“I had a year that was full of worth and value. I was excited to get up, and to get to work…”

I’m thinking about the year of COVID and now that we’re in 2021, and I think I had a very different experience with 2020 because whereas –prior to covid, I had spent a lot of time in my home writing books, so it was a pretty solitary life, sitting and writing and things like that. And the one thing I did was on Wednesdays I worked at our church’s food pantry. That was my one day a week doing that. When COVID hit, many of our volunteers are elderly and so when things started locking down, they needed to do so as well. They either had health issues, or they were just at risk, so as the volunteers stayed home, we kind of — a few of the other volunteers and I decided that we would pull together a very small skeleton team and work the pantry through COVID. We were not going –we weren’t gonna shut the pantry because we knew people in our neighborhood were still going to be hungry, and probably more people. So it started with just about five of us and I started going in every day Monday through Thursday for the whole day, not just an afternoon a week, that I was doing. We had to change our entire protocol. Instead of allowing our clients to come in and kind of shop through the pantry, we would help them, we had to just pack boxes and then load them in the car, as they drove into the parking lot, we’d ask them to raise their trunks and then we would put the food in. Mask wearing of course immediately happened, and gloves so that we wouldn’t contaminate anything. We would sterilize the tables that we would put the boxes of food on, and everything else in the area where we worked. And so the year of 2020 became a year where I was out almost every day and doing something that was so significant in a year that was so depressing and disabling of all of our brothers and sisters. So I had a year that was full of worth and value. I was excited to get up, and to get to work, and pack boxes.