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Who Was That Masked Woman?
I’m far from the first to write about how much our lives have changed in a few very short, cataclysmic weeks, but it’s also true that each of us has a uniquely personal perspective on the current global situation caused by the novel coronavirus. One of my own epiphanies: Face Masks, the Making and Wearing of.
I’ve been sewing nearly my entire life, and for the most part, the majority of people I know have not really appreciated this skill. (“Why would you bother making that yourself?” is one of the most common/least favorite things I hear.) But suddenly, anyone with a sewing machine and some cotton fabric is a hot commodity. And there are now literally hundreds of people making and selling masks*, as well as donating them to health care workers and others who really need medical-grade masks, but for whom some protection is better than none. My own mother, who lives in Seattle, is in the middle of 18 weeks of chemotherapy treatments, so she’s been wearing masks since long before the lockdown in Washington State.
I suppose I could have been selling my masks too, but honestly, all I wanted was to make and give them as gifts — and I have stuck to that, despite multiple requests for, in some cases, dozens of masks, and I have two reasons for this decision: One, in order to respect social distancing by staying out of stores as much as possible, I determined from the start to…
