What a time to be alive man, just what a trip. The height of the pandemic, you know those first like really scary few months. Feel like they happened, I don’t know this past spring or maybe like five or six years ago at the same time.
I’m an empath and an extremely sensitive one and at that time the fear from people was just palpable. My friends who had little kids were scared, my grandparents were scared and I really felt that fear for them too. I wasn’t so much worried about myself.
I lived in the middle of nowhere and spent most of my free time hiking in the woods with my dogs. We were surrounded by thousands of acres in National Forest.
So I gotta say not a whole lot changed in my world and as an introvert you know I actually valued that time where I didn’t have to go to parties or happy hours or giant work events with hundreds of people.
I did live thousands of miles from my grandparents and it was a really helpless feeling that I couldn’t use my free pass that I got from work for being an essential worker to bring their them groceries or stop by and wave to them for my car.
I was really impressed with how well we all adapted to it though. I mean even my 90 year old grandpa and 87 year old grandma figured out how to navigate Zoom and I spent more time checking in with all my extended family and aunts and uncles and cousins across the globe than we really had in some time. And then you know at home in the mountains my then fiance and I spent afternoons sitting in a large circle with two other couples in one of our driveways, we later called them our quarantine, to have a beer and just talk about how nuts our reality was and how what we thought was going to be a couple weeks of a shutdown had now lasted months.
My family doesn’t really celebrate a lot of traditional holidays because we’re not Christian but my mom and dad were really longing for some connection so in mid December of 2020.
We met at a really snowy trailhead near Copper Mountain. We sat in camp chairs across the parking lot from each other and had some cocoa and we talked until we were absolutely freezing.
I remember when the vaccine first came available and because of my professional role I was one of the first groups to receive it.
I really felt a tremendous amount of guilt because my parents who were in their 60s even though they’re super healthy they weren’t eligible yet.
The greatest moment that came out of that time was when my grandparents and my parents were vaccinated. I remember as soon as we could carve out time in our schedules and could make it across I-70 and all the snowy passes in between us. We did and I hugged my parents for a really long time. Life wasn’t normal by any means but that moment really meant the world to me.
