Island Life: There and Back Again

Now that my household are all past our second shots, we are beginning to step, very slowly and carefully, back into something resembling normal life.

No, we haven’t had any friends over for dinner; and no, we haven’t been inside any restaurants…but last week, I had a medical appointment off-island, and so we actually went to Costco and Trader Joe’s!

I know, I know–a lot of people never stopped doing those things. But we did. As I’ve mentioned, we have my eighty-eight-year-old mother-in-law staying with us, and we made the calculation that we’d rather get things online or do without, if it meant keeping her as safe as possible. So that’s what we did. For, like, a year.

As a result, I was kind of out of practice with this whole going-to-a-store thing. A few days before our big off-island adventure, I broke the ice by going to our little grocery store here. It was totally overwhelming! I wanted to buy EVERYTHING I saw–chips! candy bars! avocados! beef jerky!–and not even because I was hungry (I wasn’t). It was just, Ooh, shiny!

Seeing things in the real world is very different from seeing pictures of them on my computer screen.

Costco was pretty weird–I haven’t seen that many human beings all in the same place in a year–but Trader Joe’s was even stranger. It took me a few minutes to realize what was different. I’d expected it to be crowded–it’s always crowded–but it wasn’t. That was nice…but why wasn’t it crowded?

The Canadians were missing.

See, the closest TJ’s to us is in Bellingham. Bellingham is a nice easy drive from Vancouver, BC…when the border is open. In normal times, US-ians and Canadians can bop back and forth across the border without showing more than a (special) driver’s license. We’ve picked up friends at the Vancouver airport, done a house trade, and someday we’re totally going do that fun Canadian shopping trip we keep talking about.

And, for their part, the entire province of British Columbia comes over to shop at the Bellingham Trader Joe’s.

It was so strange to see no BC license plates in the half-empty parking lot, to hear no adorable Canadian accents in the cavernously empty store aisles, to not have to wait for a cashier.

We didn’t quite know what to make of it.

The medical appointment I had was my post-op check-up with my surgeon. She was very pleased with my progress, and released me back into the wild (though with my lifting and movement restrictions still in place for the full six weeks) (which are up April 12 NOT THAT I’M COUNTING THE DAYS OR ANYTHING). She said I could remove the surgical glue that had been holding the incision together.

That’s probably all you want to know about that. 🙂

But! The most fun thing about being out in the world has to have been the opportunity to finally wear my new Christmas boots.

See those tiny spots of mud on the heel? Proof of wearing! And I gathered at least half a dozen compliments from total strangers.

Now that I’m back at home, I am of course in slippers again…only changing out of them to put on grubby workaday boots for my mailbox walk. But it felt so civilized to put on a pair of fancy boots, even for a day.

We’re a long way from normal. I am optimistic that we might be able to plan a family visit for this summer sometime, and that our holiday gatherings later this year will be more than just the three of us. But this has been a good start.

I really look forward to eating in a restaurant again. And hey, I totally have the boots for it!