December 8, 2017 (Thursday)

by Yule Heibel on December 7, 2017

A cold front is heading our way tomorrow but especially Saturday. It’s cold today, too: white frost coats the roofs. And already the difference the insulation makes that we had blown into the home office walls last week is quite immense. It literally feels like the room has a coat on, and isn’t standing in a nightshirt out in the cold …which makes me think of the servant girls in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace who slept in thin clothes under thin blankets under bare attic rafters …in Ontario winter. The roofs I see outside my window this morning are white-coated and cold, those without inside “coats” of insulation more quickly melting the frost as heat escapes. The sky is mostly overcast, but half an hour ago – or longer, at 6:30 – the bottom section of the sky, the horizon line, was streaked with almost violent shades of pink and purple.

I filled a prescription yesterday at 5pm. It took at least 40 minutes. The pharmacy needed to input my insurance information. They were swamped. And then it took another age of standing in line to get the meds. During this time I heard story after story from customers talking with the pharmacists or technicians about …insurance, …and copays, …and what will happen after January 20 (fearfully), …and that something should change after January 20 (hopefully), …but whether fear or hope determined people’s comments, all were concerned with insurance. It overrode their concern for their health, it seemed – at least their anxiety over who would pay for the medications needed to restore their health did. What a sad, sad state of affairs. Insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies make out like bandits. Everyone quakes.

Bridge Pillars

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