More Than a Year

Greg’s birthday was Friday. As we celebrated at home, I realized that it had been exactly one year since we had dined inside a restaurant. We’re not foodies who dine out regularly; we tend to stick to quiet neighborhood places for special occasions and just as a change of pace. Even so, it was the first time in our adult lives that we went a whole year without eating in a restaurant.

In the early weeks of the pandemic, I felt anxiety about the enormous vagueness of it all: Would this go on for months? A year? More than a year? In the reports from Dr. Fauci and other experts, no timelines were ever given. How could there be, with no precedence and with so many unknown factors?

My anxiety subsided eventually as we settled into our routines, and it became easier to go day to day. Day after day. An entire week would go by quickly: Is it trash day already? Yet weeks would drag on with no markers to track time: Was Christmas only two months ago?

Like Greg’s birthday celebration, I am now coming up on many “one year since” events: the last Urban Sketchers outing, my last in-person yoga class, our last trip to Costco, my last walk around Green Lake, my last class inside a Gage classroom. At least now I have a marker to track time.

And the vagueness has been cleared: More than a year.

This was the first time I forgot to change the
date before I stamped! Literally losing track of time.