Yesterday we went on the Fresh Food Foray — to CostCo and Fred Meyers (curbside) to get some of the items we can’t get through online ordering.  Before we went, Nyel had baked oatmeal raisin cookies (yum!) and then added sugar to the CostCo list.

“Really?” I asked.  Nyel rarely bakes and we don’t use sugar for much else.  “The hummingbirds are back,” was his reply.  Enough said.  Soon we’ll be filling our feeder a couple of times a week at a cup of sugar a pop.  Yep.  I made a mental note.

There was brown sugar and powdered sugar but no white, granulated at CostCo.  No sugar at Freddy’s either.  When we got home, we looked at Amazon.  Expensive but it will be here later this week.  The hummingbirds will be grateful

I told  Marta and Charlie about it during our weekly conference call last night  “It’s sounding a lot like World War II when everything was rationed,” Marta said.  But she was a generation too late to remember that first-hand.  I, on the other hand, well remember rationing books and standing in line at the corner grocery store when their supply of sugar came in.  Desserts were a rare treat when I was a little girl.  I remember my mom saving up sugar for my birthday cake when I was six or seven.

And, then, the aha moment!  Never in all my years since “the war” have I put rationing together with hoarding.  But… of course!  How else to give everyone a chance at the items that had suddenly become rare commodities?  And if, as some medical professionals predict, this virus will be with us for a while, is rationing in the near future for us?  If our hummingbirds had a vote, they’d probably say “yes!”