Written September 22, 2020:
I’ve seen a lot of memes about the year 2020, most of which make me laugh and cry equally, which is, I suppose, the point of a meme: to bring the stark reality of life into a humorous light that can only be appreciated while directly experiencing its horrors. (or maybe I’m leaning too much on memes these days?)
The chaos of COVID-19 began, for us, in early March, where our year of travel (we thought) was just beginning. Last year, Sonja K Photography had a full wedding season back in Colorado, so Theo and I traveled back in almost every month of 2019, getting to see family and friends, and never really settling in 100% to our new Oregon home - also hence the lack of posts in 2019- we were BUSY. BUSY BUSY. But it was good busy- and I was looking forward to another full wedding season in 2020, starting off with a trip to San Diego for a photography workshop (alone! In a hotel room on the beach without a toddler! It was glorious!) and then a trip to Colorado for our first wedding of the year. Max officiated, and I photographed our friends’ wedding in Steamboat, which turned out to be Steamboat’s last wedding before their shutdown. We celebrated and stressed, and made our way back to Oregon where we began OUR shutdown.
After getting home, we waited with the world, and watched for signs of coronavirus after traveling, finally breathing a literal sigh of relief when the “two week” period was over and no one we knew got sick while we were there, including the three of us. We were glued to the news day and night, saddened by the horrifying deaths across the world, and scared for what this new reality was going to mean for our family. Fly Water gave the go-ahead for Max to work from home as soon as we returned, and I spent my days entertaining a 2 year old indoors, while Max worked from the kitchen table. It wasn’t NOT stressful, but after a few months, and once parks re-opened and the outside was available for us to use again, we fell into a rhythm which allowed life to go on as normally as possible.
The spring brought zoom birthday celebrations, zoom craft nights, zoom cocktail hours, bi-weekly hauls at the grocery store (alone), wiping down groceries with the precious clorox wipes my parents sent us home with, because there were none in the stores. Honestly, there still might not be any in the stores - I stopped looking after a while. Our local grocery store limited the amount of toilet paper each person could purchase, which thankfully left enough for everyone - but we heard ridiculous stories of people hoarding all sorts of things - toilet paper being one of the most hard to believe (but also not hard to believe at all). Summer crept in, bringing with it nightly neighborhood walks, daily toddler bike-rides around the neighborhood, and still no outside-world interactions other than online. I remember the first time we drove over to a friend’s house in mid-summer, and stood six feet apart out in the yard together, I cried. It has been hard to be separated from people, socializing only via our phones or computer screens, grateful for technology, but saddened by the limitations of physical touch and direct interaction - so quickly ripped away in early March.
My Sonja K Photography wedding season unravelled, wedding by wedding - some of my couples cancelling their big ceremony to instead sign papers at the courthouse, some hopefully delaying until later in the summer, only to eventually elope with their closest family nearby, some postponing completely until 2021 - it’s been a journey. As much as I was heartbroken for my couples, I was at least beginning to enjoy some time settling in and learning to be at home in Oregon. Theo and I were getting outside daily, we had started to do some serious family hikes on the weekends, discovering all the new (to us) places just up the road from where we now live, but then on September 8th the Rogue Valley suffered an extremely devastating fire that ripped through our community and destroyed significant parts of two of the neighboring towns to where we live. It was chaotic and scary; we were one street away from being evacuated. Many of our friends were in the direct path of the fire at one point or another, but luckily everyone we know evacuated safely. The fire wasn’t huge compared to a lot of wildfires (like the Cameron Peak fire, currently blanketing Fort Collins in smoke as I type this, or the East Troublesome Fire, which overnight became large enough to rival the Cameron Peak Fire), but with the dry conditions and the unusually strong winds, it burned more homes than any of the fires I can find listed recently - not to mention there didn’t really seem to be a reliable alert system in place - we found all of the up-to-date information we could bouncing between twitter and the local county facebook page, and trying to decipher the police radio - here’s a recent article about some of that. People are still without power and water, and the fire was just recently declared 100% contained, as rains fell on Southern Oregon. I think over 2300 homes were lost in the fire, and it is going to take years to rebuild. We couldn’t leave our house for two weeks, the smoke was so thick and toxic. In our valley the air quality was about 370 - apparently below 50 is “good” so we were definitely in the “hazardous - do not go outside even for a few minutes” category. With all the fires currently burning across the entire West Coast, there were places in Oregon and California with an air quality index of 700!! Some of the most toxic air ON THE PLANET EARTH!!! Now those air quality levels are being reported from the Colorado front range, sadly.
Through all of this past year I have been riding the rollercoaster of sadness, then outrage, then anger, then heartbreak, then hope, then defeat, then hope again - all while raising a tiny human, trying to remain calm on a daily basis in our tiny apartment space, trying to be strong for my family, trying to resuscitate my business, and trying to guess what the future holds for us, and I keep coming back to gratitude.
I could go on an on about all the bad things that are happening (and I just did) but at the end of the day I am still grateful. This year has taken away so many things I took for granted in the past, things I never thought twice about: clean air, traveling on a whim, dining out with friends, hugs - but it has thrown into perspective what really matters, and that pretty much boils down to our family & friends and our health (physical and mental) - everything else can boil away, and we would still be okay with these things.