Sometime after September 11th, I went back to the Delta to visit my grandfather Waters Hicks. My son had been born in August of that year and I wanted my grandfather to meet him. Also, I realize now, that even though I have effectively exiled myself from the Delta, I tend to go back to the Delta whenever I feel my personal equilibrium is off.
At some point in the trip I was driving Papaw around, which is what you do in the Delta because there aren’t many people there but there is the land, miles and miles of this alien landscape that is sparsely populated and now makes me ache with its beauty, but of course when I was a kid I hated it, I hated the Delta, and I just could not wait to escape.
Right when me and Papaw got to that place on 82 by the Greenwood-Leflore airport, out near Valley Hill, right where you leave the flatlands and the hills arch up green and covered in kudzu as you pass into Carroll County, the place where my papaw had been born back in 1909, I remember asking my grandfather, “Papaw, did you think the world would be like this?” I guess I meant brokenness, and inequity, and global terrorism and just the sheer inconceivability of the time. I remember my son was in the backseat asleep in his carrier.
Papaw said, “Deirdre, I didn’t think they’d have paved roads in Carroll County!”
I laughed, this great peal of laughter, because the answer was completely not expected but also predictable. My grandfather was stoic. I laughed imagining a world where there wasn’t 82 West paved across the southeast. Even back in 2001 that particular stretch was four lanes.
I am writing this now because my own life has completely shifted in the space of a month, into a future I never imagine imagined. Everyone’s life has. We’re in the midst of a global pandemic.
I knew it was coming. On February 21st, I dropped my son off at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta. He was headed back to college outside of Boston. “I might see you sooner than you think,” I told him. However I didn’t imagine that I would have him on the first flight home on March 14th because my friend Kira, whose husband is a pilot, says that the planes on the early morning flights are cleanest. I also didn’t imagine that by March 19th, two days after I celebrated my birthday on FaceTime, my husband Chris would be prototyping the design for the face shield that would be produced by the entity known as Shield Athens.
Shield Athens is composed of us, several of our friends, and a 3D printer army in the Athens, Georgia area. We are making face shields for members of the medical community. We are making face shields because there is a worldwide shortage of personal protective equipment for medical workers. We are making because America is broken and governed by grifters and profiteers who aren’t providing personal protective gear for frontline workers. I can say that here, on my blog, though I keep the politics out of Shield Athens. I can say it because I feel it because I’ve been there. I worked in public education for 15 years, only to have to resign last August because I was injured on the job because I worked too hard and shot my arms out packing a library on my own. My life has been on hold since May 2018 while I have been healing from two surgeries. Lack of support on the frontlines is why Unreformed is not finished. It’s also why I feel such empathy for the medical professionals being forced to go into their jobs without personal protective equipment.
Chris and I have been putting in 18 hour days the past three weeks. My kitchen table is covered with face shields. There are four 3D printers in what was once my library. To date we have distributed over 700 face shields to medical professionals free of charge.
Even though I’m exhausted, I’m also, as I told Alexia Ridley of Athens News Matters, exhilarated. It feels good to be doing something to help others. It feels good to have a focus. If you read this, I encourage you to find some way to help that empowers you.
#staysafeeveryone #shieldathens