of sorts a very difficult year gone by. A time I won't be forgetting soon, if ever. 

Be well......