79

So the Covid-19 lockdown happened and I found myself working from home, with my wife and kids in the house, and it was on the one hand a very strange, arguably historic/era-defining/watershed moment, but on the other hand it was ... familiar? I was in my own house, with my family, and as I've mentioned before, working from home was not new to me. In fact it was often an option I took advantage of specifically because one or all of the kids were home, too sick for school or off for a teacher workday or the like.

On top of the circumstantial similarities, it felt like I was someplace I had been before, on a visceral level. It felt like Snowmageddon: No school! Office closed! People freaking out about toilet paper! (Which - seriously? I lived through it and I still can hardly believe I typed that. The whole TP situation will probably merit it's own post down the road.)

One of the things I think I will always remember about those early days (but I'm recording it here nonetheless, just in case) is sitting on the loveseat in our front room, laptop on my knees, doing my job remotely, and frequently glancing out the window. As if I were going to see snow. Or something like it, some visible indicator that the very atmosphere outside my house had changed, become somehow hostile. In a sense, that was true, after all, except for the whole visible part. And that was the irony, because not only could I not see thunderheads or hurricane gusts or dumping rain or snow or hail, I saw beautiful clear blue skies more often than not. After so many years that it felt like forever where we went from brutal winters with mid-March snows straight into equally brutal summers with April heatwaves, 2020 offered up one of the most picture-perfect springs weather-wise. Sunshine and pleasant temperatures, weirdly commingled with pervasive dread due to the undetectable plague creeping everywhere. Bizarre.

Over time, the feeling of familiarity would fade, because even super-blizzards only shut the region down for a couple of weeks, not a couple of months. And of course when two feet of snow cover the ground, nobody denies that it's happening or downplays the dangers of driving through it. So the metaphor falls apart. But I do, even on day 79, find myself glancing out the window often. Now, though, it's because on some subconscious level I'm looking for a sign that it's safe, that it's over, that we can get back to normal. But I know I'm not going to see that, either.