The day ‘normal’ went away
A year after county’s stay-home order, residents reflect on lead-up to lockdown
Life in Houston as we knew it ended March 24, 2020, the day Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo issued a stay-home order, which closed most businesses and directed 4.7 million residents to avoid unnecessary contact with others.
For many, it was the first major disruption to daily routines, as the pandemic had just reached Texas. Along with restrictions on bars and restaurants a week earlier, the order signaled the beginning of a year of COVID-19 restrictions in Texas that spanned three major surges of the virus and more than 46,000 deaths.
One year later, Houston Chronicle reporters asked 10 residents to reflect on their final days of normalcy
before their lives were upended by the pandemic. They include a doctor, nursing home resident, teacher, cheerleader and firefighter. Here’s what they said.
The cheerleader
For Texas Southern University cheerleader Trinity Brooks, her last normal day was scrambling to prepare for a game that never happened.
In early March, the 19-year old junior, now a cheer captain, was headed to her first Southwestern Athletic Conference Tournament to cheer on the TSU men’s basketball team. With the bus leaving for Alabama at 4 a.m., her squad spent the day packing and rushing to finish their hair, she said.
Hours before they were scheduled to leave, the tournament was canceled, and the realness of the pandemic suddenly set in.
“It hit like a hurricane,” Brooks said. “And boom. Everything was changed.”
Soon after, TSU students were required to move out of their dorm rooms, dispersing her teammates around the country for months, and cheer for the fall was nixed, too.
The family
Before the shutdowns, the Gee family spent spring break at a Galveston beach house.
Three elementary school-aged kids played in the sand while their parents’ phones buzzed with texts from friends sharing nuggets from medical journals and Taiwanese news reports. It was just chatter, but Jennifer and Jason Gee stocked up on canned goods and toilet paper before Costco sold out.
When officials canceled the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, Jennifer realized, “Whoa, this is real.”
Later that month, Jason’s father died in a car crash, delivering the family some perspective: There is more to life than work. Jason’s constant work travel and Jennifer’s social calendar were replaced with games, movie nights and backyard camping.
In November, Jacob began a new job in Houston, and they moved in with his mother. COVID swept through the family, triggering seven weeks of quarantine with masks, no hugs and child care juggled by sick parents. It also took his mother’s life.
The Gees reached for silver linings, teaching their kids gratitude and resilience. Still, Jason said, “We’re just ready for this to be over.”
—Anna Bauman
The ‘Bus Lady’
Janis Scott remembers a glitzy awards event last year for the Black Student Association at Rice University, her alma mater.
It was one of her last, best excuses to wear fancy clothes. Now, she jokes, she needs only pajamas.
“It was a nice event, got to play dress-up, and then the world came crashing down,” Scott said. “That was one of my memories — well, OK, let’s see how many of these we can get in before we shut down.”
She has tried to stay active, seeking out seminars and volunteering even as COVID-19 made life more isolated. Known as the “Bus Lady of Houston” for her prolific knowledge of the public transit system, she would go to Metro meetings and the HoustonGalveston Area Council.
Scott received her first dose of the vaccine about three weeks ago. She said she hopes the region can get back to normal soon, although 2021 has not offered much of a respite so far.
“I hope so, oh dear God,” she said. “Because this is literally driving us mentally crazy.”
—Dylan McGuinness
The councilman
Jeffrey Boney attended Mardi Gras in New Orleans at the end of February, after COVID had reached the U.S. Masks soon would become a part of daily life, but at the balls and parades, they were nowhere to be found.
“People were discussing the virus and possible social distancing, but it was very, very early in the conversation,” said Boney, 46. “There was no mass hysteria or thought that this thing was going to be as vicious and widespread as it had become.”
Boney, a Missouri City councilman, said going to Mardi Gras was on his bucket list. He attended the festivities alongside his fraternity brothers and friends.
“It’s definitely one of the highlight moments of my life,” he said.
Boney contracted COVID-19 in March and spent days in the hospital fighting the illness. He eventually recovered.
—Brooke Lewis
The paramedic
For Houston Fire Department paramedic Travis Tracy and his nurse wife, Caitlin, normal life ended in Dallas. They had traveled to North Texas to visit friends who recently had a baby.
That is when Tracy heard the news that Mayor Sylvester Turner had canceled the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
Back at work, Tracy began to have to wear much more protective gear than in the past and instructions changed almost daily, as the department’s medical experts learned more about the disease. He stopped being able to intubate critically ill patients or perform other procedures that doctors worried could spread the coronavirus.
The disease caught up with both of them last June, though they have recovered.
A year after the pandemic first hit Houston, he is newly vaccinated. Life is not about to get back to normal, however. The couple have a baby on the way later this month, their second.
“We’re going to have to be careful for a little while,” he said.
—St. John Barned-Smith
The store owners
Twice in recent years, vehicles have crashed into Chocolate Passion in Conroe. The mishaps gave owners Terry and Zulay Quinn the opportunity to remodel and expand their shop, which sells chocolate as well as sandwiches and coffee.
Then came the pandemic.
“As it turns out, the two accidents did us a favor,” Terry Quinn said. “I can’t think of any favors that COVID’s done us.”
Before the pandemic, Quinn said the shop did not offer sales through any delivery services and hosted about three events — quinceañeras and little weddings — a month in a room that can hold some 80 people. That changed. The number of events was reduced to a handful in the last year, Quinn said, and now they sell through DoorDash.
Before, customers dropped by the shop and shared a moment. Now, they enter and point to the chocolate they want, which a worker pulls out and passes to them.
“What do we miss the most?” Quinn said. “I guess it would be some human interaction.”
—Alejandro Serrano
The teacher
Like many Houston-area teachers, Elizabeth Scott had two things on her mind last March: spring break and Texas’ annual standardized tests, known as STAAR.
Scott, a fifth-grade language arts and Spanish teacher at Angleton ISD’s Westside Elementary School, spent the first two days of the break decorating her classroom with homemade crafts aimed at inspiring test-takers with messages such as “Believe in yourself!”
“After so many years of the STAAR test, you finally feel like you have it down,” Scott said.
Her calm, however, soon turned to worry. Scott, who has asthma, fretted about her husband bringing back COVID-19 from a father-son ski trip. She also grew concerned about her 60 students missing in-person classes.
“The most important part of being a teacher is the connections you make with the students,” said Scott, who now teaches for Harmony Public Schools in Houston. “Yes, the student might tell you they love you through the screen, but it’s not the same.”
—Jacob Carpenter
The walker
On March 12, María Eugenia González was enjoying what she used to call “the best moments of my days”; the morning walks taking her two children to Barbara Bush Elementary School, greeting neighbors here and there. Afterward, she would stroll home, planning the rest of her day taking care of her 83-year-old mother, and, perhaps, returning later to the school to volunteer in the vegetable garden.
“That walk was my time of complete freedom, just me alone with myself enjoying the greenery and thinking about my day, about life,” she said.
That freedom vanished that Thursday when González learned that the school was closed due to the pandemic. Suddenly, she recalled, the house became an elementary school and Dad’s office. It felt very crowded very quickly.
“There is no respite; you begin to feel the tension, and I started to escape to the garden. I turned the garden into my old freedom walks and became obsessed with saving a dying rose bush,” González said. The bush gave her a few little roses, then died, the victim of an anthill at its base.
She considers it a metaphor for the virus that has taken so many lives despite relentless efforts from first responders and people trying to survive.
“Today, the wisdom of what we live remains,” she said. “Prevention with hygienic habits, peace to the souls that left us during these unprecedented times, faith in science and the goodwill of humanity.”
—Olivia P. Tallet
The anesthesiologist
Jessica Rochkind remembers a time not too long ago when a labor and delivery hospital room at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston was not a mostly solitary, lonely space requiring layers of personal protective equipment.
The pediatric anesthesiologist fondly recalls parents and grandparents floating in and out to see the newborns and children scurrying around the room. Her patients — expectant and new mothers — were, of course, unmasked.
Shortly before the pandemic hit the U.S., Rochkind listened to an interview with an intensive care anesthesiologist in Italy, who described people dying all around or struggling for oxygen on ventilators. Just imagining that setting upset Rochkind, who values her patients having a supportive community in the room with them. It soon would become her everyday reality: masks, intense hygienic protocols and isolated patients in hospital rooms.
“We are used to seeing a lot of family in the hospital,” Rochkind said. “And family is so important, not just for comfort, but they also really help a patient manage their care.”
—Nick Powell
The senior
The last normal activity 92year-old Don Venker remembers is parking his car.
He and his wife, Rena Beth, had left their assisted living facility to visit their daughter for dinner. It was one of their regular outings, along with shopping, church and banking. Suddenly, they were not supposed to leave the community where they lived near NRG Park, called Holly Hall.
“We just never went out again,” he said.
The coronavirus was spreading through the Houston area, and residents in long-term care facilities were especially vulnerable. The Venkers could neither play bingo nor eat in the dining room with friends. They could not even fill the bird feeder outside their window.
They adapted, relying on deliveries from Amazon, care from staff and talks with their doctor and family on the phone. They watched political news on TV.
“I had no idea it would take this long,” Venker said. “And it’s going to roll into more than a year, half a million people dead. We weren’t thinking like that at all.”
—Emily Foxhall