A year later after the world shut down

A year ago remains pretty vivid in my mind. It's hard to believe a year has gone by, but a year ago today was the last day of normalcy for me. Well, let me back up a bit. The day before today a year ago, the school district my kids go to determined that the kids would be going virtual. The kids basically took a lot of stuff home with them on Friday. If I look back, I could probably read the emails. I remember I had found a guitar on Marketplace and had gone to pick it up. I remember hearing people joking in the distance about the world shutting down. I notified the President of the company I work at about the schools going virtual as this would be a sign that our company would also be making plans to go virtual as well. Friday I basically spent the time cleaning out the refrigerator and freezer at work. I remember co-workers going out and looking for toilet paper. I had recently scored a four pack of Clorox wipes for the office. Little did I know that these would be the very items that would be so hard to find in the coming months. After work, there was a fundraiser at the place I take dance classes and that was the last "normal" thing I did before everything shut down. It was a really fun dance class with lots of energy. I remember driving home after that class and feeling like life as I had known it was about to change. I remember feeling like this was an out of body experience. Surely, I was dreaming. Maybe I would wake up from this at any moment and it would have been a horrible nightmare. Sadly, no this all was really happening. I remember when I first heard about the Coronavirus. My husband he is way more tuned into the news told me about some virus that was in China. He told me he thought we should purchase a deep freezer and buy some extra food just in case. He was always the worrier, but he is always planning ahead. I didn't really think much of anything he said, but figured we could always use extra freezer space. We ended up going to Best Buy to buy one and had it delivered to the house. The boys ended up doing virtual schooling for the remainder of the school year. They had Zooms. Teachers basically had to pivot, and like they always do, they pivoted to the best of their ability. The schools scheduled appointments for parents to pick up the remainder of the belongings. Carl and I both ended up working remotely and haven't returned to the office yet. We started to establish a new normal. We stayed home mainly. I switched to virtual workout classes. I had online chats with girlfriends and game nights with friends and family all virtually. We had very brief visits with grandparents masked up. We watched the news. We read the headlines. We thought about all of the health care workers on the frontlines of what seemed like a literal war zone, a war against Covid. We thought about the people we knew and loved. It seems like the oddest thing in the world, wanting to see people and be in the room with them could actually cause their demise from some invisible threat that you might not even know that you had. Going to the grocery store also felt surreal and strange. People lined up their carts outside. This was the beginning of the fighting. Fighting for a pack of toilet paper, masked up, and every person you came across the path of might be carrying a deadly virus. You couldn't tell who might be infected. This feels like some sort of weird Zombie movie, but no this was really happening. Just writing this out feels like some strange science fiction movie. Warmer weather brought more opportunities to be outside. We were able to socially do things. I went to some outdoor dance classes. I saw some friends periodically from time to time outside for quick chats. We saw some out of town family for one socially distanced outdoor visit. We went to dinner one time and ate outside at a Red Robin. I had dinner with a friend one time and we ate outside. No visits to the neighborhood pool, no vacation this year. I take that back, we took one trip to West Baden with the kids. We used the outdoor pool, which we basically had to ourselves. We had to choose what the kids should do for schooling. Their school system offered virtual and in-person. For middle and high school kids, they would have to go hybrid because the number of kids in the upper grades could not have the kids be socially distanced. We ended up sending the boys. Our middle schooler wanted to go in-person. Our youngest is in his last year of elementary and we decided to send him as well so he could have as normal of an educational experience for his last year of elementary. Now a year later there are several vaccines out. They started vaccinations with healthcare workers in December. The grandparents have all been fully vaccinated, which is a huge relief for us. We can now feel a little safer around them especially since the boys are in school. We now wait our turn to be considered eligible as supply ramps up. This has been the strangest year. It has been a year full of gratitude. I know we are extremely lucky that we were able to work from home, be safe, and not have our income impacted. Our families were able to stay safe through this pandemic. I know that for over half a million families in the US, this is not their story.