We’ve been busy hustling back and forth, walking our 25 miles a week (and me running a few of those), working on our second home, and admiring everything we see.

I was afraid to order anything before we had keys and went around and around about a sofa and bed frame (the only new pieces of furniture in our budget). I’ve painted all the walls below the chair rails palest warm gray over the nasty* medium brown, sealed the shower, patched holes and hung art, cooked a full meal in the kitchen without yet completely figuring out the fancy oven/microwave, and patched walls, framed and hung art, stored clothing and kitchen tools, and planned quilted covers for pillows I’ve had for a long time. In a fit of extravagance, I ordered a cabinet I’ve admired for years that abruptly went on sale, and I should have resisted, but it won’t be here for a couple of months. We hope to have the sofa between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so the living room is mostly empty. Gary likes it this way.

These tasks and preoccupations are my excuse for missing my last scheduled post on the 5th.

Most of our work is done in Portland, and we have found time to walk here and there. We have not yet walked to the Farmers Market or the Japanese Garden or the Portland Art Museum. It has been far too hot here for us. We like 65° more than 80°.

The one thing (the only thing) Gary loved about the now-removed furnishings of the condo was the anti-war buttons display under glass. He hoped they might forget to remove them, especially since getting them out required removing a very long piece of plate glass. They didn’t forget. We have a few anti-war buttons from back in the day, but also several jars of mother-of-pearl buttons. Once we got the glass out, I arranged buttons.

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But then we go home again because the beach is home.

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*A friend calls the color I painted out “baby-s**t brown.” We usually see it on the outside of houses, chosen in a misguided attempt to match the color of raw cedar or Douglas fir. It misses both in terms of hue and value, intensity too—too green, too murky, too much like what you find in a dirty diaper. Most raw softwood is more orange than people think, brighter, lighter. Better to find a color that plays off against the colors of real wood than try to match nature’s riches. imo I love a soft medium value purply-taupe called “Stetson” that I saw on the outside of a Seattle house more than forty years ago. I tracked the color and later realized it was the same color my grandfather had originally used to paint the window trim of the beach house.

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about covid. Gary and I met with a doctor-friend on our way to town yesterday. We three shook our heads over the carelessness of people we know. Though she doesn’t know anyone who has died or even been ill, she does meet online with other retired doctors who all shake their heads too.

She posed the question: Why did the pandemic of 1917-19 end and how will ours end? I suspect this depends on the mobility of populations. Troop movements from the U.S. to Europe (the mis-named “Spanish Flu” was likely born in Kansas) took the pandemic around the world and then back home with returning troops. Americans saw a surge and then a larger surge and then it was gone. Why did that pandemic end? We did not travel a hundred years ago as we do today. I suspect that contact circles were small and few travels beyond their circle. The disease ran through a circle and people’s immune systems fought off the disease, people got sick but their immune systems responded and people survived, or people died. And then, yes, the deadly influenza pandemic vanished a hundred years ago.

Covid is not influenza. It does not kill people as quickly as the influenza a hundred years ago, and we knew earlier how to treat it. Thankfully, covid not as contagious as another once-common disease, measles, but the Delta variant is at least three times as contagious as the original strain of covid-19, possibly five or six times as contagious. It doesn’t need to be more deadly to kill more people, it merely has to infect more vulnerable people.

Vaccination is the reason measles does not maim and kill thousands of children every year. Vaccination is the best protection from dying of covid. Vaccination gives your immune system a running start at fighting off the disease and is the reason that the odds against dying are 11 to 1.

Being unvaccinated is a risk to everyone of us as hospitals fill with patients and their ordinary business must be put on hold. Surgeries are delayed. Patients are sent home earlier than normal because hospitals need space for covid cases. (I know two people who were sent home before they normally would have been.) Among the unvaccinated the virus thrives in an environment where it can again mutate. When people make that “personal choice” to take no precautions against covid, they are not making a choice that impacts only themselves, they put everyone at greater risk.

Gary and I both knew people who had polio when we were children, and those children were permanently impaired by that disease. Many “childhood diseases” capable of causing permanent harm or even death are completely unknown to those younger than I am now. Vaccines, required for public school attendance and common sense have all but eliminated them from public awareness. I have a smallpox vaccine scar the size of a dime on my left shoulder, but I have never known anyone who had smallpox—you probably don’t either because the vaccine mostly killed that disease.

During a smallpox outbreak during the Revolutionary War, George Washington required his troops to be vaccinated. What they had as “vaccination” over 200 years ago was infection with a less dangerous form of pox, cowpox. It would make you sick without killing or much scarring. (Washington had been badly scarred by smallpox.) Immune systems in the 1700s could respond to and fight off cowpox, and then when exposed to smallpox they recognized the disease quickly and responded and fought it off.

Modern vaccines work in a similar way by injecting not a disease at all, but something close enough to the disease that your body creates a defense against it. The injection-site soreness is antibodies rushing about to defend the body against a fake illness. The vaccine itself is harmless, but the body recognizes a potential threat and then when faced by the real disease it’s already primed to fight it off. A vaccine is training for real work, like cross-training for a sport or running fartleks to prepare for a race.

We all should have learned this in school. (But I know a science teacher who did not know the difference between influenza and gastroenteritis—the miss-named “stomach flu.” The more accurately labeled “food poisoning” is usually a bacterial infection induced by something you swallowed. Flu in a virus that impacts the respiratory system. How do people not know this?)

I do know people who have been ill, sometimes seriously ill with covid-19. Not all are part of the official covid count. Some were sick enough not to get out of bed for a week or three but not sick enough to go to a doctor. One was hospitalized for three weeks. One was a breakthrough case who did not catch covid at work where she was always masked, but over a social weekend, and because of her vaccination mostly-recovered in a few days. By now we should understand the protocols: distance, mask, vaccinate.

But I fear even “smart” people are still in denial. I know covid-positive people who went shopping for groceries and people who drove a thousand miles unvaccinated, flew unvaccinated, met and dined with a hundred people (many with co-morbidities and unvaccinated) and unmasked indoors, attended various events indoors and out and became infected, and chose to travel overseas to another country in crisis.

Stay close to home, she advises from 70 miles east of her home. Vaccinate. Distance. Mask. Did I mention vaccinate?