| By Alexandra, 8th grade |
February 2021 …Yesterday, I went out in the snow, as most do after or during snowstorms. While snow will always bring excitement, I have to say that it’s just not the same during the pandemic.
We have shifted our lives to the safety of our homes, and really, if you think about it, the pandemic and snowstorms are similar.
Before the pandemic, a snowstorm was thrilling because it was almost as if we enjoyed the feeling of being stuck at home and our surroundings being so harsh. Seeing the thick white snow slowly glaze over our homes gave us a cozy and excited feeling—safe inside with family, in front of a warm fireplace, and surrounded by snow slowly building up outside.
A lot of what has always made a snowstorm so exciting is, well, what the pandemic has brought us. Staying inside wrapped up with blankets and sipping hot cocoa is my routine, and has been since March 2020.
I log on every day to school in my house. Having to stay in because of the snow doesn’t present a change. The excitement of snow days is missing—the idea of going to bed knowing that you will wake up tomorrow to no school and can go play outside all day. Obviously, that will probably never be the same.
What really made snowstorms special is that they flipped our lives upside down. We couldn’t go anywhere, and the environment we were in changed. But if you reread that last sentence, you’ll probably be reminded of something very familiar—the pandemic.
The pandemic has done that already for us. Just as a holiday wouldn’t be special if it was every day or every week, the same goes for a snowstorm. A snowstorm was something that changed our daily lives for a couple of days out of nowhere, and that was exciting.
But we are pretty resilient about half of the things that are thrown at us, now that we’ve been through something as surreal as the pandemic. Being locked in our house for a couple of days for some crazy weather is nothing anymore, really.
I think we will notice this with many things once we go back to our lives regularly again. For the rest of our lives, we will be more resilient about new things and things going wacky.
I haven’t really thought much about life once the pandemic is over, but when I have, I’ve always thought of it going exactly back to how it was before. But that’s not realistic.
The truth is that this will affect us forever, and in good ways as well. We have adapted ourselves to distancing, using electronics to connect and even learn or work. We’ve adjusted to staying in small groups and wearing masks so much that we haven’t even realized how much we have adapted.
Snowstorms are only a fraction of the many things that have changed due to the experience of going through a pandemic. As a world, we have all been shaped and changed by this.
—Alexandra is a reporter for the East Norriton Bulldog Bulletin
