There’s Nothing New About Hard Times

They feel so hard because they are our hard times.

This week my three year old screamed, “Mom…I need you to wipe my butt…” while I was in the middle of a Zoom staff meeting. My mic was not muted.

At the grocery store, I had to buy a knockoff brand of bread and yogurt.

A fox snuck into our henhouse and killed two chickens. That’s not related to quarantine (I don’t think) but it still bummed me out.

My husband, a paramedic, worked 90 hours and came home tired and sad after transporting a parade of covid patients to the hospital.

Life is really hard right now and if you don’t agree, I’d like to meet you. It’s hard on an emotional level, as people in our communities are sick and separated. It’s hard on an intellectual level as we wonder what the next eight, ten, twenty months will bring. It’s hard on a physical level as we’re stuck at home, cramped into makeshift offices with toddlers for coworkers.

But I stumbled on something in one of my bookshelves that has given me some perspective. It is a thin copy of a memoir written in 1982 by my great-great Aunt Jerrine.

My actual memories of my Aunt Jerrine are very faint. She was one of many very old relatives that I used to visit in the nursing home on Sunday afternoons with my mom. I can remember the stash of full-sized candy bars she had in her room, but I can’t picture any of her features or remember anything she ever said to me.

The sum total of her memoirs is nine double spaced pages, typed without error on an honest to goodness typewriter. I don’t know what I would include in a nine page memoir of my life, but here are some of the things she wrote about: an uncle getting hit by a train, her brother falling into a pail of boiling water, another brother that lived only one day, and the barn burning down after getting struck by lightening.

Yikes!

Those things seem hard. But then, it’s nothing new to look at how people lived in the past and feel ashamed of how easy we have it today.

So it wasn’t her description of those tragedies that got me. Instead, it was a few little sentences buried at the top of page 8 where she wrote about her time teaching high school English at a school in central New York. I’m going to type them verbatim so I capture her breezy mood:

I was there during most of the war and all of the big flu epidemic. School was closed for two weeks and we teachers were not allowed to leave town. All community gatherings, even church services were forbidden, and people could not stop to visit together on the streets. We teachers packed a picnic lunch every day and climbed the hills in wonderful autumn weather, enhanced by plenty of free fruit off the ground.

I’ve gone back and read that paragraph a hundred times. It’s about the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, when a third of the world’s population became infected with a virus that killed more than 50 million people. I have to think that it was not easy to live and teach though that time.

Sure, Aunt Jerrine didn’t have to fight bad wifi connections or wear a mask in Target, but she must have felt afraid, uncertain and inconvenienced like we all do right now. It must have been a shock to watch life grind to a halt in an attempt to slow the spread of a terrifying sickness.

But it gives me hope that at the end of her life, what she remembered was the picnics. And it helps me remember that life is long, and if I can’t go to my favorite brick oven pizza restaurant for six months or even a year, I will survive.

Life feels hard right now because it is hard right now. But hard times are nothing new. And as the years pass, maybe the memories of lonely birthday celebrations and missed graduations will fade. Maybe we’ll forget about the toilet paper drama and waiting for the router to reboot six times a day. Maybe we’ll remember the picnics and the long walks and the board games instead.

And when we’re old, we’ll describe this time with a few simple sentences nested into a lifetime of other events and memories. And it will remind the people who read it that hard times are nothing new.

It doesn’t make life feel any better right now. My kids keep asking when ‘sickness will be over’ so they can have a playdate. My back is sore from hunching at my desk all day and I worry every time my mom tells me she had to run to the store to get a few things.

But it does remind me that this time will pass. We won’t be living like this forever. And even though that’s not a whole lot of hope to hang on to, at least it’s something.

Which is why tonight when I go to bed, I’m going to put my phone away and open up my Aunt Jerrine’s pages. I’ll appreciate all the anecdotes about horses and descriptions of gelatin and her surprise the first time she turned on an electric light.

But what I really need to read is about the big flu and the picnics and the fruit. Once I do that, I can switch off the light and fall asleep.