My novel Christina’s Portrait will be published by Wordhaven Press in November. I will describe my book in this series of posts. You can read other posts in the Christina’s Portrait category on my website. Also subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok to learn more about the book.
The Chevrolet Bolt EUV we waited for and spent three years driving got totaled in a rear-end collision. Before it was towed away, I wanted to recover the grocery bags and other items we stored under the removable trunk floor. I wore gloves and avoided the tiny cubes of glass that remained in the back.
Then, I had to inspect each item to make sure there was no glass. If it had even the tiniest of slivers, it had to be thrown away. Many items were salvageable because they were covered by other items. Others, including a large and expensive insulated grocery bag, had to be thrown away.
That was when I found a bag of our pandemic masks.
These were a must when we had to venture in public in 2020 and 2021. N95 masks were hard to come by, but cloth masks were good enough and were sold everywhere in stores. Best of all, cloth masks were available in a wide range of colors and designs. If you’re going to protect yourself from a deadly virus, you might as well do it in style.
Our granddaughter was 7 during the pandemic, so we got special kid-sized masks for her. There were pink masks, ones with animal faces, and cute designs. Christmas 2020 offered themed masks with candy canes and other holiday motifs. My favorite was a mask with a Santa Claus beard.
After the pandemic faded, we put all the masks in a bag and kept them in the trunk of our car for situations when they’re needed. My wife’s doctor still requires masks, even for people in the waiting room. And who knows when the next pandemic might hit. That’s how the masks wound up in a car we bought years after COVID disappeared from the headlines.
We were able to save most of them, but one had a chunks of glass in it and had to be thrown out. It was a shame because that was one of my favorite masks. It had adjustable straps and didn’t look so ominous.
As I looked over the masks, I thought about how disasters help us rediscover things we take for granted. So much of what we’ve learned about everyday life in Ancient Rome came from the ruins of Pompeii. Food, folk art, and even the seedier side of Roman life were preserved by the volcanic ash that buried the city and its inhabitants. Our own disaster helped us rediscover a time in our lives we put behind us. It also forced us to prioritize what truly matters. We’re sad about losing the Bolt EUV and all the financial losses we incurred. But we’re alive and didn’t suffer physical injuries. We bought a new vehicle, and we’re ready to move ahead.
In Christina’s Portrait, I write about the importance of history and what we can learn from it. As I went through the developmental edits, I felt this theme needed something more. At the end of the story, one of my main characters comes to the following conclusion, “History is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves and why things are the way they are, as Christina said. But it’s also about how we choose to move forward.”
This is the value of history, even its most painful moments. It reminds us of what we can endure, and the future is always ours to create.
