‘No going back’ in Elk
No going back
The adage, “There’s no going back” is a sentiment that has been presented to me in a couple of forms this week. Our Saturday night movie was Return of the King — the third in the Lord of the Rings series.
Along with Samwise Gamgee, I was troubled that Frodo Baggins could not find contentment in his old life in the Shire after saving Middle Earth. My family often pokes fun at me for being overly sentimental, and they are right, especially when it comes to place. I like having an intimate relationship with my places in the world, meaning I like to know the stories that form, build and ultimately change a place.
The other instance that came to me was in a New Yorker article by Evan Kindley. According to this article, apparently “Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf, was a popular quarantine book this year. Set on a single June day in London, 1923, five years after the Spanish Influenza pandemic and the end of WWI. The simple errand of buying flowers for a dinner party, as the main character Clarissa Dalloway is doing, became a symbol for us.
“At a time when our most ordinary acts — shopping, taking a walk — have come to seem momentous, a matter of life or death, Clarissa’s vision of everyday shopping as a high-stakes adventure resonates in a peculiar way. We are all Mrs. Dalloway now,” Kindley wrote. Clarissa is witnessing a change in her London that is parallel to our communities and there will be no going back. We are changed. What I take comfort in is the fact that this pandemic is ubiquitous — none of us have escaped its effects — and it is up to us how we choose to absorb and adapt to these changes.
As I reflect on 2020, I don’t want to go back, but I may be a little sentimental about it as we move into 2021. Early on in the pandemic, I felt a deep connection to my grandparents and their World War II stories — the premise of these stories was always a pulling-together and making a lot of a little. I had little epiphanies about them as I navigated my own “wartime” conditions.
“Oh, no wonder Grandma always had her pantry stocked and Grandpa always had a full tank of gas in the car.”
Later on in the pandemic, I was cleaning out a drawer ( lots of time to organize) and I came across a note that went to a brooch my grandmother wore on the lapel of her coat when she was dressing up. The note was from her mother, Alma, who was giving it to her as a thank you for taking care of her when she was sick.
Alma went on to explain that the brooch had been given to her by her husband (my grandmother’s father) as a sort of marker of their family surviving the Spanish Influenza. This pandemic will mark us and our place — while “there’s no going back” to the world before the pandemic, the worries, fears, sadnesses and hopes of this time will be our greatest teachers, and their traces will be left for our children and grandchildren to learn from as well.