A Pandemic Right to Self-Expression
My self-imposed deadline for submitting my Coronavirus Journal to the National Women’s History Museum project is fast approaching. I’ve collected 12,000 relevant words written between March of 2020 and April of 2021. In today’s post, I include an early entry from that collection that now seems both prophetic and naive. Despite the irrational opening, the heart of the piece still rings true. I post it here are an artifact, a reflection, a suggestion even.
April 16, 2020 (one month after COVID-19 shutdown)
So many people are asking for the date on the calendar when life will open up again.What a funny thought. I’ve been trying to figure out another way of communicating succinctly what that really means. It means rush hour traffic snarls, non-essential consumption, and school children on playgrounds once again. It means glutted airports and travelers buzzing around hotel concierge desks for tickets to shows and whale watching adventures and hot air balloon rides over the vineyards offering tastings once again. It means returning two books to the library that I still have in hand because suddenly due dates became irrelevant. It means delivering the bags in the garage to the Goodwill and renewing my relationship with my favorite thrift stores and spending the allowance I give myself on more stuff I can’t resist.
But wait. Life has opened up already. I see kids on their bikes on cool Thursday mornings riding with their fathers or mothers. I see teenagers on skateboards, feeling the sun on their shoulders as they fly down the hill that ends at the park down the street. I see gardeners whom I’ve never seen before in yards where I’ve never seen a person before. A neighbor walked across from three doors down and introduced himself to me while I was fixing the solar lights I had placed at the corner of the yard. “I’ve lived here since ’67. You can ask me anything you want to know about the neighborhood,” he said. And it took the pandemic for us to meet. I had been afraid as he walked toward me, this man whose political sign opposed ours in the County Supervisor election in March. Both our candidates would be in the run-off in November. Likely our signs would be on display again come Halloween, if we’re still having elections in this oligarchy. For now, we are more than we were before, neighbors who know each other’s names.
Who says we aren’t already more open. I for one am grateful for the full stop, for the requirement to reflect on what kind of world we want once we survive this strong suggestion by Mother Nature to take a second look at what it means to be human.
Written, recorded or filmed expressions of women’s experiences are still being accepted by the National Women’s History Museum. For more information, read on.
“As America’s national institution for the promotion, interpretation, and celebration of women’s history, the National Women’s History Museum is committed to ensuring that women and girls’ unique voices and experiences are not left out of the telling of the COVID-19 story. To this end, the NWHM is pleased to launch the Women Writing History: A Coronavirus Journaling Project and is asking women, girls, and gender non-binary individuals to participate in the simple act of recording their daily thoughts and personal experiences during this pandemic in order to document the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on women’s lives.” (text pulled from the Project’s landing page linked here.)
