The year of Corona

When I was thinking about writing this post, I was thinking about how there might not be much to say. Given Corona-2020, we have done a lot of staying home. But as I looked back over photos, trying to find some to include, I was reminded that it was actually quite a year. Lots of people have been describing 2020 as a year to forget, but for us it has, oddly enough, been a huge respite. I don't want to minimize the tumult and loss and worry for so many, but for someone like me, who is just a bit of an introvert and has been lucky enough to be mostly able to stay home, it's hard to underestimate the benefits of getting a societal green light to forego the obligations of school, work, travel, socializing, and being in touch. It's been many years since Mike and I have had a break of any sort, really, and while this isn't quite the break I suppose I had imagined, I don't really miss "normal" life all that much (although I feel like I'm not really supposed to say that).

Pre-pandemic, Eytan and Li'el waded into the waters of sleepovers with friends and went on an ice-skating field trip with school, we celebrated Oren's 5th birthday, and had a final hurrah at the JCC purim carnival before things shut down.

 

 

Springtime, when Mike and I were both teaching, and all the kids were supposed to be doing virtual school, was (like for many people) pretty much impossible, but it was so impossible that we at least realized it was impossible, and pretty quickly gave up on the kids doing very much of their schooling and prioritized getting outside. We were living in the city then, so this proved a little more complicated than we were used to, but it manifested in a bunch of ways:

We got to know and appreciate our city neighborhood (and kids got to do a week of "dance camp" at a place down the block)

   

 

 

We made it to some new (to us) parks in the area.

 

 

 

 

 

The kids spent more time not only butting heads, but also finding creative things to play. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eytan and Li'el got all sorts of autonomy, in a different way than they had had when they just ran into the big field behind our house but couldn't really travel on their own. Because there was less traffic on the streets and more people staying home, the kids started walking and riding bikes by themselves around an ever-larger radius, and they started meeting all sorts of neighbors (the fire chief two blocks over, the artist next door, the house with the free book library in front of it), "borrowing" the camera to make videos of their travels. There was lots of construction work to watch, and one crew let Eytan drive their backhoe for a bit. Eytan also started selling lemonade -- tested recipes and hawked customers on the street. He had spent years envisioning a business where he built and sold life-sized doll-houses, which was always a bit too complicated to pull off (although he still has plans), but this lemonade thing was actually highly successful.

  

With no yard to speak of, and getting kicked out of neighborhood school grounds and gardens due to corona restrictions, we ended up adopting a huge abandoned garden at our synagogue and spending much of spring, summer, and fall growing, eating, donating, and processing somewhere in the range of 800lbs of produce. While we've planted gardens most years, it was the first time since Washington state that we've really been able to keep it up all the way through the season. We are still eating kale, frozen pumpkin and peppers, canned tomatoes and salsa, chimichurri, and pesto from the garden, and have seeds saved for next year. There's also been more kitchen stuff going on -- fruit leather, soy milk, miso, and tempeh have been the newest attempts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 (we grew loofah gourds for the first time!)

 

(and built our sukkah out of corn stalks, sunflower stalks, and cut grass) 

In the fall, an unanticipated delay in in-person school for the kids led us to finding some other kinds of structured outdoor activities that have been nice to know about -- soccer, trail biking groups, an all-outdoor half-day forest kindergarten...

 

 

When the kids did get back to school, they were so happy to be back (and 3rd graders get to choose a string instrument!)...

 

Some of the long overdue changes in our lifestyle are most certainly pandemic-enabled. Some of it may just be the kids getting older, so it is becoming slowly easier to do things again. And perhaps a lot of it is because of work changes.  2020-2021 was going to be a sabbatical year for me from my job, and the plan was to go to a university in Costa Rica, but of course the travel part didn't happen. But I decided to keep at least the fall half of sabbatical and Mike, who had finished teaching his graduating class in June and didn't take on a new class due to our travel plans, decided to stay unemployed. So after the craziness of spring, we had a summer and fall without jobs. I was supposed to do research, and I did a tiny bit, but mostly we just spent the time managing a house full of kids alternating unpredictably between in-person and virtual school, and went back to making full nights of sleep the norm rather than the exception. Oh, and also we moved again, but this time we were lucky to find the magic combination of a house 15 minutes from the city, bus-able to school for kids, and also on 4 acres with a barn and zoning that works for livestock. In 2020 we also finally sold our house in Cashmere WA, so we bought this one in Shaler PA, and I guess 8 years after moving here, we're planning to stay put for a bit.

 

Given our corona-induced immersion in our city neighborhood, we all miss the old place a little bit. But mostly it is nice to have space to run-around in again, to see deer and wild turkeys over the hills, and fight with an icy snowy hilly driveway again. We didn't travel for Passover last spring, but did go see Saba, Safta, Great-George, and Rafi in NY in summer time (and they visited in early fall), and we got the opportunity to make Thanksgiving at home for the first time. Mike and I have dipped our toes back into "television" again. Before the kids were born, we had a netflix subscription that involved sending red envelopes with DVDs back and forth to Spokane, and while we've been so busy with work and kids the past 9 years, the world of technology has changed. I had heard about this from my students (and I guess everyone else who keeps up with these things), but it has been weird to discover that Netflix is now more like channel surfing on TV, with the same pitfalls where you re-emerge after half an hour to realize you haven't watched anything and don't really want to anymore.

Our goats have stayed at my campus, because they were doing well there, but we got chickens again and we're also hosting a herd of goats for winter from Allegheny Goatscape, an organization that uses goats for brush clearing in the Pittsburgh area. So, 11 goats and a miniature donkey are staying here from November to April, and when the weather is clear, we've been putting them out to graze/browse our pasture.

 

 

Noa has taken to narrating everything as if it were a story, less so by now, but for a while it was constant. If I said "Shall I sit in your bed or next to it when I tuck you in tonight?" Noa would say "Sit next to my bed... said the little rabbit to her mama, as she sat down in the airplane..." There's a rabbit named Bugala and a smurf called Shuwaka, and Mike and I were called Macaroni and Cheese, after her favorite meal. Meanwhile, Oren has become somewhat of a match for Eytan, staging purposeful bike collisions in the front yard, and Li'el has learned to read. The older kids and I have dipped toes into the Harry Potter series (having read them as an adult, it was hard to figure out what age they're suited to for kids) and the older kids have become quite computer literate in ways they never had access to before zoom-school. During the weeks they were in school in person, they got to ride the bus for the first time (since we live now neither too close nor too far from school for that), and discovered all sorts of pop radio. So time is flowing.

 

Li'el's 7th birthday in April was a zoom party with matza/ice cream cake, but by Eytan's 9th August birthday we managed to go biking with a few of his friends, and Noa's 4th (November) was back at home.

 

 

Everyone is now on winter break, and looking forward, I decided to go back to teaching in January, so as to save the rest of my sabbatical for a future year when travel is more possible again.  So we'll see if we can keep up this new life of some-degree-of-sanity even with my job added back in. I think the measure will be, when school gets canceled, is it a source of panic (ah! how do we manage childcare?) or a source of relief (we get to stay home together and take it slower!). We have been so lucky the past year, and hope to get to retain some pieces of 2020 as things presumably do some more changing, in 2021.

Wishing you a good new year.