A friend of mine, Sandra Cripe wrote this piece and shared it with me. While life as we knew it has changed so drastically, we thank the Lord that we are stuck in a beautiful place here in Boquete and pray for our family back in the US. It is a beautiful time of year when we transition into rainy season and birds are going nuts building nests and laying eggs. They know that the rains are coming and the air is filled with birdsong!!
Here is Sandra’s story:
I am from Washington State, the Evergreen State, so named because of the evergreen forests, mainly Douglas Firs, whose uplifted limbs create a pleasing conical shape.
Our daughter and granddaughter live on Mercer Island, a city island in Lake Washington across the lake from, next door to, Kirkland, WA, ground zero to the Novel Coronavirus or Covid-19 outbreak in the United States of America.
From the moment the first death at a senior care facility made headline news, we were in constant contact with our daughter. We have driven by that facility numerous times. The grounds are lovely, located in an up-scale community, the building is attractive, there was no reason to suspect that something as insidious and deadly as Covid-19 would emerge from this place.
News bulletins became more alarming and ominous.
Julie, our daughter, is an architect by training and now in senior management for Sound Transit. Based in Seattle, the firm develops and operates bus lines and the light-rail system. From the onset of the outbreak, they were monitoring daily events and making decisions shaping public options. Early in March, the CEO sent most management and staff home to work. Already, the capacity to work from home was available to most people. Still, it was a tremendous disruption to our daughters’ life. Next day, Mercer Island school system closed until further notice. Our granddaughter, Cassie, a freshman in high school and soon to be fifteen-year-old, was now home, or rather, dividing her time between two homes – Mom’s and Dad’s. I was so proud of her, the first thing she did was create a “to do” list. She is resourceful. She will thrive.
News about the Covid-19 outbreak eclipsed all other news.
I was paying attention. I didn’t panic or overbuy, but I began to “lay-in” certain supplies: extra bottles of good red wine, a couple bottles of silver tequila, dark chocolate bars for the medicine drawer in the kitchen – no, no, I didn’t panic – just prudent!
Then, reality arrived in Panama.
The first two weeks of March, the Tuesday Market operated normally, sales of our Palmira Gold coffee were brisk. The afternoon of Tuesday March 10th, the announcement letter arrived: the Tuesday Market, public information meeting and all Boquete Community Players events closed until July. That night, we received a letter cancelling our much-anticipated Viking Ocean Cruise scheduled to begin mid-April, creating a chain of cancellations including; rides to and from airports, flights and hotels.
Each new day brought changes creating a need to make adjustments to meet an evolving reality.
Acting on my entrepreneurial spirit, I sent messages to coffee customers offering to take orders and deliver product at a set time at Plaza San Francisco on Tuesdays, March 17 and 24. The plan worked well until mid-morning of the 24th when an enforcer team from the mayor’s office appeared and shooed all venders off with an increasing amount of force, even taking my photo. When I told Lloyd about this event, he offered, “Don’t worry, I will bail you out.”
I am grateful for my husband, Lloyd, we have been together since we were nineteen-years-old and come Hell or High Water or a pandemic, we will prevail.
As the quarantine progressed, we adjusted. We ceased inviting friends over to join us for dinners and movies in our theater. Over the last few months, Lloyd worked on upgrading the audio/visual components and now has the capacity to stream High Definition (HD) movies and play HD4K discs with enhanced surround-sound. Unbelievable timing, given our current “stay home” mandate. A friend dubbed the improved theater, “Lloyd’s Uniplex.”
Finca Armonía, our small coffee farm, is our haven. We have space to enjoy sunshine, to walk, and to do projects, although, the major work on the farm is completed for this growing cycle. The coffee trees are waiting to blossom once again, while the Clay-colored Thrushes “sing up the rains.”
I find simple home-management tasks comforting just now. In January, Lloyd put up retractable clothes lines on the lower terrace. The orientation is to the South-east perfect to catch the morning sunshine full-on; as I hang up the damp clothes with old-fashioned wood clothes pins, my lungs breathe in the fresh air, my ears fill with bird calls and songs and, my eyes absorb shades of green light reflected off myriad leaves, the images soothe my brain. I am grateful to be alive.
Mysterious are the ties that connect us to people, places, times and experiences, that an unseen deadly foe could attack us where we live, literally breaking our ties to people, places and experiences, drastically altering our behaviors, playing havoc with our organizations and systems at all levels of society, causing confusion and anxiety on a scale beyond imagination – unthinkable – until now.
I’m scared enough to be grateful for all the measures put in place by the Panamanian government. I don’t like “social distancing” but I will do it for me, I will do it for you and I will do it for my daughter and granddaughter living in the beautiful evergreen State of Washington.
From Sandra Cripe, in Boquete