Presidents Day weekend 2020 I took the opportunity to travel
to North Carolina to visit my sister. While I was there, we took the
opportunity to look at our grandmother’s college scrapbook together. She went
to college during the years of 1916-1920 at Millikin University, in Decatur, Illinois.
Near the end of her scrapbook, we found envelopes
containing letters friends from college. These had been written to her during a
time when she had to temporarily leave school to recover from the Spanish Flu. She was at her family's farm, being cared for by her grandmother and uncle, who had raised her from a small child. All her friends' letters implored her to come back as soon as possible, as college was not nearly much fun without her.
Ironically, the month following my trip to North Carolina,
Covid-19 hit our country, and we started having to go into lockdown. During the
spring, I was furloughed from my job (from which is was then more or less
involuntarily “retired”); I broke my ankle; and I found out that two of my
daughters were pregnant with our first grandchildren. Both babies were born before
the end of the year (in October and November), and both are healthy.
As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” My grandmother hadn’t planned to have an interruption in her college education. But she recovered, finished college, went on to have a career, met and married the man she loved, and gave birth to the baby who would become my mother. And a hundred years later, although my life has taken a detour, the birth of my two grandchildren has reminded me that we will recover, and that life will go on.
