I, as an introvert, found the idea of two weeks of not going anywhere quite appealing. When the government put the whole country in lockdown I was rather excited. All of my friends were bored and done after the first week, and really, I just didn’t understand. As a homeschooler (and in one of those weird homeschooler families that actually didn’t do much outside the house) I didn’t have to move online for school. I got to just be at home, do my normal school, and never had to think, “Oh yeah, we have to go to such-and-such place today.” As an added bonus, my (adored) aunt had to stay in our basement the whole time because she couldn’t get back to her home in China after the whole country shut down while she was traveling for Chinese New Year. It was fun having her there for so long. She retaught me how to knit, and I would go down to sit and knit with her while we watched things or just talked. It was one of my favorite parts of the year.

But not going anywhere did (eventually) affect me, because, for all of you reading this in a hundred years, outside interactions are important. I was in a big house, with seven other people, so there were people around if I needed a hug, and there were places to escape to when my siblings got too noisy. But I started to miss outside interactions, though I didn’t really realize it till we started going back to church a while later. Even walking into a big sanctuary that only had twenty other people in it, I could feel the difference between worshiping separately and worshiping together. I think Covid has made me actually appreciate the social interactions that before I had just taken for granted.

We spent a lot of time at the pool that summer. It was easy to forget everything happening while I was there, because I was used to there not being many people there, so spending the afternoon with the pool completely to ourselves felt normal. For a little while, I could just relax under the water, floating, in the calm silence. I loved to just lay there, limp and peaceful for as long as I could hold my breath, then stick my head up for a breath of air and go back down. The quiet was my favorite part. With four younger siblings that’s a bit of a commodity.

When I was cold I would swim around fast to warm up, or play games with my siblings. Often, when I was done drifting, I would swim down as fast as I could, then push myself off the bottom to

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out of the water.