We had been visiting weekly for 8 years … until COVID struck.
She did her best to follow the guidelines when the health department allowed her to reopen last summer and we only went at 6:00 am, assuring that we were the first people in the diner any given morning. Even still, the conditions and circumstances eventually forced Keith to decide to stop going to Darlene’s.
We did what we could to help out. We purchased a large gift certificate that we’ll never use before the governor closed all eateries. We did the same again when she re-opened. We ordered out a few times and left her and Pam inordinately large gratuities on a couple of occasions. We did what we could to help her weather the storm as (1) her customers would slowly returned to diner and (2) she would be limited by the number of people that she could allow in the building at any given time.
Today, the local hospitalization numbers are better than they were last summer and all the adults in our family are vaccinated. It was time to go back … and Darlene let out a squeal of excitement when we walked through her doors for the first time since September.
We still wore our masks when we weren’t eating and we probably would have benefited from an additional hour of sleep, but there is nothing quite like going out for breakfast and still feeling like you are home.
