Isolation: How Do We Handle it?

Hi, @shortshot80, I'm with you and would like to gain a few pounds as well. I'm 76 and close friends have told me that they also eat less now at meals and their appetites for foods are changing as well. So we are just chalking it up to general aging and less exercise.

Like Shortshot80, I also live on the Oregon coast, in perhaps the town most reliant on tourism. I've owned this place since I bought it "halfsies" with my parents in 1962. They retired here full time when Dad was 72 (I bought another place nearby), and sans planning, I moved here full time just before my 72nd birthday, although, like my self-employed father, am still not retired at 77. When we first moved here, I had a contract to work one day a week for a client in the Portland metro area, which is two hours away. Since I was driving every week, I volunteered to pick up "a few" loaves of donated bread for Backpack for Kids here...and, although my contract with the client ran out two years ago, I still drive every week, often coupling a doc visit or client meeting to the hour or so loading what has turned into 400-600 loaves of bread every week!

During ordinary times, every winter lots of the low-wage restaurant and motel workers here are unemployed, waiting for Spring Break. Our town has only 8,000 residents, but houses an additional 40,000 or more visitors most weekends. The town is 100% reliant on tourism. We've had as many as 500 kids on Backpack some winters, which is a lot for such a small town. The average family income of schoolkids here is so low that ALL qualify for free breakfasts and lunches. The school district has pitched in to package and deliver two meals every day via regular bus routes. We've been supplementing that with food boxes for the families with kids on Backpack (the most needy). I also pick up bread for a church program, which is now operating out of a member's home, a retirement home where residents have no kitchens, a place that provides emergency food and clothing and ID help, and the town pantry. Right now, we don't need nearly as much as we ordinarily need for Backpack, so 200 loaves of what I picked up Thursday afternoon is headed for Food Share 40 miles away first thing tomorrow morning, to serve people who live south of us.

The really nice thing about living here (in addition to the lovely surroundings and all the animals we enjoy watching cross our acreage) is that the people are really, really generous. All the charities have received $$ and food donations--there is a large group of well-off retired people living in very nice places, and they've been very helpful, not only now but over time. Every time one of the charities has a fundraiser, the first people to show up are those who volunteer for other charities! A coffee company with a tiny cafe owned by a couple (no employees) faced being shut down by coming up with a proposal that people buy a pound of coffee from them so that they could donate the coffee and half the profits to local first responders. As a result, that couple and their two young kids are doing okay, in spite of the fact that self-employed people without employees fall through the cracks. It makes me sooooo happy to deliver bread to all the places I help and learn that others are contributing as well.

The woman who's running the church pantry now that the church is shut certainly has no money to spare. She's an unemployed night clerk for a big motel these days, but she set up a small pantry outside her crummy trailer home to serve the community that lives in a collection of trailers and 5th wheels so dilapidated that they can't ever be moved. While she was still working full time, she volunteered for the church's pantry program seven days a week. Now, she cooks meals for the 70 people in the retirement place three days every week. When we gave her a pkg. of frozen meat that we couldn't pack into food boxes because it was frozen and told her to eat it herself, she sliced it into thin strips and made stir-fry for the people in the home. Now, that's a truly good person! Yeah, and she has two large rescue dogs--no surprise.

Even though I'm not doing two big jobs that would mean nice money to upgrade something here, if we do receive stimulus money that we don't need because our retirement is large enough to allow us to save a little, we'll buy things for the various charities with it, patronize the coffee people and others who are working hard to figure out ways to keep their heads above water. Look around you: there may be lots of people working behind the scenes to help others. There are lots of good people out there!

I've never been too thrilled by the idea of exercise for its own sake although I faithfully follow the Pilates shown to me by the physio in the Transplant Unit in Edinburgh.Somehow, I'm not fully awake until they're done!

My response to Covid-19 and all its works is to start dancing again..I searched on the internet for all my favourite dance tunes from my youth; just pick your favourite decade ( mine is a secret!) and compile a playlist. It's great exercise and the memories of happy days just come flooding back.

When my husband saw me dancing to 'This Old Heart of Mine'( and that's a giveaway!) he said he could hardly believe that only a few years ago I was at death's door. We should never forget the miracle of transplant and the gift we have been given. Good times will come again when we won't have to dance alone. I know it.

Can I also make a small request? The Covid 19 stream is now becoming so large that we are all receiving many emails each day. It's lovely to hear from everyonebut could we keep this stream purely for Covid 19 issues? In itself it is a huge subject and likely to get bigger as time goes on. Thanks to all.

How wonderful that you could write a book about your family. You have a desire for productivity and gratitude. I too am grateful that you are still here, @shortshot80!

Hi I think you are in the city South of me. It's the only place I know that is tat big. More power to you I don't work anymore i am 87/ amd O [ probably won't get any Stimulus money. Nancy/Shortshot

Hi I think that this site is for everyone andtheir problems. I have two kinds of Lung cancer I don't go out side without a mask. I this this site is for everyone to write their one problems on. I don't even want to tald about Covid 19.

Hmmm...I'm an hour south of Tillamook (a little over 5,000) and 40 minutes north of Newport (10,000). As you know, the actual RESIDENT population of coastal towns is very hard to nail down due to all the absentee owners of second homes, let alone the VRD owners. Our community north of town (most of it recently annexed) is 24% VRDs, a far cry from what it was when I bought here in 1962 and there were still some of the pea fields that provided peas for the metro-area produce markets. Back in those days, those of us who owned second homes bought cabins, intending to improve them and live there some day, not as an "investment." That's one of the reasons why there's so little affordable housing in our town for all the minimum-wage workers who make it possible for the hordes of visitors to enjoy themselves. Really sad, but at least people here are generous. Where else would your doctor, out for her daily 2.5 mile walk, stop for a half hour to help you shovel topsoil from where it had been dumped along the edge of the road? The closest thing we have to a dept. store (Goodwill) is closed, so it feels a bit more away from things than usual. Because my business is doing marketing and design for sport fishing companies all over the West Coast, I've always done most of my work remotely. In addition, my husband really doesn't like to have many people come to our house, so things don't seem very different for us these days, except that my boat is sitting in the yard because every boat ramp is closed. I still have a couple of acres of old-growth spruce trees that we own behind us, so I have plenty of places to go outside...and plenty of work to do to keep me more than busy.

Shortshot80, sounds as though you live near Pleasant Valley. I'm in Roads End, on the south side of Logan Creek. This morning I saw the first two of my dahlias poking their noses through, so it won't be too long before I have lots of them blooming alongside the road, which is the only part of our place that isn't too shaded for flowers. I'm known for having a big bed of dahlias that bloom all summer and fall, with that funny little beach shack up the hill next to the big spruce trees. In spite of having spent quite a bit on it over the years with various additions and remodeling, the place is still, basically, a beach shack, one of the few older places still standing in our area. The new places are all two-story VRDs or trophy homes. We live in the slums with an elk herd and lots of deer, but no other houses nearby. Yes, not many women commercial fished that long ago...not even today!