The Last Week

There has been a meme circulating on social media since this past weekend that says something to the effect of, "A year ago, this was our last normal week and no one knew it."  I felt that deeply when I saw it, as this period a year ago has been on my mind a lot lately.  We passed by the memories of our last busy weekend, with Jacob's last basketball tournament (when he and a bunch of random kids filled in for another team) and the trip to the trampoline park that followed it--which even then grossed me out a bit knowing we were on the verge of a pandemic.  Craig's last roadtrip was that weekend, too, so he officially has been home for a year.  

Things escalated crazily in the days that followed that last busy weekend.  I read my blog the other night from those early weeks and subconsciously thanked myself for some of the detail I recorded, specifically the account of how many dominoes fell over the course of a few days, both early in the week and over the following weekend.  It all happened so quickly, going from "Something's coming but we should be good for a bit," to "Okay, I guess we'll stay home now," in the space of a week.  We went from banning work travel to shutting down campus early in the week, to the very quick progression over the following weekend to school and work shutting down.  I will never forget my Thursday trip to Wegmans, a year ago tonight, as it was clear things were ramping up and the first case or two showed up in our area.  That was the moment I realized we might be in for something unprecedented.  

Lines snaked through the store and almost every shelf of staples was empty.  It felt apocalyptic, foreign, and straight out of the third world.  I think that was the first real bit of the low-key panic and stress that has been a constant for a year.  It was this unknown fear of something--not just the virus but a very real threat to our way of life.  It's the stress of not knowing what the next day might hold, whether we could get sick, or when normal life might get back to normal.  Most days it's not overwhelming, but the heightened stress levels over such a long period is not healthy.  But that Thursday shopping trip was like the peak at the top of the roller coaster from hell--the whole week had been building up to that point, and at the top you could see it was going to be a rough ride to get back to the station and there was no turning back.  You just had to let it run its course.  We just didn't know it would take over a year.  

That Friday we had a really good therapy appointment when Jacob was off school (complete with a last lunch out) and a dinner get-together with friends from church.  We left the dinner fully expecting to see everyone on Sunday.  But before Sunday, church got canceled, and despite a declaration from the district on Friday that schools would stay open, by Sunday those were closed as well.  We visited Craig's family for his mom's birthday on Sunday, and we had no idea it would be three months before we did anything like that again.  Life just came to such a sudden standstill.  We all left school and work on a Friday and never went back.

One of the things that stuck out to me most from my posts was the speculation on duration.  Initially I was talking about a couple weeks, or maybe a month.  I still thought we had a chance to get in Jacob's travel season (ha) and I was hopeful about Easter.  Summer was my worst-case scenario, and obviously we blew past that, even though we were able to sneak in bits of normalcy here and there.  Honestly, it's a really good thing none of us knew we'd still be struggling through this a year later.  I mean, if we were honest with ourselves we should have known better, but we all lived pretty normally through Swine Flu, and SARS never really made it here, so I suppose we were optimistic.  When China seemed to get COVID under control within a few months, it seemed doable to do it here, too.  But of course, they had full, hardcore lockdowns, and we could never get away with those here.  Interestingly, most other places with strict lockdowns are still having issues so I find it curious that China barely seemed to look back.  It makes me think we were working with false information from the get-go, which couldn't have helped our decision-making.  Regardless, if we'd have known from the beginning that this would be a year-plus of upheaval, I think the suicide rate would have been through the roof.  Slowly adding time on was a bit of a tease, but it also gave us more digestible periods to survive.  It seemed almost unfathomable early on that this could become a long-term "new normal", but here we are.  

We were forced to adjust very quickly to so many new things, and I think for the most part what we did was amazing.  Even if it felt like a mess, it was a huge enough shift that I wouldn't have expected anything less.  We just had to power through and find a way to survive.  A former blogger that I now follow on social media said the other day that "you can't really process a thing you are still in."  I've been thinking something similar (but likely less eloquent) for weeks as I come back across the memories and the pictures.  As huge and hard as that shift felt, I'm not sure I've fully processed how mentally traumatizing a lot of it was.  I mean, yes, we struggled, but when you consider the degree to which we were isolated, the percentage of life that was affected, the life-enhancing things we couldn't do (Easter with family, real Mother's Day visits with our moms, any sort of travel), the fear that accompanied "normal" stuff (going to the store, sneaking in a hug during a socially distanced visit), and the very basic loss of our village and support system (even our meager one), it's amazing we didn't completely shut down.  Instead, we just put our heads down and got through it.  But a year later when I realize all of the ways life has changed, maybe for the long run, it becomes clearer how all of those things had to have a profound effect.  We probably just don't know it yet because we haven't been able to fully process something that never really ended.  It changed, we adapted, things got easier or harder, and in many ways most of the last nine months have been some sort of middle-ground monotony.  We can do little things but not big things, which means most of our days look the same and lack those big-ticket, exciting moments we used to live for.  Instead of getting excited for a vacation, we get psyched up for a doctor's appointment, library trip, or stop into the office.  I've gotten an awful lot of Taco Bell Happy Hour Freezes over the past months because it's a little moment of "fun".  My, how times have changed.  

As we hit the year anniversary, we're once again approaching spring, with the same ups and downs we lived by last year since "outside" was the only place we could easily go.  The weather this week has seemingly been oddly similar.  I went for my first run last year on March 9th, which had to be a decent day because I wasn't yet in pandemic-driven desperation to get out of the house.  This year March 10th was a gorgeous 68 degree day also worthy of my first run.  I remember milder weather on that last Friday, and I recall those early weeks at home had surprisingly good weather before it tanked in April and snowed into May.

That good weather last year and the warm weather the past couple days did a lot to lift spirits.  I even found two tiny but misguided vinca flowers peeking out of our back flower bed!

There's still so many things that preoccupy me--people that won't wear masks (just in case, people, seriously), all of the political divisiveness (still--and even more so in NY where our governor is in hot water for COVID coverups and sexual harassment), and why members of this house are struggling more than normal with getting up and dealing with work and school--but at long last we have a lot of reasons to be hopeful, too.  Vaccines are ramping up, and between the vaccinated and the already infected, it's getting harder for the virus to spread.  Things are opening up (slowly, thankfully), and numbers don't seem to be spiking despite newer variants being more contagious.  The school district next to ours is going to be in-person for four days starting in a month, which hopefully bodes well for ours.  Travel restrictions are lessening, which will hopefully lower our stress when it's time for Jacob's next basketball season to start.  All of our parents are vaccinated, and based on the President's plan, we'll be eligible within a couple months.  We might be able to have a reasonable summer after all, and maybe even think about taking a real vacation.  There are things to look forward to, real things, for the first time in a long time.  I don't want to get my hopes up too much, but even just getting back to outdoor summer gatherings again is a nice thought.  

In the meantime, as I wish these (hopefully) last hard weeks away, we're trying to get some things done and right some of the wrongs from the past year.  We've been back to church for a few weeks now, and Carter finally got to play in the church's new indoor play area, which was so exciting to hear about a year ago.  After an extra-long wait, he had a blast.

You can see him up in the punching bags on the left.

It's huge!  Multiple slides, tons of crawls...the kids all loved it!

On Monday we finally had the Salvation Army come through and take our old entertainment center.  That meant that on Monday night, I spent three hours putting together the new one, which had been taking up floor space between our entry and kitchen for weeks.  It's really pretty and we all like having the TV lower, even if it does make that wall look a little extra bare now.

All of our "grown-up" DVDs fit in the middle section.  The kids' ones have a separate shelf.  We could slide the doors to the outside, too, but this is better for individual decor items.

The next step to this project is reviewing the many, many VHS tapes we have sitting around the house (some of which lived in the old entertainment center) before our last VCR bites the dust so we can decide what we'd like to convert and what we don't care about.  My old TV shows are among them, and there are lots of memories for both of us saved on those tapes.  I'm also hoping to rework some of our wall art and just freshen a little of everything up after a year of staring at the same walls for too many hours a day.

My other big project is that I finally pulled out the first round of baby clothes last weekend.  I had been putting it off for over a year (and realistically at least six years prior to that, once it was clear we were done).  But I had to go into the crawl space for something last weekend and realized I just had to do it.  I started with the first bin, which was full of emotions.  All of Carter's tiny newborn clothes, the onesies Jacob lived in when our house was perpetually 90 degrees, and so many tiny little memories.  I set aside the boys' Christening outfit, Carter's coming home outfit (I wanted to keep a newborn one--sooo tiny!), the Hawaiian shirt both boys wore in memorable matching pictures, their special hospital hats, and one tiny newborn diaper.  I might still grab one more thing of Jacob's in case I do this cool Pinterest graduation thing I saw (six(!) years from now, but I thought all of that was fair.  It made me a little sad but I feel ready.  I soaked everything that had stains and washed it all.  I lost a few things to stains, rips, and an unfortunate dye transfer (maybe the soaking bath was too hot?), but most fared well.  It's now waiting to get paired back up and set aside so my cousin (who's having a boy) can look through them.  I decided against trying for consignment so anything she doesn't take I will either donate or try to sell at my mom's garage sale.  My goal is to get through about 12 months or so, at which point my friend Heather and my godson Mason might start needing some things (they got showered with a ton of hand-me-downs, but she's not sure yet how the seasons will line up).  From there I'll just try to be consistent about getting through a bin or two when they have somewhere to go.  That will free up a few bins in the meantime so I don't have to buy the ones I've been needing (mostly as the boys keep outgrowing the stuff they're in now).  Oh, and because the washer started acting funny last weekend and the dryer hasn't dried right in years, we bought a new set this week while similar models were on sale.  Sixteen years is a lot to ask of those appliances, so it was time.  One less thing to do down the road.

Overall I think we're just realizing that this homebound time might be coming to an end and we might kick ourselves if we don't get through some of these projects while we have some time, particularly while the weather still stinks.  Admittedly we don't always have the energy or brain space to do it, but limited time can be motivating.  Now to just make those calls about the kitchen!

It's been a weird time this week thinking back on our last "normal" week, but we can only hope the worst is past and we can move into year two with much more optimism and some real hope for the end of this insane, unexpectedly difficult year.