Time lapse

 [Most of this post was drafted back in March 2021 - the one year anniversary of the start of the pandemic. As I revisit it now, it has hard to believe that we are closer to the two year anniversary!]

March 2021

The question of the day from Thing Two is, "If you could have a horse, world peace, or the end of COVID, what would you choose?" 

She has created the perfect dilemma for herself with these three options. First, leasing her own horse is the ultimate dream. Second, her succinct summary of world history - she's studying the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks in Social Studies at the moment - is that 'war is dumb; peace is good'. And then COVID is.... well... COVID. 

The outcome? 

She says, "I think I would choose the end of COVID." Big sigh. "I'm really really done with COVID."

Not surprising really since at that point, in March 2021, it had been a year of living with the pandemic.  

Anniversaries naturally involve some aspect of reminiscence and as the pandemic anniversary approached I found myself, both coincidentally and intentionally, thinking back over the last year. 

I've been keeping a 'one-line-a-day' diary since 2019 so it was interesting to see how COVID-19 began to make an appearance in March 2020. 

On March 5, 2020 I wrote:  Feel like I'm getting back on track [after my surgery] and if it weren't for this damned COVID-19 worry, life would be pretty good.

Then the next day on March 6: Big Tech telling people to work from home if they can. Went for my BCC Mohs surgery consultation. Bit spooky to go out as normal. Schools have cancelled field trips and events.

March 9: Now 21 cases of community spread - the virus is here. 

March 10: The virus keeps on. I don't know why I can't stay out of supermarkets but today at Safeway a man backed into me and I just felt horrified. Hopefully that wasn't 'it'. [It wasn't!] But made me think just STOP!

March 11: COVID seems scary today and I've decided to only be at home or at [Friend]'s house. Shopping like crazy on Amazon! All very surreal.

March 12: Nice walk today with Mr Husband around the loop - foggy in the valley, clear in the hills. Thing Two had a half day so we went over to play with [friend]. This self-isolating-lite version we are doing seems pretty good. Schools are open but parents keeping kids home.

March 13: This morning we kept the kids home - partly because of uncertainty around my risk and partly because it didn't seem fair that the teachers had to go to work when Mr Husband didn't. Then at noon schools got officially closed as of Monday for three weeks. So it begins. Flattening the curve. Strange strange times. 

I first mention Zoom on March 23, 2020. At that point, the kids had been in online school for a week. Who would have guessed at that moment that they wouldn't go back to in-person school until April 2022! Who would even imagine, in that former life, that we would utter phrases like 'in-person school'?!

Around March 2021 I helped my sister organize a year's worth of recordings of the hundreds of Zoom dance classes she taught during lockdown.  Before saving each file I'd have a quick peek to check the recording had worked, but this also gave me a glimpse of people's lives, a weekly window into their temporary living room dance studios. I saw people get tanned over the summer, then the tans fade away. Short-sleeve t-shirts and leotards replaced by long sleeves and wraps.  Christmas trees and decorations appear in the background, then disappear again.  Little changes each week showed the subtle progression of the seasons against the backdrop of a life mostly in lockdown. 

Oddly, this timelapse view of a year somehow best encapsulates the feel of our lives during the pandemic. On any one day our lives drizzle by with the same old same old. But when I think back, letting myself dip into a day here, a memory there, I see that phases came and went. Life changed but oh so slowly against a backdrop of sameness.

Patterns emerged only to be shattered and replaced. At the start we were so creative, coming up with games and activities to alleviate the feeling of being locked in, held back, to distract. There were the early 'lockdown bingo' games, the Friday interviews, dining room table ping pong. Bikes rides along the train tracks. Thing One skate boarding. Thing Two rollerblading. Then came the relative calm of the summer. Life moved outside, we went to the beach, on hikes, and we saw friends, albeit masked and from six feet away. Case numbers fell. And then the return to school, still online in August 2020, the numbers creeping up, the new lockdown in November 2020.

We didn't host friends for dinner for over a year. And then only outside in the summer. Only three outside people (plumber, landlord, fridge technician) came into the house in 2020. There furthest we went as a family was about 40 miles from home. Our gas (petrol) bill for the all of  2020 was $563.96 compared to $3,330.31 in 2019.

Thinking about this idea of timelapse I googled how it was invented,  and found that it has origins in Silly Valley, albeit from 150 years ago. 

Eadward Muybridge was an Englishman from Kingston-upon-Thames who emigrated to the United States in 1850 when aged 20. He led a varied and interesting life that included suffering severe head injuries after being ejected head-first from a runaway stagecoach in Texas, shooting his wife's lover but being acquitted after convincing the jury it was 'justifiable homicide', and becoming a world-famous professional photographer. As a postscript, he finally moved back to England and his grave is in Woking, Surrey, where Mr Husband grew up. 

In 1872 Leland Stanford, the railroad billionaire, 8th Governor of California, and founder of Stanford University, commissioned Muybridge to prove whether or not a horse's hooves were simultaneously off the ground while at a gallop. At that time galloping horses were usually depicted with their fore and hind legs outstretched, the human eye unable to discern the exact pattern of this fast-moving gait. After many years trying different methods, Muybridge invented a system to photograph the exact position of a horse's legs as it galloped.   He positioned 12 cameras along the Palo Alto Stock Farm racetrack (now Stanford University campus - about 20 mins drive from where we live). Each camera shutter was triggered as the horse galloped by, capturing a still photograph of the horse at that moment. The photographs were then superimposed to create an animation of the horse galloping, revealing that horses are indeed airborne each stride of a gallop, but with their legs gathered underneath rather than outstretched. 

Animated gif from frame 1 to 11 of The Horse in Motion."Sallie Gardner", owned by Leland Stanford, running at a 1:40 pace over the Palo Alto track, 19 June 1878

Muybridge's photographic innovations  that dissociated space and time led to the now-familiar inventions of timelapse photography and 'bullet time' photography. Even the average smartphone these days has a timelapse setting. Here is a timelapse movie I took in Death Valley last November at sunrise from Zabriske Point, showing the shadow in the valley retreat with the rising sun. Sitting there for the half hour we got distracted, we chatted, we played with rocks, we didn't notice the boundary between night and day approaching. But the timelapse distills the dawn into a few seconds and reveals something new: a landscape bursting into colour. 

During this pandemic the passage of time has simultaneously skittered and crawled.  Time is so precious; it is easy to think of it as time wasted.  It is shocking to think that for the kids, more than a tenth of their lives has been during the pandemic. But when I think back over the past  two years, I see a procession of stills separated by voids between. In my line-a-day diary there are times when I write every day, and then gaps of weeks where I'll never know what happened. I remember smiling faces on Zoom, sunrises, sunsets, hair long, hair short, hair long again, trees in bloom against the bright blue spring skies, the same branches bare and stark against an indigo winter night. Despite the voids in between, it stitches together and has meaning, the progress of life revealed in timelapse.