When there's light at the end of the tunnel
And other thoughts on the last year
Early 2020 feels like a lifetime ago. A lifetime when we hung out with friends and neighbors several times a week. A lifetime when we felt free to plan vacations to faraway places we’ve never been before. We were working through Autumn’s anxiety over performing on stage in front of hundreds of people for her first dance competition season and searching for the best ways for Eden to make friends outside of our homeschool bubble.
And then the world collapsed.
Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but all at once everything was canceled and we had nowhere to go. In an instant, our world turned upside down.
As a family, we most intensely felt the loss of dance competitions. Autumn had worked for months with the three other kids in her Company and they were talented far beyond their years. To work for something so hard and then to lose it was the hardest thing she had ever experienced in all of her 8 years.
But other than that, it was nice in some ways to just clear the calendar for a while. To have nowhere to go and no one to see felt like the ultimate staycation. We had a house full of food—and toilet paper—and an amazing yard to play in. With David working from home, our likelihood of coming into contact with any virus was very low. And yet, despite the fact that we could seclude ourselves into our little cocoon, we felt anxiety like never before.
Like most of the country, I did too much scrolling, reading too many stories about people’s near-death experiences with Covid. At one point I woke up in a panic attack, sure that I couldn’t breath, convinced that this coughing fit attacking me in the middle of the night was the disease ravaging bodies all over New York—and in Boston too. I’ll never really know what caused that spell; too much news is the likely culprit.
With the loss of David’s commute, we struggled with finding balance in our home. It couldn’t be a true staycation if he was on phone calls all day. What used to be our quiet home had now become his office, where meetings were nonstop and constant chatter ensued.
When our church closed right before Holy Week, the reality of deep loss set in. We had been searching for years for a church home. We had barely been there a year and now it had been swooped away from us. They pivoted to online worship, but music and the Word weren’t why we went to church. Holy Communion and the people were. We could sing songs and read the Bible at home whenever we wanted. It was the gathering that made church important to us. The gathering itself was where we most found God and it felt impossible to feel that same holiness through a screen. Our pastor made great connections between this wilderness we found ourselves in and the journey of Lent, but as Holy Week and Easter approached, our sense of loss grew even more profound.
I withdrew from my friends and turned to books and hiking instead. I discovered hiking was one of the few ways I could get outside with no fear of seeing anyone—until everyone discovered that same thing and all of our hiking trails closed as well. Our house sits up against protected wetlands and I became incredibly grateful for our little spot in the woods. We learned the trails behind us and found solace in getting outside and breathing fresh air, all while staying far away from any other human being.
Sometime in May when people started working in their yards, we spent some time talking to our next door neighbor about summer vacations. People were beginning to tentatively plan again—but not me—I didn’t want to plan a thing. I became more spontaneous than ever before, staying up until midnight one night in July, searching for a cabin for a weekend getaway. The closest one we could find was a 6-hour drive so we loaded up the van and headed to western NY, and made some of the best memories of 2020 in that little cabin in the woods. With nothing around but wild raspberries and birds, it felt like the perfect getaway to just breathe. And be.
By then we were wearing masks and tensions everywhere were high. We hated wearing masks, but embraced them anyway, as a way to stand in solidarity with our fellow humans. As a way to say “I see you. I care for you. I’m willing to sacrifice my own comfort for your sake.” We knew people who didn’t feel the same way. People who said, “masks are useless, so what’s the point?” People who refused to wear masks because they wanted to exercise their freedom to breathe fresh air. People who refused to go anywhere because they didn’t want their kids to wear a mask over their face. “Kids should be free to be kids. We don’t want them afraid of germs. Germs are a part of life.”
These weren’t just people we read about on the internet. These were real people in our lives. Friends. Acquaintances. Even a family member or two. We felt lucky that our immediate neighbors all seemed to feel the way we did. If they had strong opinions about masks, they didn’t voice them, and we allowed our kids to play maskless only with the kids who lived next door.
Now here we are, almost exactly one year later, and while some things have changed, we’re still finding ourselves mostly in a time of seclusion. While many people have found technology a great way to connect, we’ve discovered it only leaves us longing. Longing for hugs. Longing for interaction. Longing to break bread with others. To run around together free and uninhibited. Longing for the kind of connection that just can’t happen through a screen.
We find ourselves in a group of people uneligible for a vaccine until later this Spring. Our lives aren’t high-risk enough; we are too healthy. We know this is a good thing, but when we see stories of friends and family being vaccinated—when we see their pictures with captions like “one day sooner”—we can’t help but feel a little jealous. We fear life resuming to normal without us. We put our lives on hold for the sake of others and yet here we are, lives still mostly on hold, while others begin to gather with one another for connections like the ones we deeply long for. We know the time will come when we will be vaccinated too and we work to put our jealousy in check, reminding ourselves that we are incredibly privileged to be last in line.
It’s hard for me to say if I would change anything if I had to do it all over again. I’m not sure I would. We didn’t live the year entirely in seclusion. We had family visit us here in MA, and we traveled to WV to meet my parents for a week just before Thanksgiving. We continued having dinner with our most trusted friends—although not as regularly as before—and we had many outdoor playdates, no matter the season. We made the girls’ activities our main priority and prioritized friendships with the people they were already spending significant amounts of time with.
With every decision we made, we tried to weigh the risk. Sometimes the risk of not doing the thing was stronger than the risk of the virus itself. We learned to communicate our fears. We learned to stand up for ourselves and for our family. We learned which friends would understand our fears and wait for us to feel ready to gather again. And we learned that there are always new friends to be made, even in a time of crisis.
We can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Autumn had her first dance competition earlier this month and although the theater was mostly empty, it felt good to sit in seats and watch dancers on a stage. I’m starting to wake up to dream about when we might gather in groups again. We’re looking forward to summer. It’s when our best memories are made here in New England. Long days spent in our backyard hammocks and at the beach. But first we have to make it through Spring.
Spring in New England can be beautiful or vicious. Most years it’s a little of both. This month, I pulled together some of my favorite ways to make it through Spring. If you find yourself in another part of the country where flowers are already blooming, please take a moment to smell them for me. It’ll be nearly Summer before we see any here!
Cook Something Delicious
We are deep into the cleaning out the freezer stage of Winter, so we’re eating a lot of soup and a lot of beans. This Rosemary White Bean Soup was the easiest dinner I’ve ever made. If you start with cooked beans, it takes fifteen minutes from start to finish and is quite possibly the most delicious soup I’ve had—and I don’t really love soup.
One of my favorite impulse buys is a Rotisserie Chicken from Costco. I know there’s a lot of debate around their chickens, but for $4.99, I haven’t been able to kick them to the curb. We can usually get three meals out of one chicken. We eat it off the bone the first day for lunch, then we make these Chicken and Dumplings or this Chicken Pot Pie. The best thing about both of these recipes is that they can be altered using whatever vegetables you can find in your fridge or freezer. I usually make these Taquitos with the rest of the chicken. You can never go wrong with Mexican food in our house.
For breakfast, we’re loving these Cottage Cheese Pancakes. I know, I know, that sounds strange, but just try them. I’m a cottage cheese hater, but these pancakes are just divine. Plus they are full of protein, so they keep you full much longer than regular pancakes. If you have cottage cheese that has large curds, pulse it in a food processor a few times to smooth it out a bit.
Read a Good Book
The Velveteen Rabbit, Margary Williams
Typically considered a children’s book, I have thinking lately about what it means to become real. This book is not only a wonderful story of a child’s love for his favorite toy, but is also an incredible portrayal of how painful—and yet painful—vulnerability can be. It’s a fantastic book, especially during these final days of Lent.
Learning to Walk in the Dark: Because Sometimes God Shows Up at Night, Barbara Brown Taylor
I read this book last year and found it to be incredibly relevant to the dark time we were living in. I’ve used many of her stories over the last year to talk to my own daughter about what we can do when we wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. This is a book that made a profound impact on me, not only for dark times in our lives, but for the ordinary times too. There’s power in the darkness, and Barbara Brown Taylor does a terrific job of helping us embrace it.
The Last Year of the War, Susan Meissner
We have just finished up our history unit on WWII, and I’ve been reading as many books as I can set during that time period. The Last Year of the War was a unique story about two families—one German and one Japanese—who were put in United States internment camps. This time in our country’s history is one we don’t talk about enough, and this book sheds a light on how some Americans were treated simply because of fear. It would be a terrific book club book—I can see it sparking a lot of really great conversation.
For more of what I’m reading this month, check out my March Favorites.
Remember: This link is to my shop at Bookshop. If you buy something, I get a tiny percentage, just for telling you how much I love them. But I promise to only tell you about the books I really love. And I always encourage you to check your local library first!
Listen to Something Fun
Something about Spring makes me want to listen to catchy tunes with fun lyrics. I’m adoring this song by Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors—I think we can all identify with it right now.
I’m also soaking up the new Renegades Podcast with Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. It’s making me think, it’s making me laugh, and it’s making me wish I had a friendship like theirs.
We sing a hymn as part of our Morning Time together every day and during Lent, we’ve been singing My Song is Love Unknown. It’s a beautiful hymn and one that we have really enjoyed singing together and the lyrics tell the story of the Passion as well as it can be told.
Words to Inspire and to Challenge
I adored this reflection on how life is starting to feel just the tiniest bit easier. I also really loved this exploration of the life a library book over the last year.
This essay helped me feel not quite so crazy in my sense of overwhelm, and this one made me want to learn photography so I can take family photos for all the single moms I know.
I’m grieving over the latest news from Atlanta and am furious that the sheriff blamed it on the kid having “a really bad day.” This essay from Roxane Gay reminds us we have a lot to reckon with and is making me think about the things we must do in order to make hate crimes like this stop.
The political divide has only grown over the last year, and I really enjoyed reading this piece regarding the partisan errors around Covid. One of the hardest things during the last year has been knowing who—and what—to believe and this helped me feel a little less crazy in thinking that maybe both sides were a little bit wrong.
In Case You Missed It
Snow lingered into March this year and we found ways to get outside with friends anyway.
I never dreamed that we’d spend another Holy Week and Easter without our church community. Last year I put together some ideas for how to make Palm Sunday and Holy Week special when we can’t celebrate in-person together. These words feel even more relevant today than they did a year ago. Our church isn’t quite ready to worship together yet—even masked and outside—so I put together some ideas to make Easter a celebratory affair, even though the last thing we want to do is celebrate another Easter at home.
I took the hardest step of turning 40 and got my first mammogram. My results came back clear, but because of risk factors, they want me to get further screening. Adulting is hard sometimes, ya know?
We’ve been studying William Grant Still the last few months and I sat down to write the story I heard in his Song for the Lonely.
On International Women’s Day, I remembered a wonderful woman who made a profound impact on me, in a very short period of time.
We took our final winter hike in the woods, told the stories behind some of the messes I found in my house this month, and explored how dirt is bringing me closer to God.
And I explored ten things to reset your day when it feels like nothing is going right. This piece is written particularly for homeschoolers, but most of these tips can be helpful for anyone having a bad day.
A Blessing for Holy Week
May you take the time to remember your losses, may you remember the quiet of those dark three days, and may you forever rest in the hope that Easter is coming.
from Where Were the Children [A Good Friday Reflection]
Until next month,
