Even at the time, I always wondered what the children would remember of those early years of Covid. They didn’t understand at the time what was going on, but neither did we. We faced days of unknown, not knowing what to do, how to do it, what would happen next, or even what would unfold in the next hour.
The children were all at home, not understanding why everyone wore masks, nor why they couldn’t go to school or anywhere else. The big kids did elementary home school out of workbooks and read every book in sight.
Two of our grandchildren were twins, only three years old. We would stop by and wave through the window. They didn’t understand why we didn’t come in anymore.
What would the children remember from these times? What would we?
My days were filled with stitching surgical caps and masks from scraps of fabric left over from a thousand previous projects, not enough material to make much of anything, until now. Our physician daughter shipped these to nurses and doctors all over the States. Every couple days, I would deliver to my daughter’s doorstep, more surgical caps from whimsical printed fabric, a loaf or two of bread, cinnamon rolls, and usually, a couple dozen cookies, often delivered in foil-lined shoe boxes.
We bought flour in those days in fifty-pound bags from Costco, purchased during the early hours, when they allowed masked “older people,” to enter the store. I could not lift the bags, but they occupied a corner of our pantry, from which I scooped out flour, almost every day. In the course of a little more than a year, I went through five 50-pound bags of bread flour.
Baking and sewing protective gear for nurses and doctors provided me not just something to do, but something I could do, making good things in response to the evening news when daily statistics would be announced. Faceless numbers scrolled in the news like a daily score. But sometimes a name or face would be announced when someone was famous. Even they were vulnerable.
Sometimes we received a sudden text or call about a family member or friend whom we didn’t even know was sick or that sick. We prayed a lot in those days. Some squeaked through. Others passed silently, alone in hospital rooms or at home. Everyone was touched by it, days upon months. And God held us gently in His faithfulness. Even then.
We lived in the cross-section of lack and abundance. We stopped keeping track of each column.
In early March, very soon into the lockdown, my elderly mother-in-law, confined and quarantined in her facility, called one morning, panicked after watching the news. “They said this might last until June!” How little we realized.
There was hopeful talk of returning to normal. But we didn’t know when that would happen, nor what "normal" or even a new normal would look like. Surely we would make it through this. But all of us would be changed by it. Would the older children reminisce, “Remember when we went to school every day?”
The day before yesterday, one of those three-year-old twin grandsons – now eight years old-- thought out loud while we were riding in the car. Out of the blue, he recollected, “I loved the cinnamon bread you used to bring for us. It was so good.”
That is what he remembers from the Covid lockdown, the powerful fragrance of cinnamon and brown sugar swirled in a still warm loaf, left by their side door. I thought those days were just a blur in his little toddler brain, like a photograph out of focus. But love never is, even when we cannot pinpoint the aroma. What creates those memories? What triggers them?
Yesterday morning, I made him a loaf. It was on his kitchen table when he got off the bus from school, to keep that strong reality of being loved still warm.
Not too young to remember.
...in the days of famine
they have abundance.
Psalm 37. 19
