A year ago on March 6th, 2020 it was a Friday. It was my last "normal" weekend of work. I was a server at a lovely family owned farm to table restaurant that prides itself on its great service. I worked Friday - Monday as a "weekend warrior". I loved my job and my coworkers. I have nothing noteworthy from that weekend of work, except to comment on its normalcy. I goofed around with my coworkers. I put candles in desserts for guests. I opened a million bottles of wine. We probably served about 250 people Saturday night. Covid was a topic of conversation amongst the staff, but no one seemed overly concerned. Suddenly, on Tuesday the 12th, the world blew up. Chaos was starting to happen and it was happening fast. Schools were shutting down and talking about it being "just for a few weeks". People who had the ability to work from home were sent home to do so. This was one of the longest weeks of my life. On Wednesday Amelie's preschool closed. Thursday Caleb's elementary school closed. Friday I went to the dollar store to get $40 worth of craft supplies because I had a feeling this would go longer than expected and these kids needed stuff to do. Every morning that week I would wake up and pour over the news. High stress. High alert. And getting worse. A generalized feeling of dread and stress just settled onto me. The insomnia, that still continues to plague me, began. Friday the 13th I went to work completely freaked out. I am not generally overly concerned about germs, but I suddenly understood why people are. They had made a whole bunch of new safety protocols and changes. My restaurant smelled like bleach. My coworkers and I were not touching each other or getting to close to each other. Reservations were cancelling at an insane pace. We went from over 200 covers to about 60 within a few hours. It was like living in some crazy alternate reality. I got called out of work for Saturday, they just didn't need me. So I took stock of my fridge, freezer and pantry and hit the store. Thankfully, this was a few days before everyone was panic buying. However, I also didn't know what was to come, so looking back there was a few more things I wish I had picked up. You know, like hand sanitizer. Have you ever had to hunt through your house to find the little free hand sanitizer bottles that you got at the fair? Yeah. I have. But I digress. It would be months before we could even get any that weren't trial size and even those were near impossible to find. I went to work Sunday. I had no idea it would be my last day of work. I was a million times more freaked out than I was on Friday. I felt like I was vibrating and hypervigilant. Everyone was afraid to go near each other. It was surreal. Staff who would normally cluster together were far away from each other. Disinfectant permeated everything. I was afraid to touch my guest's items on the table. It was absolutely the most stressful day I've ever had at any job. I came home from work beside myself and exhausted. The next morning the governor of NJ would declare that all restaurants must close down by 9pm. My restaurant just didn't bother to open that day. And thus began lockdown in New Jersey. That's when the panic buying started. Rumors that there would be no food shipments or that grocery stores would close down were running rampant. A huge chunk of our population just got laid off. So people were stocking up as much as they could. People also took advantage, of course, and stockpiled things like toilet paper and sanitizer just to mark it way up to sell and make a profit. Stores had to start limiting how much people could buy so there was enough to go around. People were bartering with neighbors for toilet paper rolls because there was none to buy. OMG the toilet paper shortage. It's one of those things you don't think about until you cant get any more. People were getting sick at an alarming rate. Central and northern New Jersey has a huge commuter population going to New York City. New York city was BAD. So naturally, the virus got down here very fast. New York and New Jersey were hit hard and fast and people were dying fast because no one knew how to fight this thing. People were dying in their homes from heart attacks and strokes because they were terrified of going to the hospital. So they died instead of risking getting Covid. Every morning brought new images of things like field hospitals set up in parks and convention centers. Refrigerated semi trucks were parked outside hospitals to hold the dead bodies. I'll never forget that image. Every day on my Facebook feed someone lost someone they knew. All Hell was breaking loose and every day was worse. I started feeling like I was living on some alternate reality. Other places in the US were barely being grazed by Covid and it was pretty much business as usual. Watching normalcy on my Facebook feed in other parts of the US while my region of the US was bleeding out was surreal. At first, my work friends and other friends would get on zoom calls just to hang out. After a few months, these stopped. Everyone became very insular and just needed to focus on themselves and their family. Everyone crawled into their caves. My husband worked though everything safely, thankfully, but I was home with the kids. My kids who got ripped out of school and their whole world changed. It was on me to make a sense of normalcy and find joy. At the time even the playgrounds were shut down because they thought it was spread on surfaces. So I sucked it up, and tried to make things good for my kids. What else can you do? We played in open fields away from people. We hung out on our front lawn playing with the neighbors cats and chatting with neighbors from a distance. We made the backyard fun, and began the most epic garden I've ever made. We did crafts. We played video games. Caleb made a best friend on Fortnite who would literally carry him through the spring and summer. They played online every day together. I'll never forget the first pandemic grocery store trip. There was no mask mandate yet. As a matter of fact they were telling healthy people NOT to wear them. We had our hand sanitizer in our pockets and we were steeled and ready to go. It was overwhelming. At the time it was believed that every surface could possibly infect you with Covid so you didn't touch anything unless you were putting it in your cart. Then sanitize your hands immediately. The meat departments were picked clean. No frozen veggies to be found. Entire sections of Costco were empty. No pasta, no rice, no tomato sauce. The grocery stores would be picked clean like this for months. If the store could get product in, it was gone by early morning. For months, the only meat we could buy was frozen chicken and fresh ground beef, If we were lucky. The meat shortage didn't start to resolve till about June. The first time I bought a roast over the summer I felt like I won the lottery! Around April 8th a mask mandate was imposed. This was a very good and needed step but also quite problematic. Even our healthcare workers didn't have enough PPE. Healthcare workers were wearing garbage bags as PPE and reusing disposable masks for days. There were no masks to even buy if you were the general public. But yet, to get into a store we had to have a face covering. So, myself and anyone else with a sewing machine got to work. I dragged my sewing machine out of its 8 year slumber in the closet and found my supply bin. Never before has my craft hoarding been useful. There were NO craft stores open to get supplies because they were seen as "non essential". Thanks to my buying fabrics over the years "just because they were pretty" I had supplies. I found pipe cleaners for nose pieces. I sourced elastic from a crafty friend. I found a pattern I liked and began sewing in earnest almost every night for a while. I was giving them away to all my family and friends and people who needed them. I felt like it was something real I could do to keep them safe. I shipped masks all over the US. I did porch drop offs. I had people pick up off my porch as we waved at each other though my glass door. My first masks were rough and awkward, but they worked. Finally the craft stores opened in the summer and I got a bunch more fabric and better nose pieces and such. I will never be without these supplies again. To date I think I've made about 300 masks. Compared to my friends who did it as a business that's just a drop in the bucket, but I'm proud of that number. Every mask has potentially helped someone stay healthy.
Summer of 2020 was pretty good. Numbers were going down so the utter sense of dread and impending doom was fading. We thought this might be over by September. We spent days at the beach with one of our good friends. We went to parks and played and had playdates with one family we were close with. Since we could go outside it opened up a lot more adventures for me and the kids. I would have a friend over occasionally for a 8 foot away front yard chat date. We learned to slow down our life pace and enjoy just being instead of living the crazy pace we had pre Covid. We stayed safe. Our bubble was small. But we enjoyed our summer as best we could. Grocery stores started to look normal again, and one day I found hand sanitizer on a store shelf! Around July we decided to homeschool the kids for the 2020 - 2021 school year. Check out previous blog posts on that. Cases were not going down fast enough and things were not looking as good as we hoped. In the Fall, numbers started to rise as predicted, but this time we were ready. We already had a stockpile of food. I always have about a month of food on hand now in case we have to shelter in place and not leave the house. I'm not getting stuck like that ever again. Due to a death in the family, I had to fly to Vegas in the beginning of November. I cant explain to you how much I didn't want to do that. Thankfully, the other woman in my row flying out there was just as freaked out as I was so our space was nice and wiped down and she kept her mask on. I have always loved meeting new people and being in a crowd. Being in the airport though, that was the first time I had been around any crowd of people in 8 months. I was freaked. The trip was 100% worth it, bit it was also very, very stressful. So where am I now in life? Well, I'm homeschooling the kids and hoping I can send them back to school next year. Some days are easy, some days aren't. I am glad I decided to homeschool them though because they would have been back to school, back home a lot. I try to give myself and them a lot of grace every day. I cook a lot because we don't order out much and we don't eat in restaurants. I wear fuzzy pants every day and have no idea where my bras have gone. Lockdown life is second nature now. Masks and hand sanitizer live in my car. I still have insomnia, but I have this thing called Cove that is helping with that. 2020 was very different depending on where you were in the world, or even the US. I want to make this a space where you can share because we all have been though it. I know we are all feeling the anniversary coming. We need to talk about it. What is your 2020 story? I would love to hear it.
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AuthorI'm so tired. The children are so not tired. |