March: Picnic
The first of the 12 squares for my 2020 quilt represents march, the first month of the pandemic shutdown. It also represents a picnic blanket: a place of gathering that became especially important when March of 2020 hit. Everyone was caught in the middle of something when countries all over the world began declaring shutdowns that transformed our lives. For me, Covid hit at a time when I was starting to open up to the world again. In 2019 I had moved back to California from Philadelphia in the aftermath of a serious illness, which meant leaving my job, friends, and routine from the East Coast. I went through a period of recovering, physically and emotionally, from the ordeal. In the opening months of 2020 I was attending a coding bootcamp and I was ready to build on skills I had started learning on the job to make a pivot toward getting back to work with technology. It was both a program that was teaching me new skills, and a way to begin getting out among people again. In ...