Everyone has post-Covid dreams. I’d wager most of them involve family and travel, and mine are no different in that respect. I long to be able to hug my grandchildren again, to see them somewhere other than on FaceTime. We had a you’re-only-going-to-do-this-once trip planned this summer and poof! like everyone else’s plans, it was cancelled, tucked into the not-now-maybe-not-ever box.

So dreams fill our contemplative moments. I’m a writer and I’m asked how I get my ideas. It’s sounds trite to say ‘from life,’ but seeing something has been known to trigger an avalanche of what-ifs and recently, I happened upon a beauty.

I was in Walmart and there was one of my favorite things—the clearance bin. This particular one was piled with bolts of fabric but often it’s DVDs or books. Clearance shelves can be filled with coffee or cereal or spices, always worth a look. And as I was thinking about the fabric or coffee or cereal or spices, it came to me, the ultimate post-Covid dream: What if this bin or shelf were filled with boxes of masks?

What if we can get to the point that we don’t need a mask? A vaccine, herd immunity, time and more time—what will it take before Walmart can clearance the boxes of masks? At that time, standing there looking at them, will I be tempted to buy one, take it home, put it on a closet shelf and hope like heck I don’t ever have to remember what I did with it?

I don’t know about you, but for me, that’s a really good dream.