It’s getting busier with the shutdown ending. Real events are back on the calendar: in-person graduations with actual people sitting in front of the stage; weddings in churches (not necessarily the blow-outs they would have been, but with flowers, music, and the memorable antics of ring bearers and flower girls). Kids’ camps will take place, as will summer festivals and, yes, family outings. True, there will be certain adjustments in procedure, but suddenly actual occasions are being penciled into our datebooks! And, just as suddenly, some of us are wondering how we previously found time to conduct our lives in non-virtual reality!

A year ago, restrictions unimaginable except in science fiction altered our world. That’s when I decided, around the first of May, to plant a garden. This garden was my knee-jerk reaction to watching one-after-another Smithsonian tour crumble, decimating what would have been my busiest of ten seasons doing such work. The cycle of lecture-prep, packing, flying the oceans, intensive touring with wonderful folks in astonishing places, flying back across the oceans, and doing it all again, framed my life. Sprinkling in domestic conferences made it more of a whirl!

And then, poof, it was gone.

Okay, we all know this. Each of us had a different version of “poof.” But what interests me, and will fascinate future historians and sociologists for years, is how did we fill our suddenly empty weeks?

For me, it was that garden: a poorly thought-out garden where the only criterion for planting was “Oooh, I do like to eat this.” I did zero soil-prep, unless you count digging with a mattock. (This year at least I bought a tiller.) Still, I attended to this patch of ground with a fervor. And many things grew well. Notice that grew is the verb employed. I didn’t use the verb “yielded,” did I?

Let’s take an example: my towering green-bean vines were a wonder to behold. With the grandkids we reenacted Jack and the Beanstalk at their base, for the tale actually seemed plausible. Those bean vines, though, yielded few beans. Either I did something wrong, or they were duds. Still, who cared, because one could actually take a garden chair, sit in front of the vines, and more-or-less watch the feelers spreading out. That’s the type of thing we did back in the summer of 2020.

The one gift we nearly all had from the shutdown was a sudden influx of time. Amidst the disasters of lost jobs and business, the severing of people from their loved ones, the closing of schools and chain of cancelled events, we got the gift, or curse, of time.

Did you, like me, periodically say to yourself: “I’ll never have this kind of time again!” Vanished were the excuses for avoiding lists of tasks, physical and otherwise, that never get handled because there is never time. Even so, most of what sat on my list remains unhandled, I confess. Photos did not get sorted (well a few). Closets did not get sorted out (I can prove that easily). Actually, if the word “sorted out” belongs in the sentence, it didn’t happen. And those letters that needed to be written? A few made it to paper; most didn’t.

I look back in astonishment how abundant the time was during the shutdown. Yet we filled it. The garden was a demanding pet project. But more amazing was the rigor of moving our “Professor Carol” life online as we reinvented nearly ever endeavor. Some of those reinventions brought fruits we’d never imagined, particularly in global outreach. Some required shades of creativity that we hope to keep going as we move forward.

We are moving forward, just as you are. The books I want to read regarding the shutdown won’t be written for 20 years, if not 40. What matters now, I think, is that we keep the good we were forced to learn. How do we make sure to remember the importance of seeing each other’s smiles? How quickly can we restore the bond of shaking one another’s hands? When will our littlest ones no longer automatically “distance” themselves (translate, be afraid of one another)? Will band and choir kids, theater students, athletes, be able to recover the lost time and resurrect their passions for activities that defined and enhanced their youth? More importantly, will we, as a society, get to a place where this bizarre experience can be viewed as a common experience, open to recollection, discussion, and analysis without political rancor?

Nothing can soften the blow for those who suffered irreparable damage during the shutdown. How does anyone get beyond the horror of being unable to tend to dying relatives and loved ones, or lay them properly to rest? What can parents of teens who succumbed to despair, lost in isolation, do to move on beyond that nightmare? How can rock-of-the-community, now-shuttered businesses resurrect themselves and return? The list of damages is long.

Yet, as humans, we must find light and meaning. We need to grow, not like my frantic, fruitless green-beans of 2020, but as verdant vines bent with sweet fruit. Right now, we are trying to remember how to till the soil. Let us work to gather the array of good ideas and restore the common sympathies that eternally have served as rudders through human darkness. These are the fruits that will spring from the gardens we are called on to cultivate and restore.