march melancholy
I was on a plane when the world shut down.
My family of five loaded up to go to Tucson for a long weekend, and right before I turned my phone to airplane mode, I saw that my church had shut down services indefinitely and that the World Health Organization had officially declared a pandemic. We landed and went through the airport, no one wearing masks, no one knowing what would come next.
Within a matter of hours we cancelled our flights home and rented a car to drive the 1,400 miles back to Portland. Our stay in Tucson was a mix of at least two Target runs a day, texts with friends loading up on supplies back home, checking Twitter for redundant news updates, and grandparents playing with kids, all of us trying to pretend that this would end up being a blip, nothing to worry about really. We’re just playing it safe, right? Everything will be just fine.
I wonder if I’ll always have this slight melancholy when the calendar to turns to March. March 2020 marked the before-and-after event of a lifetime. I wonder if travel will ever feel so easy again, if a cough from will ever feel like just a cough. And I marvel at the miracles of science, of the resiliency of my neighbors and friends. I know things two years later that I wouldn’t have learned any other way, and I wouldn’t want to trade who I am now for how life was pre-pandemic.
And yet. These two years have been hard, in every conceivable way. I often can’t tease out what is hard because it’s a hard thing, and what is challenging because of All the Hard Things. The sorrow compounds, grief upon grief upon grief, until life feels so heavy all we can do is watch Encanto for the fiftieth time.
And yet. I’m here. I’m here when so many are not. I’m here feeling the cool, spring sun, sending my kids to an actual school that isn’t my kitchen table, going to church with people I love (and some that I don’t so much). I’m here baking cookies, reading books, laughing and crying with friends, both mourning and rejoicing in this broken and beautiful world.
