Hey dad.

We are now past 2 years of the global COVID pandemic spreading through the world. Worldwide over 445 million cases have been confirmed with over 6 million lives lost to it. I have now been working from home for 2 years later this month.

While on the subject of working from home, I recently quit my job of nearly 16 years. People were quitting left and right as the pandemic has made it an employee’s market so I decided to jump ship too. I had not had a cost of living increase in 14 years so it was time to move on, I have started at a trucking startup that actually cares about its employees and I just finished my second week there. I really like it, the people are all super nice and supportive of each other. It has been a major culture shock going to TrueNorth from FedEx.

The morel clone I made last year, you know the clone of the one you gave your father as a joke, is doing well outside under a tree. I stand in the kitchen and look out at it, it does make me miss you and grandpa Jack but I do not regret putting it in the yard. I have now been in my house for about 16 months now and it’s going pretty great. We had the basement flood last year when we got somewhere between 8 and 12 inches of rain in just a couple of hours but we only lost a single particleboard shelf and people from church rushed to help us get the water out and clean up. My wife and I were running buckets up and down the stairs for at least a half-hour but the water was still rising, finally, we managed to get a call out for help and within an hour I think we had 8 people here helping us about the time the sump pump finally started to catch up. Just having help show up made the clean-up go much quicker and raised our spirits considerably.

Mom’s health isn’t the greatest but she seems pretty happy and stays pretty active. Her roommate and her don’t seem to get along very well but she’s on a waiting list to get into a retirement community the Quakers operate in downtown Plainfield.

As the latest wave of the pandemic started to die down, things looked great. Then on February 24th Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. The world quickly responded with sanctions and as of today, over 1.5 million people have fled Ukraine. Many are staying to fight though, despite facing superior forces. Men and women, young and old, are taking up any arms they can get their hands on and fighting in the streets while a Russian military column stretching over 40 miles moves deeper and deeper into their country. People are dying in the streets, in their homes, in their apartments, as superior Russian forces launch mortars and missiles into the cities. It is surreal. Around the time COVID started, there were massive worldwide wildfires, then we dealt with COVID and domestic civil unrest, we moved into a more virulent strain of COVID and now find ourselves at the doorstep of nuclear war. Russia has explicitly threatened to use their nuclear weapons if anyone tries to mess with them taking Ukraine.

One begins to wonder if I’ll be around next year to write this letter, or if I’ll stand on the other side of the veil and get to tell you what happened to between this letter and the next in person. On that subject, proxy baptism was performed for your mother last year. I haven’t gotten around to yours, or grandpa Jack’s, but things are weird in the world.

I heard your voice last year for the first time in a very long time, an answering machine recording. You sounded decidedly more country than I remember. Funny how we forget things with time.

Hopefully I am still around to write one of these next year, if not I guess I will be catching you up in person!

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave bereft
I am not there. I have not left.

Past letters.