“I hope you’ve been writing all this down”

“I hope you’ve been writing all this down,” my mother said, some months ago. This was over the phone. I’d been amusing her by relating some fairly unremarkable event that passes for excitement in this stay-at-home time. As is so often true of a mother’s hopes, my mother’s dive-bombed into a disappointing truth. I hadn’t written down much at all.

At the same time, a partial record of my stay here in Michigan during the pandemic has accrued. Mainly photographic. But there are also notes on the wall calendar, journal entries, texts and emails. Vestiges of what has been an intense, anomalous, often somewhat tedious historical event lasting more than a year.

Now that the American population is being vaccinated, the strange, cooped-up phase of the pandemic will likely end. When my husband and I are fully vaccinated (I will reach this state in mid-April), we’ll begin doing more and moving about, resuming some of our former routines. In the resumption, we’ll find novelty. We won’t be going back, but we won’t be staying in the present mode, either. We’ll be pressing forward. Everyday life will partly revert from what it has been lately.

Perhaps it’s the relief of knowing I’ll soon get to see friends and family and go back to living in our cozy apartment building in the city that makes me want to put together a fuller, more orderly record of what I’ve experienced since March 2020, when Mr C and I left the city. So, I’m going to be publishing some post-dated entries here on my Celia blog. I’ve taken thousands of photographs in this time. Many are nature photographs, views of the sky, birds, or plants; views of the weather as seen from the house. Some are pictures that remind me of my state of mind or the activities that have filled the days. Precisely because we have been shut up with ourselves, this time has been special and arduous. Even a partial skeleton attests to the surprising vitality of the Big Interruption.

So, if you’re a subscriber, be prepared to receive what look like very old and incomplete blog entries. I have no idea how many or how few of these old pictures I will end up introducing, but most will consist of a picture and a title, with little or no text. Once posts have been published, I may go back and write more on some of them. I dream of doing that, but realistically I might not have the time.