My great-grandmother made the world’s best strawberry-rhubarb pie.

She paid me in pie for mowing her lawn — on the riding mower out on the acreage, which was fun, and with one of those old-school, motorless, manual mowers up close to the house, which was not.

Great-Grandma Baker’s pie perfectly blended sweet and tart, both the strawberry and rhubarb pulled fresh from the big garden Great-Grandpa Baker worked every day well into his 90s.

I had just one complaint: Great-Grandma often served the pie with too-cold milk that tasted watered-down, with unenjoyable flecks of ice in it. I didn’t want to complain to Great-Grandma, so I complained to my mother one day when Great-Grandma wasn’t around.

Great-Grandma lived through the Great Depression, Mom told me, and going without so often as a young woman taught her to stay frugal throughout her life. So Great-Grandma bought multiple gallons of milk when it went on sale and she froze the extra gallons. I got flecks of ice when she served me milk that hadn’t fully thawed.

I began to notice all kinds of ways their Great Depression experience had changed Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa Baker’s life. Most of their clothes came from the 1970s. They always had coupons stacked up in the kitchen. They stored food not in Ziploc baggies, like we did at home, but in the cut-off ends of bread bags closed tight with bread ties.

Even that wonderful garden — where Great-Grandpa would walk me and pull off sugar snap peas and we’d eat them right in the pod, standing right next to where they’d grown — wasn’t a hobby. They grew their vegetables so they didn’t have to buy them.

Both Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa passed long before the coronavirus pandemic, but I’ve thought often about them throughout the past year.

A world-altering phenomenon changed their entire generation for their entire lives. Long after they’d made enough money to buy full-price milk whenever they wanted, they couldn’t bring themselves to do it, because the want they’d experienced decades prior had permanently rewired their mindset.

I’ve wondered, how will the pandemic change my generation?

I hope face masks go away. In fact, I aim to burn mine as soon as I can. And I hope to never hear “social distancing” again. I want to hug someone. I want to hug strangers on the street once I can, just because I can.

But I hope we hold on to better hygiene and cleanliness. All this more-frequent handwashing and hand sanitizer, all this absolutely staying home when we’re sick, all this “deep cleaning” at restaurants, all that ought to stay. Since my boyhood, I’ve gotten sick once a year, like clockwork. Weak immune system, I guess. This year, I haven’t had a sniffle, and I think the community’s coronavirus cleanliness has something to do with it.

I hope we forget everything that’s divided us the past 13 months, that we forgive every person we scowled at for refusing to wear a mask and every business owner we boycotted for refusing to serve us unless we wore one.

Instead, I hope we remember all the ways we came together, like the mask-maker armies that formed early on and the volunteers who showed up at food banks and the kids who made cards and everyone who participated in drive-by parades for our seniors trapped alone in nursing homes. I hope we keep doing such things.

Most importantly, I hope we remember just how “essential” each one of us truly is. Not only doctors, nurses, police, and firefighters (whom we learned to appreciate even more), but every fry cook, waitress, gas station attendant, retail clerk, car salesman — and, yes, even journalist — is essential to our way of life. We missed them when they were gone.

The number of businesses that closed not just because they lost revenue but because they couldn’t find enough people to work should show us to appreciate every warehouse hand, truck driver, and chef we come across.

Like Great-Grandma Baker learned the value of the bottom of every bread bag, I hope we’ve learned the value every person brings to our economy, to our day-to-day comfort, to our safety.

And, like Great-Grandma Baker never let go of her frugality, I hope we never let go of that lesson.

As we climb out of this pandemic and — hopefully — celebrate Independence Day 2021 not just as the birth of our nation but our independence from that invisible bug, I hope we never forget what’s truly essential.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.