We each have our favorite colors of sea glass. Gary almost never finds the dark orange “brown” glass. Cobalt blue (the piece above is more than 50mm across and 6mm thick) is cause for celebration.

Today I will bake rolls and roast green beans. My mother would have made lamb, but we are vegetarian and I have a casserole of mac&cheese already made and ready to go in the oven. I found fresh blueberries on our weekly grocery run, so there will be a pie. No ice cream, but blueberry pie. We will sit at table and remind ourselves of our good fortune.

Yesterday a friend called to offer us clams he and his wife had dug that morning. That was probably not really a good idea to hand them over, as he said himself, and anyway Gary and I gave up even occasional seafood this year. But he called, and that was the gift we could keep. He has been planting thousands of trees, he said, not so fast as the professionals who can plant in hour what takes him most of a day. He hopes for rain soon to water the seedlings. I told him I was weaving. No one we know is sick.

It was possible to ignore the disease a month ago, without paying much attention and resisting any alteration to our personal routine. People did ignore it. There were deaths, of course but people die all the time. The dead were measured in single and double digits. Someone’s problem perhaps, but not ours. A month ago there were fewer than 1700 cases diagnosed in the whole of the United States. This morning there are over 530,000 confirmed cases in the United States. More than 20,000 Americans have died in the past month—more confirmed cases and deaths than anywhere in the world. (Even so, availability of testing is still limited and experts will scrutinize these figures and inevitably establish a higher and more accurate estimate.)

Our family and friends are keeping safe at home. Friends in Alberta are expecting greyhound puppies. Gary’s sister in Seattle knows three people who have died. Washington friends with MS are being particularly careful. A friend recently in cancer treatment is coping well with isolation. Three elderly neighbors have had medical emergencies in the past couple of weeks but are safely home now. Our older son’s little family in Portland is entirely healthy. They generally suffer, one or all of them, from sniffles and colds from fall to spring. His father-in-law stood on the sidewalk and talked to them on their porch. They are all perfectly healthy.

We have learned to be more careful. Most of us.

What my mother was always telling me was right: Stop touching your face! She was right about a lot of things, but I wish I could tell her she was right about that, and that I have finally learned to do as she said. I never even noticed I was doing it.

After all these years, I pay attention when I touch my face. I can resist touching my face for hours at a time, not even scratching an itch or brushing a hair off my forehead. It is the sort of simple little thing, like washing your hands to the tune of “Happy Birthday to You”—sung twice—that we are learning to do. And didn’t they always tell us to do a good job washing our hands?

I am not a religious person, but I am a faithful one. I sang “Down to the River” yesterday morning while searching for glass, sang two verses over and over like a mantra repeated to time the cleansing of my hopes and my future.

May you all have a quiet day today, remember the best words of your parent, and tell someone you love them. Tell the trees. Tell yourself.