"Essential" in the changing world

Essential.

This is one of those moments when the universe re-shuffles the deck and when everything that comes back down will be in a slightly different place than it was in The Time Before. Pre-pandemic, if you will. 

How different remains to be seen. If you've lived long enough, you've probably experienced this kind of thing in a local or regional way, say, after an earthquake. Or even a national way, like after 9/11. 

But this is the first time (in my lifetime, anyway) when the reshuffling involved almost every human inhabitant of the planet. 

In the midst of it all, the word "essential" has taken on a whole new meaning, hasn't it? Who is essential these days? Certainly not the same people who thought of themselves as essential in 2019. I'm looking at you, life coaches, social influencers, talent management agents and nail salon operators. 

My husband is essential (and not just to me). He's in agriculture, and if there's one thing I'm sure we can all agree on, it's that food is a good thing to have around, especially during re-shuffling times. 

Right now, he goes out and checks on the fields once a week or so, driving around alone in his truck. But mostly each morning he eats breakfast with me, kisses me goodbye, and then heads upstairs to his home office where he does all the fertilizer requests, leases, insurance, legal stuff, and personnel issues that arise from growing a lot of food at once.

The people we always gave scant, polite "thank you for being a helper" lip service to in the past -- nurses, respiratory therapists, and hospital check-in clerks, are now regularly saving our lives, just as they always have been -- we just failed to appreciate them much until now. Along with grocery store clerks, pharmacists, the garbage truck men, and mail carriers (ours was just diagnosed with COVID and is down for the count, so we are praying for her).

There's also the people who still have to come to your house and fix stuff, no matter what's going on, like plumbers. (Social distancing everyone! No congregating around the clogged up sink!) If you think re-shuffling is hard now, trying attempting it with no hot water or a backed up septic line.

Who is essential in the retail world? Not Ashley Furniture, not Hobby Lobby (they'd argue against that though wouldn't they?), or your local gift shop. No, in a strange turn of events, it will be the much-loathed, behemoth big-box stores -- which oddly enough are the great-grandchildren of the old rural general stores -- that will make it, because a long time ago they decided to sell groceries along with dry goods, generators, underwear, garden plants, mattresses, and dishes. So WalMart, Costco and Fred Meyer get a pass, no matter how you feel about them personally. The local economy we so adored and touted -- the nail salons, pricey little boutiques and comic book stores, it turns out, were only considered essential in ideal circumstances, economically-speaking.

Also completely essential are the IT/computer types, who hold in their hands our ability to stay in touch with those we love, and those we do business with. How can we ever thank them enough for that, as we go through this? 

Without virtual cocktail hours, I'd be drinking with my chickens. 

But I kind of hope at the end of this we have a resurgence in kids wanting to go into medicine or study agriculture; that there's a generation of youngsters sitting and watching these heroes on the nightly news and that they're going to ask their parents for an anatomy book from Amazon, or a six pack of strawberry plants the next time they're at Fred Meyer. 

Or maybe they'll find trades for themselves that will always be necessary, like plumbers and electricians, once they see their Life Coach parents try and get unemployment for what we strangely, have always been able to live without (and just never thought about enough to realize it). 

Frankly I'd just be happy if everyone wanted to get out into their gardens and grow some of their own food, play their own music or make some art. There are a lot of both essential and non-essential life skills that we all may be learning to do for ourselves in the next few years as this pandemic waxes and wanes, and anything that makes you more self-sufficient, and beyond that, just happy, is a good and useful thing.