The Year in Photos

Google Photos informed me last week that it had created a “yearbook” for me, compiling photos I took in 2020. Curious, I clicked the link.

My older daughter was in the room, and heard me when I gasped. “That was 2020?”

“What was?” she wanted to know.

“Your ring ceremony!” In February, my parents and I had met in Atlanta to attend my daughter’s college “ring ceremony.” The formal ceremony, a tradition at her school, presents students with their college class rings and has them renew their first-year commitment to the college’s ideals. Looking back from the vantage point of December, the gathering was nothing short of astonishing.

“That was this year?” Ash said, coming to peer over my shoulder. “That was this year!”

We paged through the photos. January and February, 2020, were a whirlwind for us. I made ten trips in thirty days between January 9 and February 9, traveling to Atlanta twice (for the ring ceremony, and for my younger daughter’s basketball tournament) and North Carolina three times, for job interviews. There were photos of a second basketball tournament from January—a home tournament that we did not travel for. I recall thinking that I did not see the point of owning a house if I was never there.

In March, after everything shut down, there are photos with my daughter’s college roommate, who came to stay with us through the end of the semester. “That’s right, this is the year my roommate lived with us!” my daughter recalled in wonder.

“Even stranger,” I said, “You lived in the dorms at school. This year.”  In a year when her college chose to be fully virtual for the fall semester, it seemed so strange to think that until Spring Break, she actually lived on campus.

“It seems like such a long time ago,” she marveled.

I got the job in North Carolina, in March, but delayed starting until the end of May, in part so that my daughters could finish out their school year without any further disruptions, and in part because we still hoped, back in March, that the pandemic might have died down or been brought under control by that point.

We were such optimists, then.

The year got longer, rather than shorter. We moved, twice—first to temporary accommodations with my sister, and then to our present home. Instead of going back to school or moving to North Carolina, my older daughter moved in with a friend in Alabama for fall. We were isolating, but not as determinedly as people who did not have to manage an interstate move, multiple chronic illnesses, court-ordered visitation, a new job, and matriculating into a new school matriculate in the middle of a pandemic.

We still went to medical visits—a photo of my younger daughter in a hospital bed was momentarily confusing to us. “Cora was in the hospital?” “In August! The wound on her leg got infected!” “That was this year?”

We puzzled over more photos of Atlanta. “Oh, right! We were there for a week!” My older daughter and I spent a week in an Atlanta hotel, so that she could undergo neurological testing at Emory. The testing was only two days, but she had to have a negative COVID test administered by Emory three days beforehand, and staying in Atlanta was easier to manage than two trips. That was this year.

So, our isolation had unavoidable chinks. Both girls spent time with their dad, exposing them to two separate households. My parents visited us in North Carolina over Labor Day, and we gathered for a family wedding in the fall. Social distancing, masks, and warm weather had conspired to make us think that we were doing pretty well at managing this thing. Autumn rain and cold weather drove us indoors, that night, forcing us face to face with circumstances at a distance much closer than six feet. The summer respite, as predicted, was temporary.

The photos show a medically-masked Halloween without real trick-or-treating; Thanksgiving and Christmas without family gatherings. We opened presents in a hotel room, after I picked up my younger daughter from her dad’s, because friends’ houses and other gathering spaces remain off-limits and the weather was too bitterly cold to meet outdoors. A photo of my parents’ Christmas table, set for two, is both lovely and melancholy. It has been a long year—longer than we had fully comprehended, before the reminders in the photos. I would have said that it was a year we could not forget, except that the photos proved we have already forgotten so much.

The year is almost ended now. Sadly, the pandemic is not. The vaccine is coming, but won’t be widely distributed until late in 2021. The virus itself has mutated, creating a new strain that is much more contagious than previous ones, and it is already loose in this world of overwhelmed hospitals and exhausted healthcare workers. Summer, and the respite of outdoors, is months away.

Normally, I would advocate for looking forward, not back. But nothing has been normal this year; nothing is likely to be “normal” for several months yet, and my unplanned look back at 2020 was a surprise. It was an important year, a year worth living; a year with milestones and memories like any other year. And as it ends, we are still here. If you are still here, too, take a photograph.

You may be surprised, a year from now, by what it will mean to you.