October is normally my favorite month, with birthday celebrations, leaves changing, pumpkin everything, it’s great! But this October?

I sprained my ankle three days shy of my birthday and a week later got Covid. Talk about not fun. It’s been awful.

The first time I had Covid, February 2020, wasn’t any better. I was on vacation with my husband in California, unaware that the world around us would soon turn inward like a bellybutton. My lungs ached, I was coughing and phlegmy. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t taste, I couldn’t smell. We were staying in hotels, traveling, trying our best to resurrect some semblance of fun on our long-awaited trip even though I was pretty much the walking dead.

I didn’t know then that I had Covid. I just thought I had the flu. Some crazy misfortune that struck in Vegas, something I’d picked up our first night along with a serious case of food poisoning.

We arrived the day of the Super Bowl and my husband and I walked the strip that evening to an almost-empty buffet. I consumed something that had surely sat out far too long, the malaise descending before we’d even left the table, and I stumbled back to the hotel clutching my husband’s arm, disoriented and nauseous, likely looking over served.

But the next morning I felt better. We walked 16 miles, from Mandalay Bay to Circus Circus and everywhere in between. I ate normally. We slept. The day after that we picked up our rental car from the airport and drove west, through the desert, to Los Angeles.

It was then that I knew I was really, truly, sick. I’d never been on the other side of the Mississippi before. Never seen cacti and tumbleweeds, the dry earth a rainbow of russet and terra cotta, so real and so much prettier than the Home Depot flowerpots holding the succulents I had at home. I sat in the passenger’s seat, gaping, as my husband drove the open highway. I’d never seen anything like it before. The world outside the window looked otherworldly and the wonder it induced felt magical. I was awestruck at first, almost high, like I’d been dosed with something, but soon it turned dark, almost liquid, like a Hershey’s kiss melting in a pocket. Some surreal syrupy strangeness was taking hold, a heat that cooked from within.

By the time we reached LA, I was feverish. I’d lost hearing in my bad ear as we drove through the mountains, and a sweaty panic was taking hold. We checked into our hotel, a lovely boutique near the UCLA campus, and my husband asked if I wanted to stay and sleep. But I was so hungry. We got dinner at a casual Mexican restaurant. I handed the women sitting beside us my hand sanitizer during the meal. I wonder if they got Covid too?

At that time, early February 2020, Covid was still a stranger. It was something mentioned in passing on the news. A sickness half a world away that had very little bearing on our lives, especially on the east coast of the US. But by the spring of 2020, when the world was quiet and Covid was all we had, I knew we’d met months before.

Despite all of the vaccinations I’ve had, the first few documented on my immunization card which I surely still have somewhere, and the others too, tacked on with my annual wellness visit flu shot, I still got Covid again. I’ve no idea where. It’s everywhere. It’s inevitable.

All of this forced down time, the weeks laid up with a bum ankle the size of a baby watermelon plus the subsequent hellfest that is Covid, has gifted me something big though. The freedom to go through this blog for the first time in forever while I was resting, rereading stories I’d lived another lifetime ago, when my daughters were children, and I was, too.

The past five years have been the hardest of my life, though not in the way you might think. I was one of the weird ones who loved the pandemic. I quit my job, I stayed home, and when the world opened little by little I started hiking. I hung out in the woods, heartbroken and scarred, my father still alive, yet gone. I held his presence like a tiny lit candle, carrying him along, knowing how much he would have enjoyed it. The freedom. The peace. The beauty. I held his spirit high on mountaintops, a whisper of invisible smoke, I spoke to him when I was alone. I carried him through the endless green tunnels, and when he finally died, I kept going, holding fast to a hand no longer there, but I feel still.

I’m not the same woman I was the first time I had Covid. My dad is gone, my husband has survived cancer not just once, holy shit, but twice. The deepest core of my ravaged heart is still a bit raw like an underbaked cookie, but the outside has healed. Its thickened scars are so tough now they’re like leather, beaten and worn and almost weatherproof. More beautiful than when I was new.