As if things weren’t difficult enough, my blog crashed last week rendering it inaccessible. On top of that the “theme” I was using from WP has been retired so you will see the blog come up with a different look which I’m not totally sold on, so bear with me as I play around with different themes until I find the one that feels right…

So this is just a note to let you know that I’M STILL HERE!

We are now in week two of I don’t know which Lockdown, is it the 3rd or 4th? We’ve had so many both national and regional and citywide that it is hard to tell. It is once again Spring, a little over a year since the start of the Covid-19 Pandemic, and again all the events heralding this beautiful season have been canceled. No “Trieste in Fiore”, No “Horti Tergestini”, none of the social or cultural events… the few tepid Museum exhibits that were recently announced, suspended. What drives it home even more is the lack of boats on the gulf. The gulf is usually dotted at this time of year, with sail boats and yachts that have come out of dry-dock. There are springtime regattas and of course the usual traffic of locals on their vessels and the display of serpentine lines of impossibly small training boats with young children taking lessons. Now, looking out I see a beautiful empty expanse of blue Adriatic sea.

Last year at this time, Italy was being ravaged by the virus and this country came together, worked together and we got each other through the worst of it…it seemed. Italy then was the example to the rest of the world on how to buckle down and deal with this relentless killer. We were in an extended and difficult lockdown, but we got through it; neighbor helping neighbor, cocktail hours and dinners via Zoom, regularly scheduled “balcony appointments” to sing, to clap, to exchange news and simply see another face.

Of course the problems came (for every country) over the summer, relaxed rules, the false sense that the worst was over, the inevitable rule breakers and the governments’ lack of strategy and preparation for the summer and fall created a dangerous environment…and then came the variants.

Now, after second and third surges due to relaxation of rules, of unclear messaging and Covid fatigue we are once again in lockdown. Frustrated, we look to other countries, countries who we think didn’t make the sacrifices or efforts we made, who are now swimming in vaccines. And despite initially bungled approaches to the Pandemic, they have been able to amass, distribute and re-configure distribution systems as needed, to get the bulk of their populations vaccinated.

Here, we are wrapped in red-tape and confusion, political in-fighting and a genuine vaccine shortage. As of today it’s still unclear if Astra Zeneca is ok to take – yesterday it was cleared for use again and then overnight called into question again… Vaccination seems to be so far away. I would have thought that we’d see some ingenuity pop up, or at least some copying of good ideas like Apps to track vaccination sites and extra doses and at the very least a clear messaging system explaining the roll-out. Instead, we don’t even have a online site that is available and updated. People with co-morbidities are told by their doctors “they haven’t told us anything”. A friend who is a retired pharmacist went to the Red Cross to offer her services for vaccination distribution but was turned away… I mean, they could at least pretend to have a plan so we’d think that they know what they’re doing…

My husband keeps suggesting we fly to the US and get our vaccinations, but tbh, the idea of traipsing through airports unvaccinated is a little too scary. Also we’d have to book extended vacation time to get there, book a hotel for quarantine, get the first dose, wait 3 more weeks for the second dose and who knows how much longer before we’d be cleared to fly back….it’s just economically prohibitive.

So we wait. We download the app that shows us the 500mt. radius from our house in which we are permitted to go for “outdoor time”. We wait, marking time with the calendar holidays, Valentines, Father’s Day, Easter next..We clean our apartments, we purge our closets, we live “remotely” doing things as we best can without being on site or using agents and proxies…until that time when we can live in the present again, making plans for the future and looking behind us, incredulously, at all we have lived through…