How Long Is a Year, Anyway?
Reading the emails I sent one year ago today is sad, but also strangely comforting
There is considerable debate as to the exact date of the one-year anniversary of the pandemic in the United States. Is it January 21, when the first case of Covid-19 was discovered in the United States? Or is it February 6, when we had our first death? March 6, when 21 passengers on the Grand Princess cruise ship tested positive? I personally think the anniversary is March 11, when then-President Trump gave his wobbly, error-riddled Oval Office speech, Tom Hanks tested positive, and the NBA shut down.
Your date may be different. But no matter what, we’re all in that period of realization that this has all been going on for a full year of our lives. It has long been a chestnut of pandemic wisdom that the world pre-Covid feels like a foreign planet than the one we currently inhabit. But how foreign? How long is a year, really?
To remind myself what my life was like last year at this time, and how much has changed, I decided to go back into my email outbox and see what I was talking about then. Suffice to say: I was not talking about any of the things we’re talking about now.
Here are 10 quotes from emails I sent one year ago:
- “It has stopped raining enough for…
