I guess everyone feels like these last few months have been like riding in the back of your Dad’s pickup. No seatbelts, no cab, just a bouncy ride in the open air with nothing to restrict or restrain you. Depending on the speed of the ride, it can be a joyful experience or a terrifying one.  It can be smooth and the wind just whips your hair into the corners of your mouth or it can be steep and bumpy where you hold on for dear life trying to keep yourself from bouncing out of the truck altogether. The resounding memory of my rides in those old truck beds is how cold and hard they are. Just like those hard steel  pickup beds, life is just hard right now!

During the Pandemic I finished my second trip through 5th grade, I hope all of you are impressed that Christopher and I received straight A’s. It was a team effort and it was hard.

5th grade teacher M. Neeley and Christopher at 5th grade graduation

5th grade graduation

School for Christopher ended the 25th of May, 2020 and I was still working at least 35 hours a week during the shutdown. I worked remotely for one portion of my contract and on a construction site doing punch-out work and painting at a second site the other part of the time. I was also helping Christopher with his remote learning and trying with all my heart to keep him from getting behind on his reading and math. Some days were good and others were terrible. I brought him to tears once and the pandemic brought me to tears a couple of times.

One of 13 rooms with a wall of conduit that I painted before the office is reopened.

I also had my hardworking husband home for two solid weeks, working from home and then every evening for the last two months. Let us just say that is was fun and funny at times.

So, the new normal became, feed three people, three meals a day, every day possible. Go to the construction site and paint for two days, then work from home for two days, building a website. along with my projects, I helped Christopher do 5 days of homework over about 4 days. Then try to write my blog and paint on my downtime with whatever that was left.  Friday was my shop with my mask on, use hand sanitizer at the grocery store day, making it the most stressful day of the week. Saturday and Sundays were the days we worked on the remodeling project we started while we were home instead of out in the world  …… Yea,… I’m enjoying all this time off and am feeling bored… aaaaa…”NO!”. We made daily trips to Lowe’s. Some days I would go to bed so tired that at 8 am the next morning I was still tired and I didn’t feel like getting up and doing it again.

We actually finished about 85% of that remodeling project in three weeks. We are still working on it, just like we are still social distancing and wearing our masks in the store. We have new work tables to install this weekend.

Tom sanding the hardwood floors of what was the formal living room and turning it into a workspace for both of us. 

I am glad school is over and Christopher is allowed to just play in the neighborhood with his friends again. It is so important that they are not totally isolated. This way he has a chance to have some good times during this hard time of staying at home. The kids play the same games we played as kids which makes me smile. They run and scream through the yards playing games of hide and seek after dark and kickball. We all enjoyed a bonfire this weekend from a tree that fell in our yard earlier in the spring.

As I was sitting looking into the flames,(Flames that I know are burning all over America because of the untimely death of George Floyd.) I remembered that life will get back to some kind of normal eventually. We just have to take the time to heal. We need to heal our bodies from the pandemic and our minds from the violence that has taken over our country. We need to take time to heal our countries broken spirit. Today I realize, WE ARE A COUNTRY WITH A BROKEN DREAM, THAT ALL MEN ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL IN AMERICA. It is time to set the broken bones of our country no matter how painful so we can grow and heal and become strong again.

Now  West Virginia prepares for the 1.5 to 2.o million Cicadas hatching out over the next few weeks. It makes us wonder if 2020 was the year that everything was supposed to fall apart. Maybe this is our chance to change to grow as people. We can do better to make things better for the little kid bouncing around in the back of that old pick up truck.