Seemingly out of nowhere, it hit me a few weeks ago: I’ve been home for four years. In the middle of March, 2020, my job sent us all home with the expectation we’d only be working from home for a few weeks, maybe a few months. And while we’re able now to return to the office without fear of infection, most of us, including myself, were given the option to continue to work from home. Which I have.

I wanted to do a post about that, but I couldn’t figure out how to write it. How do you celebrate such a milestone when what kicked it all off was fear and doubt and worry about what the future would look like? Do I write about what a disaster it was for, well, everyone? The toll it took on us all, especially our kids? Or do I write about the good things that came out of it? The technology that let so many of us work from home and not be completely cut off from society? How, in some ways, some of our relationships grew closer than they would have if we hadn’t been forced to it?

COVID was a mess. There’s no doubt about that. It disrupted lives, upended how we live, how we shop, how we think about everything from vaccines to masks to handwashing, and so much more. It came with a terrible human toll, both in lives lost and in our mental health. I hated hated hated it, and hope we never have to go through something like it every again.

And yet, there are a few things that I will always remember as the good in the middle of the terrible, the eye in the center of the hurricane. Our small friend-pod of five that met every Friday night, outside, on the patio, distanced, yet together. Family TV every night after diner, where we would all sit around and watch a few episodes of some series we were working our way through, making a point of eating dessert while we watched. At two episodes per night, we watched (or rewatched, for some of us) all of Psych, Schitt’s Creek, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Running a T-shirt contest on Facebook as a way of connecting with a large group of people and coming up with new ways to reveal the winner. Adding our beagle, Hank, to the family (though, to be fair, our other dog, Harper, may not have seen this as such a good thing…).

Looking back on four years ago, at the beginning of the unknown, I can still feel an almost visceral degree of dread. There was such a high degree of the uncertainty. Four years later, like an audience member watching a historical docudrama unfold on the History Channel, we know how it ends. But four years ago, we had no idea. No idea when a vaccine would be available. No idea if we would ever have face-to-face interactions again. No idea if we would ever get to stop using Clorox wipes on all of our groceries. The tingling feeling I get in the tips of my fingers brings that fear of the unknown back quick and sharp.

To a degree I guess I don’t know what I’m trying to say, other than the fact that I’m grateful. I think back on those early days, and I’m grateful that we in this house made it through, grateful that, push comes to shove, I know we can survive it again if we have to.

(But let’s try to avoid another pandemic, okay?)