We were reeling from the death toll. It was pretty tough at first. And hard to take.

And then, a strange thing happened. Without so many cars and buses on the roads, the air got cleaner. After being antsy for the first few weeks, folks calmed down and found the slower pace of life to be, well, just better. People cooked three meals a day at home and ate with their families every day. They read books. They played board games. They walked their dogs. They went online or got on the phone and told people they can’t see in person how much they mean in their lives. People took their musical instruments out of the rafters and made music. You could hear it as you walked down the empty streets: music coming from your neighbors’ windows. People played piano and guitar, violin and clarinet. There was a sweetness to it, like we had time-traveled into a different era. Tired of the horrifying news, people shut off CNN. Most of Fox’s viewers fell to the virus, so Fox itself was a casualty. Now it’s just a shadow of what it was. Cooking shows, mostly.

People decided to grow gardens, which were great therapy and an insurance policy against the specter of starvation. Some had little suburban farms. The fear that people felt about the virus would soon be replaced with a fear that, after all of these months, life would get back to normal. And it turned out that only a very few people wanted normal again.

One can Dream right?