So now my father passed away, now coming up on three years ago, and my mother is still quite independent at the age of 89. She likes to go to Florida in the winter and I like to go with her and allow that to happen. She is not really comfortable being down there on her own, but that’s fine with me because I am still working and can work from whatever location I might be in remotely.
So again, that’s a blessing that I feel so fortunate to have a number one a job, and number two to be able to do it from anywhere in the US.
Let’s see what else, so my mom and I were actually in Florida in the beginning of the year when things started heating up about covid-19. And at that point the news just kept getting worse and worse and scarier and scarier and she did not really feel safe being down in Florida away from her doctors and my other sisters who are also in the vicinity of Michigan where we live near Ann Arbor, and she wanted to go home.
So we were supposed to fly home at the end of April but Plan B became renting a car and driving back to Michigan. And of course, my mother doesn’t drive, the responsibility for getting her home safely was on my shoulders. I got the rental car, cleaned it all out, let it sit in the sun for a couple of days. Make sure there were no germs in it before she got in, and then made the drive without an overnight stop. We had food packed, so we wouldn’t have to go to any restaurants. I stopped to nap a couple of times, but it was pretty much a straight twenty-four-hour run from Fort Myers, Florida up to Ann Arbor, Michigan to get my mom home. And I will say that drive was a bit surreal. You know people were just starting to wear masks at that point. I used gloves when I had just stopped to fill up the car. Some people were not, I felt strange putting on a rubber glove to touch the gas pump, and use the touch screen and that was also really scary. We used restrooms, public restrooms and you know every surface we touched we wiped before we touched it. We had hand sanitizer with us in the car, you know, just really hyper vigilant washing our hands whenever we went in and trying not to touch anything or breathe air or be in contact with — with people.