New York and California both reopened last week, lifting most of the pandemic restrictions, with their governors touting a “return to normal”.
The past 15 months have been anything but normal. In the United States, more than 600,000 have died of COVID-19 – about 63,000 in California and 53,000 in New York – and more than 34 million people in the country have contracted the virus. My friends and neighbors had it when the pandemic started in March 2020; another friend is recovering. I had friends who were hospitalized and a relative who died. Everyone I know has been affected by loss or change. Bans, shutdowns, layoffs, work from home, school from home, business from home, holidays canceled, weddings postponed.
Even after everyone in my immediate and extended family was vaccinated, we were still unsure whether it was really safe to visit, safe to hug, safe to take off your mask, safe to enter public places.
We are all slowly getting used to it. People started going out for dinner. My oldest went on vacation. My sister flew west to visit her children and grandchildren. Are we going back to normal? And what have we changed in our year at home that we might want to keep?
What happens to all the vegetable gardens and chicken coops in the back yard, the new habits of baking and hiking, working from home? Will we fall back into full-time commuting, with the associated traffic jams and accidents, car emissions and the loss of home and family time?
It’s too early to tell. Many companies found the home office model to be good for them and their employees. My former carpool partner’s company has cut the office size in half and allows employees to continue working remotely and using the office as needed. The Daily News permanently closed its offices and found that the move to remote working was a success. And even Amazon, which announced a full return to the office, panned last week (our favorite word for the pandemic) allowing its employees to work from home two days a week.
It’s likely that some kind of hybrid office / remote model will continue – some 30 years after we heard that teleworking would be our future. It has now been tested and a lot of people like it. Bloomberg News reported that a May poll found that nearly 40 percent of workers would consider quitting if their companies requested a full-time return to the office. Most of them cited cost savings and the avoidance of commuting as reasons.
All of the time at home over the past year has resulted in these increases in baking and gardening that could become a constant habit for some even when they return to the office.
Industry giant Bonnie Plants estimated that 20 million U.S. residents first started gardening last year, and it’s true that seeds and vegetables sold out quickly. Seed companies are reporting even stronger orders for 2021 than in the previous year. A survey by Minneapolis-based Axiom Marketing found that 80% of homeowners plan to continue gardening this year.
Our unscientific surveys show that interest may decline. My friend from Minneapolis, a first-time gardener, dismantled the raised bed her college kid stuck at home had built for her in the first spring of the pandemic and gave it to a friend last spring. Turns out she hates gardening, as she used to suspect, and this year she only has a couple of pots of herbs. When we drive through this region we see a lot of weed patches that were gardens for the first time last year.
Our own vegetable garden has grown this year, also because my husband took pity on my need for house pumpkins and winter pumpkins. After the year I overplanted, I was banned from planting them in the kitchen gardens. The whole garden became a sea of giant pumpkin leaves, and we lost the peppers and tomatoes under the waves. He likes to put the pumpkins in secluded gardens, but I like to have them at home where I can do some exercise with the deer. So this year he ordered a new area directly outside the garden where I was allowed to plant four plants.
I’ll lose a lot of my garden time when I have to return to the office later this summer. I appreciated being able to swap traffic time for garden time and still be able to sit down to work early. I could milk the goats at lunchtime or pull some weeds and then go back to my computer and phone for the afternoon. Looks like that will change soon.
Fortunately, the days are now so long that, in the light of summer, I should still have time at home and in the garden after “returning to normal”.
Greenpoint appears every second Sunday. Look for it next in July
Reach Margaret Hartley at [email protected] or @Hartley_Maggie on Twitter. The opinions expressed in Greenpoint are yours, and not necessarily those of the newspaper.
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