What I Remember Most Post-pandemic

It isn’t what was in the news.

Camping in summer 2022, Lake Isabel, Colorado. Stars above the trees. Photo by author.

During the beginning of the pandemic things felt like they moved slowly. The numbers of infected were small and it was hard to comprehend the kind of exponential growth that was going to happen. At the time I worked at a library in Colorado. I was 5 weeks in to my new Dungeons and Dragons program for teens when things began to close down.

I remember they decided to remove the toys in the children’s area out of “an abundance of caution”. I was on edge about what was happening likely because I was in the U.S. Marines as a Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear Defense Specialist for five years. My training wasn’t focused on pandemics, but it was focused on minimizing contamination and understanding the things and actions that can cause spread.

Out of concern for our patrons, elderly and young, I wrote the director of the library and pleaded for them to shut down early and not wait for the health department to tell them what to do. It felt like everyone was dragging their feet.

At the time we were renting the basement in my mom and step-dad’s house. We had been living there together successfully since 2012, but this was going to test all of us. With varying political ideas, diets and spiritual points of view it became a pressure cooker, but we made it through…