AGE OF UNCERTAINTY

I RECENTLY WENT BACK TO VISIT THE high school where I used to teach. I met with a handful of kids in my old classroom, and as I looked around at the same pictures on the walls, the wooden desks, the view from the window, I was stunned thinking about the last time I sat in this room. It was the spring of 2020, and I was seven months pregnant, trying to talk to a class of 14-year-olds about this new coronavirus without being too flippant or too scary. It was the day before spring break, and we were fumbling through a crash course in online learning, because we expected classes would need to be virtual the first couple of weeks back. It would be weird and annoying for a minute, but then we’d get right back in the swing of things. To put our complaints in perspective, we went around the circle and shared whom we wanted to protect from getting sick—a grandpa in a nursing home, an aunt with a heart defect, a loved one with cancer.

That was almost two years ago. Now I have a toddler who runs around the house hollering about ducks,