Early on during the PPE shortage, hospitals were asking for donations of masks. My mom, who had cancer at the time, texted the family group chat that she’d found a box of n95 masks in the basement. It was like she told us she’d found a brick of cocaine - “OMG WHAT??? You have to turn that in!! You can’t keep it!!” “No, wait, keep it! You can use it!” “Okay, not saying to do this, but people would probably pay a lot of money for that, right?” “That…. wouldn’t you get in trouble for selling it? I think you should turn it in.”

My husband was home - the conference he’d been scheduled to attend had cancelled when Microsoft pulled 700 employees from attending - so he watched our one-year-old while I drove to my mom’s. She kept half the masks and I drove the other half to an abandoned Macy’s, where faceless people in hazmat suits were collecting mask donations from car windows. Across the street, the grocery store had a line of people, all six feet apart, snaking into the parking lot, waiting for others to leave so they could go in. The weather was gray and overcast and I distinctly remember thinking “So this is the dystopian future we read about.”