Given the success of the vaccine in reducing the rate of new Covid cases, life has opened up substantially where I live, and I hope it has where you are as well. The relief has reminded me of the last handful of pages of Albert Camus' The Plague, which you probably remember is a sobering and frightening novel about a mid-twentieth century plague in a town in Algeria. Finally, the plague did lift, however, and the roads and the railroad tracks into the town again reopened, and the people returned to moving about the streets. In the days just before the gates allowed entrance, for Dr. Bernard Rieux, the story's narrator, "the prospect of imminent release had obliterated his fatigue."

"Hope had returned and with it a new zest for life. No man can live on the stretch all the time, with his energy and will-power strained to the breaking-point, and it is a joy to be able to relax at last and loosen nerves and muscles that were braced for the struggle.... Indeed, he had a feeling that everyone in those days was making a fresh start."

If you've read the book, you know it's not a fairy tale and not everyone lives happily ever after, even with the plague lifting, but still, joy returned.

"[T]he moment they saw the smoke of the approaching engine, the feeling of exile vanished before an uprush of overpowering, bewildering joy. And when the train stopped, all those interminable-seeming separations which often had begun on this same platform came to an end in one ecstatic moment, when arms closed with hungry possessiveness on bodies whose living shape they had forgotten."