Remembering

Memory is a weird thing, you know? No matter what you do, it slips away like water cupped carefully in your hands. It changes shape and shifts to fill the gaps that call out to be filled, constantly fighting to slip away. There have been a lot of studies looking at the ways we remember but misremember and even more articles written about the shared oddity of collective memories. Here is a recent one that builds on that knowledge about shifting memories and poses the question, "How will we remember the pandemic?"

Blogging every single day, even as events such a pandemic unfolds, adds a new layer to the whole remembering thing. I've captured the memories as they were happening, so I can go back through archives and catch the subtle nuances that have shifted as time has slipped by. I think I tend to remember things I've written a bit more accurately than I would have otherwise, but I can still go back and find an occasional blog post where I'm like, "Huh. I thought that unfolded a little differently."

It's wild.

What's even wilder is that I can already point at some ways the girls are recreating their own experiences with the pandemic. Their ages influence the whole thing, so Alexis' recollection will be more accurate than Mila's. Mila has been largely shielded from the worst of it all. We've lost family members to COVID-19, but she won't remember that because they weren't people who were in her life every day and then suddenly weren't. She was absolutely clueless as the adults struggled through mountains of uncertainty, especially early in the pandemic. Remember when we didn't exactly know how COVID-19 was spread? People were cleaning their groceries and using gallons of hand sanitizer and all sorts of things that turned out to not be the culprit of the worst of it all. Mila had no idea any of that was happening. She was just stuck at home a lot.

Mila is going to remember COVID-19 as this thing that made her wear a mask and attend school via a computer, but I suspect she's going to tell stories as an adult that will paint the pandemic as much more fun than anyone who has lived it in a different way. While some kids will tell a tale of losing someone and having their lives altered forever, I'd bet that Mila's most vivid memory of the whole thing will be the Zoom lunches she had with her friends early on.

There were only a few of them and they all took place in April and May of 2020, but Mila -still- talks about them all of the time and asks to do one again. They were as simple as me giving her a laptop and a Zoom meeting while she sat at the kitchen table and ate lunch with her favorite two friends, but apparently they left a permanent imprint.

I think Mila's overarching pandemic story will be one of missing her friends, but finding ways to still connect with them.

As for Alexis? Well, that kid keeps a journal. She has lived a very different life this past year from that of her sister, but she's captured her thoughts along the way. My money says her recollection will be pretty close to reality.