Communing (Or Lack Thereof)

We’ve come to the time of year when I start thinking, ‘What are we doing here?’ The place is a ghost town except for the market, and the lack of sun has become this palpable frustration that Vitamin D capsules just don’t fix, at least for me.

Born in Texas, 100° weather was my norm for years. I have no memory of ever feeling hot and sweaty. I’m sure I was, but I knew nothing else, so I never questioned it. Typical life was the relentless sun beating down on hot suburban concrete. When adults scrambled inside as fast as possible to get to the air conditioning, we kids wondered what all the fuss was about.

A Californian from the age of eleven, I was not only bathed in sunlight almost every single day of life, I was also spoiled by lovely temperatures and ocean breezes throughout the year. I grew up being active every day, all year round.

I went to college in Santa Barbara and lived there until I married and had children. Being outdoors was what I did whenever I wasn’t studying, working, or changing diapers. With the options of surfing, kayaking, jogging, hiking, beach volleyball, exploring new towns, biking in the mountains, day-tripping to the Channel Islands, and the endless list goes on, I would have felt very weird about staying in the house for a full day.

We’ve been here for a decade, and this year I’m beginning to worry now that we’re in this season. Our kids have grown up the quintessential Orcas kids – playing in the forest and at the beach year-round even though everything about the weather in wintertime said we should go in and get cozy. They’ve hiked ridiculous lengths of mountain trails, caught endless crabs and darted from the spray of geoducks on the beach, and explored the same paths and trails over and over.

I worry because after a kid has covered the same little territory until they’re a teenager, the inclination to repeat the same activities becomes an ad nauseum kind of thing. Especially right now. We’re two years into a pandemic and there’s nothing else to do. I try to tell myself that I don’t mind going out and covering the same territory under a perpetual dark gray blanket and drippy skies. But kids? They’re drawn inside when their daily life revolves around the same little quarter-mile area of home, school, town, and church.

Before the pandemic, there were still myriad activities and gatherings, so when winter got dark and drove people in, kids still had all kinds of things to do together. But these pandemic times are not good for us at all here. The quiet isolation of a life without sun or social activities sometimes means that unless I get very creative as a mother, free days on the weekends feel incredibly purposeless. When kids who have grown up doing every kind of creative thing they can dream up begin to feel like there’s nothing left to do (due to the weather and pandemic) but watch movies, I find that downright scary.

I don’t blame them, either. I can’t force us as a family to enjoy windy winter paddleboarding. We do all have our own projects – our younger one builds objects and characters out of found parts and pieces; our older one makes all kinds of things on his 3D printer; I’m working on a book; my husband does a triathlon every day. But there’s a massive human void that we’ve all been forced to accept. Without large daily doses of humanity in our usual multitude of gatherings, festivities, and celebrations, winter life here is feeling very wrong.

I say this not to be a downer, but in case you’re feeling it too and need to know you’re not alone.

It’s like the frog in boiling water. The day our lives and schools shut down to COVID back in March of 2020, it was a devastation. We all coped with the new reality and did our best to put sparkle into a life that no longer included anyone but our nuclear families, hanging on to a hope that life as we knew it would eventually return. In the meantime, an inhumane level of non-social endurance has been forced on us (this isn’t political – I mean forced on us by the virus), and we’ve slowly begun to accept it even if we don’t want to. That’s what I think is dangerous. And none of us can do anything about it but continue to endure.

But kids are the victims in this more than adults are. This is becoming their norm, and it’s anything but normal. This is characterizing the times of their young lives. No extracurriculars; no fun social events dotting the calendar every week; nothing dotting the calendar at all. Just school (when it’s in school) and going back home.

It isn’t all that healthy to spend 99% of your time within the same four walls and in the presence of the same three or four people, no matter how much you love your home and each other. In our case, it has led not only to lots of books read aloud, board games played, and cooking together, but more petty arguments for not having our own spaces to go to or when we need other things we can’t get from each other. In addition, when you can’t be as physically active as you want or be with other people much, you find that you and your kids aren’t getting to be the people you were truly made to be. Humans were made for community and physical activity. And the pre-COVID Orcas spoiled us with continuous festivity and variety.

A few Sundays ago, I said to the kids, “Okay, let’s go do something. Something different from being at home.” We got in the car and drove to Deer Harbor. I had heard of a pie shop, and I thought we’d order something fun, just to do something besides make food at home. It was closed. We drove around and realized there was absolutely nowhere to go but Eastsound. We ended up at the market – the only place we ever go anyway. I told them to just look for something to eat that we don’t usually get. There we were, back in our same quarter-mile radius. Thank goodness the market exists, or we’d have absolutely nowhere to go (that’s affordable, at least).

If we were in a sunny place, kids would be constantly getting together to do things outside. Here, it’s yet another waiting game until the sun comes out in March. Or July. Do you live life just hanging on for the four-month span when people actually start coming out of the woodwork?

I have an added angst lately because I recently heard someone I know say that where they are living in the California desert, life is more full of activities than ever before, even pre-COVID. People are getting together all the time, and the year-round sunny weather means that there are endless outdoorsy catalysts for social gathering, laughing, playing, and bonding.

While this isn’t a very “Sun Days” essay, you and I need to talk about this elephant in the room that we’ve been forced by COVID to accept. What we’re experiencing right now, all holed up in our individual houses, is not healthy in the least. I thrive having quiet, alone thinking time – I need it every single day in order to be a healthy human – but I also need people every day. Everything in my being is almost at the breaking point, saying, ‘No! I refuse to let my children and myself remain in this isolated state if there’s a way around it!’

I haven’t come up with a solution yet. I’m sure all of us here have looked at real estate sites and heavily considered where we’d want to live if we could just pick up and move tomorrow.

Perhaps some of you have settled into life as we know it now. But unless you just moved here and are exploring the newness of it all, I guarantee that most of you who have been here for years and have kids are feeling a lot of what I’m feeling.

This is going to be one of those rare articles you read that ends without any closure. Because there is none. I have no idea how to raise kids in a healthy way in a place whose weather forces them indoors during pandemic times when the hundreds of gatherings we used to have have been canceled for who knows how many years.

If you have any ideas for me and for other parents who are straining to put meaning into days that are bereft of gatherings here on this now-much-more-isolated island, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

You can also find this on the January 30th Sun Days column on The Orcasonian here.