March always brings it back. Something about the light, the thaw starting, the particular nervous energy that lives in the month. Five years ago the news about COVID-19 still felt far away. It was something happening elsewhere. A cruise ship here, a city overseas there. Interesting in the abstra ct. Then suddenly it was not. COVID arrived in our daily lives all at once. Schools closed. Streets went quiet. Life narrowed down to the size of our houses and the radius of our neighborhoods. I occupy a slightly awkward position when thinking about that time because I am both a teacher and the mother of three children. As a teacher, I am very aware of the long shadow those months cast. In schools we still talk about it. Every fall we notice it again. Students arriving a little further from where they might have been socially, academically, developmentally. Test scores show it. Behavior shows it. Teachers feel it in ways that are harder to measure but impossible to miss. And yet. Personally, I look back on those months with a strange amount of gratitude. Our district only remained fully virtual for about three months before summer arrived. But those months landed right in the center of our lives as a family. On the first morning of e-learning for my then second grader, I stood behind him as he logged into class. My son squirmed in the desk my principal allowed me to take from my classroom just for this purpose. I had essentially re-created a miniature classroom in our house. After more than two decades teaching, I know how to set the scene. Apparently my first instinct in a global crisis was still to rearrange the furniture and try to run school. The teacher appeared. The little squares of classmates popped up across the screen. All the kids in their tiny frames looked remarkably ready for the moment. Many were wearing their uniform shirts. Some sat very straight in their chairs. When the teacher asked them to, they even stood for the Pledge of Allegiance in their living rooms. My son shifted in his chair. He was trying. I was glad he could see his friends. But every instinct I had as a parent and a teacher was screaming the same thing. This is not good for him. The next day I filled out the paperwork to opt him out. I am aware of how that sounds coming from a public school teacher. I believe deeply in public education. But I also had the unusual privilege of being home, which meant I could choose something different for a while. Ironically, my own work took very little time. The tasks I needed to complete for school were often finished quickly, leaving long stretches of the day open. That turned out to be the real gift of that strange spring. What my son learned during those months did not come from a curriculum. He learned how to fillet a fish. How to bake bread. How to help cook dinner and do the ordinary work that keeps a house running. How to plant tomatoes and watch them slowly take hold in the soil. Our kitchen counter was often dusted with flour. Bread dough rose in bowls next to stacks of papers I still had to grade. Outside, tomato plants went into the ground in crooked rows along the fence, my son watering them with more enthusiasm than precision. I have always paid attention to birds, but that spring I finally had the time to show my kids the patterns I had long noticed myself. We started paying attention to spring migration the way some people follow sports schedules. Instead of worrying about logging into platforms or completing endless assignments that I suspected were largely unnecessary anyway, I had time to teach my children how to notice the world. I know our situation was not universal. If I had needed to be somewhere else each day, if my children had been left alone with screens and uncertainty, I might feel very differently about those months. There was real loss unfolding in those months too, in ways I worked hard to keep outside the edges of my children’s small world. But something unusual happened in our house. We slowed down. I remember riding bikes with my kids one afternoon. The sky was that impossible blue you notice when the world goes quiet. The streets were empty enough that our voices echoed a little when we called to each other. I stopped, turned around to look at them, and said something that surprised even me. Remember this moment. Someday you are going to wish we could come back to it. It felt like a strange thing to say in the middle of a global crisis. As a teacher, I know the losses from that year are real. My work since then has been challenging. Each year a little less so, but the effects are still there, moving quietly through classrooms. But as a parent, I remember something else. For a brief stretch of time, the world slowed down enough for a family to actually notice itself. And even now, when March comes around again, I sometimes think back to that quiet spring and wonder if we noticed it enough while it was happening. Heather Bryant is a Park City resident, writer, longtime educator, and mother of three. She writes educational curriculum and essays on parenting, conservation, and the importance of place. The post The quiet spring appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less