Little Things that Surprise me Most during this Covid-19 Outbreak: Elastic Shortage and Pigeons

Everywhere you look the world has changed.  It almost feels weird when you find an aspect of your life that hasn't.  Almost nobody goes to work anymore, working from home and trying to find unique ways to do your job or keep up with your friends is now the norm.  Schools are doing distance learning.  People are cooped up indoors.  All over the world there are empty squares and streets.  And little things that nobody ever thought of are now big.  And somehow the big things we all worried about three weeks ago seem small.

My mother and I were both feeling a bit like we were useless trapped inside.  But now we are coordinating through the phone and email with a neighbor who runs a local food bank in need of masks.  Mom and I are now busily looking up patterns and sewing fabric masks to help volunteers hand out food to the people who need it.  The numbers showing up at this local food bank have swelled from 160 a day to 400.

People have lost jobs and income.  People are in need and frightened.  And we are all doing our best.  Making masks from home with scraps of fabric piled in the attic.  There is an elastic shortage.  We used all of ours and now there seems to be none anywhere.  People across the country trying to sew masks to help first-responders are using hair ties and headbands for elastic.  An elastic shortage.  I would never have guessed.

And it's the little things that keep surprising me.  I saw a post on Instagram of the pigeons in Spain flocking to the only person on the street.  Nobody is out so they have no food to scavenge.  I have never felt sorry for pigeons the way I did when I saw them desperately following this lone human, begging for food.

A small piece of my heart broke for them.  Not even the pigeons, a seeming constant in every city, are unaffected by the global pandemic that is bringing our world to a halt.

Everywhere I look I find another thing that surprises me about the way our world has changed.  It makes sense, the way that streets being empty brings the wild animals out into the cities.  But it doesn't make the world any less surprising as every day seems to bring tiny revelations of our newly altered world.

We are all doing our best.  Fashion houses in NYC as well as individuals with sewing machines are churning out masks.  We know they aren't as good as N95 and surgical masks, but they're all we have now.  And we are doing all we can.  The fact that everyone is coming together, online, through tutorials on YouTube and through Facebook's Covid-19 Support page Community Help is a bright ray of hope.

The news is now almost entirely fact driven informative pieces relaying the situation on the ground to those who need to know.  I don't see the judgemental and hateful partisan things I once did.  Legitimate problems, calls for aid, and the way that people are trying to lift one another up are in the news now.  And for the first time in years I read the news with hope.  Hope that I'll find real information.  Hope that I'll find answers to questions I have.  Hope that I'll see humanity fighting it's hardest to become better.  Because faced with a global crisis we are more than ever all connected even as we sit in our houses all alone.

Stay home.  Stay well.  Stay connected.  Continue hoping and helping.