Living in an Ice-Age

Reflections on five years since life didn't hardly change at all

TW: CSA

We are driving home yesterday when I realize the date, March 16.

In the days immediately following lockdown, I read a piece from Andy Crouch that seems no longer available online. In my memory, Crouch likened these days as the blizzard preceding the winter preceding the ice age. To live in those early days as though this was just a blip on our screen, a snow-day, an opportunity to stock up on TP and water bottles was short-sighted, he said. We must prepare for the long term effects.

I’m not sure any of us knew exactly what the long term effects would be.

I say to Nate as we drive that I know too many people who don’t seem to be affected much by the pandemic still. They were also the ones who eschewed masks and social distancing, the vaccine when it became available. I’m not proud of it, but there was one day when the distancing had gone on a year, when I felt so alone and isolated, that I thought to myself, “They’ll pay for this, this lack of care, this indifference to neighbor.” I am too close to too many of these people, though, to have lingered there with my thoughts. I knew them to be loving people then and know them to be loving people still. Even if our idea of what is loving may differ, then as now.

But it is the ones who did mask, who did distance, and who did stand in line for the vaccine a year later who seem to be living in the ice-age still, myself included.

Nate says something like that it is not a before and after, and I interject, but like a parallel universe, like a different timeline opened up and that’s the one we’re living in. Both of us know that’s not true but maybe it helps to think that there are a variation of ourselves living something like normal lives somewhere.

But what is normal? And I think about this later as we lay on the couch on our mid-afternoon Sunday, watching a film about either climate change or, alternatively, post-apocalyptic, I say to Nate to get him to watch it too. It is about a mother who births a baby in the midst of a 1000 year flood. After eight months, she and the baby finally make it to a commune on a Scottish island where the community eats food they have grown and puts flowers in vases and where the children laugh and everyone seems happy. The radio is not allowed to play, news from the world is forbidden. The woman, the mother, cannot stay. She packs her baby back into his sling and when she is sure the waters have receded, she treks back to London, to their flooded home, to begin rebuilding. She couldn’t stay where they chose to ignore not the flood, but the effects of the flood, the losses they’d all suffered, the ways the world had irrevocably changed.

I didn’t choose the film on purpose yesterday, but I’m still thinking about it today.

On March 13, 2020, Nate and I were preparing to put our house on the market, we had been talking with a couple moving to Portland, Maine, Nate had finished his final interview of five with a company based there, and been offered a job. We were packing boxes, dreaming of living in a place we’d long loved and feeling like we were finally on the road to where we wanted to be. The first five years of our marriage had been one trauma after another—three cross-country moves, a dozen pregnancy losses, including an ectopic one that kept me in the hospital for a week, multiple instances of violence, including my witnessing a close range shooting of a police officer, multiple job losses or changes, church dysfunction that trickled out pain that wouldn’t quit, and more I can’t even mention here. We were ready for a fresh start in a fresh place.

On March 16, 2020, the job offer was revoked.