A few weeks ago, as Omicron reared it’s ugly spike, I decided to start going through the archive of photos I took during quarantine to see if I could possibly partially recapture what the rhythms of a life mostly lived in the confinement of a one bedroom apartment looked like before we mostly and necessarily forget what being in quarantine actually felt like. A lot of things happened that aren’t pictured, like my in-home mixology events, the YouTube cooking show I started with my Dad and the time I drank too much and tried to cut my own hair in the bathtub. Substack has decided I can only post so many pictures, and SM, my friend WA and the stylist who tried to fix it are the only people who ever saw the haircut that resulted, and I’d like to keep it that way…
Our first loaf of Covid focaccia is not pictured, but we certainly made one. This is a casserole I made based on a friend’s Grandma’s recipe. She enjoyed the photo very much!
The first Spring flowers hit way differently in 2020. It was cognitively dissonant, but still a big improvement.
I had started taking a lot of pictures of our food. and one of my photos actually made the SnowFloss Kraut Facebook page. This shutterbug tendency would lead to starting a card business with my very talented Aunt.
We took to hiding a paper sheep around the apartment.
SM continued to make art from what was (and wasn’t) readily available.
I had been writing poetry again, but not painting it on walls until we stumbled upon a pro-BLM live art protest happening on the boarded up windows of The Center On Halsted
Mail became a thing again.
I created but never ordered this t-shirt:
I made this turtle prop for my Zoom theater group’s production of “Arcadia .” It was our second production after “King Lear.”
We survived the collapse of American Democracy for the first of two times, although both would prove a close call.
We decorated for our very first Covid Christmas. Yay! The decorations were still up just in time for the Capitol riot!
We continued to prioritize healthy eating into the New Year.
On the other hand, my level of stress in the aftermath of January 6th got me out there taking long walks almost daily. Now, I’d walked nine miles for bagels early on in the pandemic, but the more frequent walking was a balm to my sanity.
And then all of a sudden, I was double-vaxxed and on a City bus, on my way to the first Green City Market, unafraid of being in a crowd for the first time since March 2020. Hey, nothing lasts forever, right? And happily, it wasn’t clear, at the start of the interregnum just how true that actually would prove to be.
The waning of my attention to my phone battery over time is its own unintentional metaphor…
Fun times!
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