Seeing Dorothy

"It's not goodbye. It's just a sweet adieu."

Last summer, for Plough magazine, I wrote a pandemic-essay-that-wasn’t-really-a-pandemic-essay about my family’s visit to an old neighbor in her nursing home. The essay wasn’t published until October, but I conceived it a few months prior, just as COVID and the George Floyd protests were converging. We had to visit Dorothy through the window at the time…