A 9-year-old’s Song Tops a Virus, Snow, and a Sideways Car

April 2020 and you wake up – assuming you slept –

          and you wonder what the day will hold.

You know you’re surrounded by COVID-19

          but really now, you ask, also by snow?!

                    The weather warning was right.

The blacktop running past our rural Iowa house

          is covered by a glaze of ice

                    and there on our white front lawn

                              is a car sitting sideways.

John and I look at each other and laugh.

          How could we not have heard that happen, we ask?

Yup, John, the senior citizen, but still full-time trucker,

          had his job suspended and we’re now self-quarantined.

So, you know, you figure that a car sitting sideways

          on your snow-covered front yard, in April,

          while a novel virus has stopped the world,

                    likely tops your excitement for the day.

But, I was wrong.

Okay, you know you have to fill the hours, so we cleaned –

          he picked up, I organized, he vacuumed, I dusted.

And then at supper time our daughter came by!

to deliver the RXs she picked up for us,

to deliver a pizza from the Ranch,

and then, well, you know how the unexpected has thrown us

          for loop after loop in the last few weeks,

                     but this surprise that she brought us

topped all of the others!

Her 9-year-old daughter had begun filling a new binder that day-

          She, who loves school and is a social butterfly,

                    finally had enough of this homebound business.

                              She needed a project so she started one.

          The multicolored cover, carefully printed with markers,

                    states with childhood clarity and unabashed honesty:

Lacey’s Going Through Hard Times Songs 

Find attached Lacey's first song, COVID-19.