WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR CAN MAKE

Apparently this time last year was our last normal week, and it was totally wasted on us because we were oblivious.  You know, just drifting along thinking that life was dull and boring ... and maybe we should look into a week on a beach in Mexico to liven things up a bit.

Ah, those were the days!  There’s nothing like a twelve month dose of house bound and constrained to make dull and boring look good.

Wide eyed and innocent we heard our government officials say words like ‘pandemic’, ‘shelter in place’, ‘lockdown’ and ‘quarantine’ – strange, alien terms that couldn’t possibly apply to regular folks like us.  Only, of course, they did.  Apparently that’s how pandemics work.

Borders were slamming shut faster than windows in a rainstorm.  So much for a trip to Mexico!  And all those snowbirds - high tailing it north as fast as they could get there, sanitizing every gas pump and door handle they came in contact with all the way home.

They were better off than the poor people on cruise ships, floating Petri dishes of infection turned away from port after port, thinking they would never get home.

I will confess here, I was busy getting my kitchen renovated and wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what was going on.  It all seemed so far-fetched and surreal until the day my daughter called me, panic in her voice “They’re closing the schools on Friday!  The kids might be home for six weeks!  What am I going to do?!”

Six weeks.  How quaint was that?

And then we were into the thick of things. 

Toilet paper; remember the toilet paper insanity? And the worldwide shortage of yeast?  And everyone who had a square foot of dirt deciding to plant a garden? And the mask/anti-mask fiasco that still rages on?

As time went by our vocabularies were stretched too.  Not so much by new words but by new meanings for old words.  Remember when ‘bubble’ meant something that expanded and contracted out of a toddler’s nose while you went to find a Kleenex?  Now we live in them, with our closest friends and family – but not too many.  The only good bubble is a small bubble.

Who, outside the medical profession, knew what PPE stood for before 2020?

And remember when ‘remote learning’ was flipping between two documentaries on TV?

In the beginning we watched the provincial health updates in a kind of competition to see if our province could claim the lowest case numbers.  As time wore on we watched in horror as the numbers kept climbing – didn’t people understand what social distancing meant?  It’s a giant game of Keep Away!  The winners don’t get sick!  If we play it right only the virus dies!  If we didn’t know how to read a graph before, we sure do now. 

A ‘next wave’ isn’t something a surfer looks forward to at the beach.  ‘Zoom’ isn’t the sound a car makes when it goes by real fast.  ‘Mandate’ isn’t meeting your boyfriend for dinner and a movie.  And the designation ‘essential workers’ covers so much more than the medical and policing professions – apparently grocery store workers and meat packing plant workers are kind of important too ... along with the bus drivers who get them to work.  It’s been a steep learning curve.

So, here we are in 2021, and although there were days it felt like we were stuck here forever, the light at the end of our tunnel is getting brighter each day.  I can only imagine what it was like for our grandparents living through the Spanish ‘Flu epidemic of 1918, but because of what they learned then and how that science has been taken seriously and carried forward, researchers were ready with vaccine experience that only needed to be tweaked for this particular virus when it inevitably popped up.  As much fun as this has been, it could have been so much worse.

We began 2020 oblivious to how our world would wobble off our comfortable old normal.

2021 finds us on the cusp of freedom to roam as we please.

May 2022 be the year that we move past wanting to punch anyone who uses the term “our new normal”.