A Year In

A year ago yesterday, I boarded a plane for San Antonio to attend AWP (nonwriters: it’s a giant writing conference). Coronavirus fears were rapidly escalating by that point, but the conference hadn’t been cancelled, and I went. I flew on a plane, stood around in crowds, went out for dinner and drinks and readings. And then changed my flight to come home early because it was absolutely dystopian to be in San Antonio while the world was falling apart. 

The kids were still in school, but not for long; within two weeks, the schools had closed. I can’t lie: I was excited. I was happy to have the kids home, and it felt like summer had come early, with all the promise of long, free days. The plans I made! I made an Excel sheet of daily schedules; I set ambitious goals for the kids learning to type; I talked passionately about the importance of journaling during This Unprecedented Time; Andrew began reading Shakespeare sonnets out loud after dinner each night. We were all going to better ourselves. We were going to use the time well and turn lemons into lemonade.

Keep in mind: the school closure was TWO WEEKS. This was how excited I felt, how optimistic I felt, and also how daunted I felt at the prospect of, as I called it in a blog post from March 2020, a “two-week-long snow day.” I went to the Dollar Tree and spent $47 on supplies to survive that long, long, long time at home. I dug out the bread machine and began baking bread, because it seemed like the thing to be doing. We watched episodes of Little House on the Prairie every night, feeling a kinship with the Ingalls and their impossible lives. And we were looking at two! weeks! at! home! We still thought we were going to Costa Rica for spring break!  

Remember all the We’re In It Together For This Strange But Temporary Time positivity? People putting rainbows and teddy bears in their windows so kids could walk around the neighborhood and count them. Mo Willems’s daily doodles. All the ambitious streaming from zoos and what have you. There was a kind of giddy desperation to make the time memorable, to show that we weren’t actually freaking out over suddenly being afraid to leave our houses. 

At some point, all that just seemed to stop, and lockdown just kept going on and on and on, and there was no point pretending anymore that this was an exciting time for Big Goals and Fun New Ways to Connect. It had never been that. 

I mean, what can you do but laugh? Well, you can also cry, and today has made me feel all the shock and amazement that generally get buried under day-to-day life. We have been at this A YEAR. A YEAR. A year ago, the world closed. It wasn’t a two-week-long snow day. Unimaginable things happened: the kids never went back to the schools they left; I spent hours ordering groceries online; I bought 50 pounds of flour; I bought an inflatable above-ground pool. And the world beyond our home turned so, so dark.

The kids are still journaling, and I’m glad for that, and I’m glad for the daily blog posts I kept all through last spring and summer. Those Quarantine! posts tapered off because, eventually, after many months, lockdown life became regular life, and the new shape of the days lost its novelty. 

I flew back from San Antonio last March and spent the next week or so walking to the bus stop and going to the grocery store in close-but-not-quite normalcy, but the life I returned to was already changing. And now, of course, since I’m typing this from Pittsburgh, I can say that it’s completely changed--it turns out we were right all along; it was indeed a time for Big Goals, wild life changes. Typing programs and Shakespeare were the decoys; the real changes were waiting up ahead.

We’re a year in.