By Rosie Preston
Last week’s article seems like it was years ago instead of just a few days. Are you also watching the news several times a day? My family is keeping up with it. Each day is just as intense as the day before, as it involves the facts about the coronavirus.
The title of this article comes from a song you may or may not remember according to your age. But when I was young, the song “Wishing and Hoping and Singing and Praying” was a love song about a girl wanting the attention of a guy. The words are relevant today, as the world’s population is wishing and hoping for a vaccine or cure for the historical pandemic.
Only time will tell, which is something I’ve tried to instill in my children and grandchildren, that “time is the teller of all truths.” It has worked for me in so many situations. Within a few weeks, we will have the facts on how the virus is going to continue to touch our lives.
Many years ago, in 1979, I lost a precious friend due to her being in a car accident. The car wreck involved the other driver driving drunk. The wreck was horrible, as the cars hit headlight to headlight. The book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, was written by Harold Kushner. He had lost his 14-year-old son to an aging disease named Progeria, a rare condition in which the child never grows over about three feet tall with the child’s life span only lasting a few years. The book was a New York Times bestseller and can be purchased online.
The lessons I learned from reading that book helped me to accept that bad things do happen people who do not deserve a terrible situation. The book gave assurance of a God giving us strength, determination and will power to get through difficult times.
My friends and I are experiencing changing routines to staying home more while wearing masks and gloves when we go out. There is still the sadness of not being able to visit our loved ones in nursing homes. I have cried many tears about not being able to be close to my mother.
Luckily, we can still contact each other by phone.
The next topic is one I could not ever imagine writing about until it became a significant part of our trips to the stores during the past weeks – toilet paper! In the old days, only the wealthy had inside bathrooms. When my great-grandparents were raising 12 children, the family used an outhouse, which usually was a minimal wooden box-type room. Toilet tissue was something that would come years later. It was a joke that the Sears and Roebuck catalogs were used in these houses instead of toilet paper because families could not afford to buy from the sale book.
My great-grandparents did not have an inside bathroom installed in their small house in Collinsville until their 12 children got together and built them one. That day will always stand out in my mind as I watched my great-grandmother take a chicken and, with a quick move, snapped its neck. The chicken was later fried for our evening meal!
This information deals with the past depression, and when I watch the news, I often wonder what the next few weeks will bring. They will continue to include all citizens wishing and hoping for the best as well as more information about the facts about the coronavirus.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, time is the teller of all truths. We will learn much more about our future and the continuing ways this pandemic will affect us.
Keep Smiling, Rosie
P.S. The journaling book is still in process, so send me your stories to rosie.preston@yahoo.com.