Occasionally in life things are so mind-boggling with their immensity that I think we have to try to look at them from a different perspective.

Remember the drawing class where you were asked to draw something upside down?

I have this clock that Meg brought me from her South American adventure. I love it!

But it’s very disconcerting. It runs counterclockwise.

What if we tried to look at things this way?

It’s crazy-making. When I’m studying a map, I actually need to turn it so that the top is north-facing and then I need to face north too.

But how do we reframe a pandemic? Maybe think of it as a war.

Specifically WWII into which I was born in 1943.

Everything in the country was focused on that war. In fact, everything in the world was.

There was a dearth of healthy men between the ages of 18 and 40. Everyone had someone at the front. Families lived in terror that their loved ones would not be coming home. Many of these men did indeed die in action. My own father, a very young lieutenant, was wounded in action while leading his platoon through the jungle in the Philippines. He was patched up and sent back in.

Women were doing jobs outside their homes, working in factories which were now manufacturing materiel. Food and clothing were rationed. Front yards were turned into vegetable gardens. Socks were knitted for soldiers. Socks at home were darned.

And after the war, things were never like they were before.

The pandemic is like a war that we lost because we had no materiel at the ready, no ships, no planes. And now we are trying to get back to center. Like a war, we are waiting to learn who died in action. We will all know someone.

And my part is to stay inside my house. I wish I could go work in a factory making PPE. Or that I was a virologist working on a vaccine. This not doing anything to help is more crazy-making than the fear of getting sick and dying.

Women during WWII liked to quote Milton’s Sonnet Nineteen: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Well, screw that.