Untitled

Untitled

Lewis R., of Deering Center, Portland, Maine

June 19, 2020

2020-06-19

COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-

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English

After three months of quarantine during which we’d only seen our closest neighborhood friends from a distance, we had them over for dinner in our backyard. It was a warm spring evening. Their kids (5, 10, 12) and our kids (10, 12) played cornhole while we cooked and brought food out to the porch. We shared stories about the things in each of our lives that had become familiar that were completely unfamiliar to us before quarantine. Masks. Zoom. Telemarketers seeming kind and human. Daily talk about sickness and death.
They’d biked over to our house so when dinner was over we all got on our bikes—all 9 of us—and biked through the dark and mostly empty streets of Deering Center to Evergreen cemetery. We rode right down the middle of the street, a critical mass, and when we reached Evergreen, we rode down to the ponds, got off our bikes, and in the long unmowed grass beside the ponds we watched hundreds of fireflies dance in the dark. It felt miraculous to see these little insects light themselves up. We all stood there in awe feeling grateful.

Personal narratives