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Top Comments: Three Years Since The Before Times Edition [1]

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Date: 2023-03-13

Photo taken at a local grocery store on March 7th 2020. I'm STILL grateful for plentiful toilet paper three years later!

While it has a host of terrible issues, one thing I do like about Meta/Facebook is its Memories feature. Each day it offers me a look at things I’ve posted on that date in past years. Sometimes it’s an image of my life and the people in it I’d forgotten I had, other times it’s a status update and I have NO idea what it meant.

This past week or so, most of what I’ve seen are all memories from three years ago. The week marking the end of the Before Times and the beginning of The Pandemic. As I mentioned in my March 1, 2021 diary Top Comments: One Year Ago Edition and which facebook showed me last week, Mr. Brillig and I went out to dinner on March 6th 2020. It was the last time we ate inside a restaurant for a very long time. It also was the night I realized I should get to the grocery store and stock up on a few things.

Hahaha, as you can see from my cover photo, I was late to the hoarding party and had to scrounge for what I could find. I saw a picture of hand sanitizer in my cart… I’d stalked the person stocking the shelf for a long time when I saw she had a box of bottles to put on the empty shelf. I took one (NOT the maximum of two!) and guarded it carefully so no one would steal it from my cart.

My memories this weekend, March 10-12, were full of sadness. An official state of emergency was announced. K1’s college shut down, and they lost the last semester of Senior year (K1 wouldn’t set foot on campus again as a graduate student until January 2021 and wouldn’t take an in-person class until September of that year). K2’s soccer club cancelled all practices and games, and that’s when it became Real to him. His school closed on March 13 for a ‘deep cleaning’, with everyone thinking they’d be back in a few weeks. Nope.

As I look at these images and commentary I shared three years ago, two things struck me: first, how Very Long Ago it feels, a different lifetime ago; and second, how it also feels immediate and all of the fear, grief, and anxiousness of those early weeks comes rushing back in full force. I remember how scared I was that we wouldn’t have what we needed (we were fine, even if K2 didn’t always have the food he wanted when he wanted it, he always had food!).

I know so many people who have “moved on”, for whom The Pandemic is thought of in past tense, or at most an annoyance when they get sick. “It’s inevitable, everyone will get it”. And I also know people who live as if it’s April 2020, because they or someone they love is especially vulnerable were they to become infected. And I know many more, myself included, who are trying their best to balance safety and a need for what feels like normalcy. I wrote on March 22 2021 that I’d hit a Pandemic Wall. I never thought that two years later, I’d still think of Covid-19 every single day even as the government moves towards a May 11th ending of the state of emergency.

How are you doing, as we enter our fourth year of the After Times? Are you stocking up on your free covid tests before May 11th? Do you have a stash of masks in your car or near the door for when you go out, or are you done with masks? Do you still do any of the activities or hobbies you picked up during the first year? Let’s talk in the comments, after tonight’s Tops!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/13/2157907/-Top-Comments-Three-Years-Since-The-Before-Times-Edition

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