By Ellen Marsden
We’ve coped with COVID-19 for over a year now. During that time, we’ve not only reached out for help and support, but, unknowingly, reached back to earlier times.
We’ve adopted many of the ways our grandparents lived and worked. The pandemic was like a time machine to the early 20th century.
The milkman was a common and necessary occupation back then, and local grocers had delivery boys taking goods right to your home. We’ve turned to Amazon and Instacart for the same services.
Doctors made house calls with their little black valises and stethoscopes around their necks. Remember? The pandemic gave us the equivalent of a house call with physicians adopting telemed services to care for their patients.
With nowhere to go and feeling trapped in our homes day after day after day, many of us spent more time outside walking and biking in our neighborhoods, enjoying the outdoors.
We waved and smiled at people we did not know, feeling a kinship just because we were all in this together. We each had a story to tell, eager to share, trading information about what we were going through, where we could buy paper towels, shaking our heads in disbelief that this pandemic was really happening.
Maybe these interactions didn’t foster deep and lasting friendships, but they fostered community. Familiarity. Like in days gone by, next-door and across the street strangers were now acquaintances.
COVID interfered with getting all the prepared foods and takeout you were used to. And restaurants, of course, were out of reach. More people started making food from scratch.
Flour, yeast, and sugar were out of stock in the early months of the pandemic because there’s nothing like warm homemade cookies or fresh-baked bread for comfort.
Good smells emanating from the kitchen came from the ovens and stovetops, instead of the microwave.
Families were sitting down to dinner together, night after night. There was way less working late, or rushing off to band or athletic practice, everyone busy, busy, busy.
Sure, we spent a lot of time online, looking for diversions, but many of us went back to picking up a craft we’d long abandoned or getting out the sewing machine. We honed our DIY skills and made our own masks.
To while away time there was so much of, we played board and card games and did jigsaw puzzles as a family.
It was the 1930s again. Families that couldn’t go to the movies, gathered around their TV sets like families did decades earlier around their radios to listen to Fibber McGee and Molly, Charlie McCarthy, and The Shadow.
We tuned in to the news more than we had in decades, and talked about current events rather than our busy schedules, who had to be where and when.
Zoom became the back fence, the front porch, the annual Thanksgiving get together at grandma’s.
The media by which we communicate with one another have changed over the years, but the message that we might have been partially deaf to pre-COVID is everlasting. Connection is nourishing to the soul. We came to a more enlightened understanding of what was really important.
As the pandemic taxed our patience and heightened our fears, it boosted our creativity, resourcefulness, and appreciation of the outdoors and each other.
People often long for the good old days. COVID times will not be among them. But I hope there are some good and lasting positive takeaways that come out of this – let’s hope – once in a lifetime experience.
Thanks for listening. Nice chatting with you.