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 particular, I made friends with the fellow women in the class. I was the only woman in the program who was not either an immigrant or the daughter of immigrants from various Asian countires, so I loved our lunchtime potlocks where we shared food from many different places in the world, and bonded over both coding problems and the challenges women often face in male dominated environments like tech. Somewhere around late January and February news reports started up about a new disease called Covid 19. I was starting to hear the first stirrings of real concern from friends with ties to China in my Southern California community ahead of any calls for significant concern on the US news.  One person in my class was even worried about whether having family come from Wuhan for Chinese New Year, at the end of January was something to be concerned about, but for awhile I didn't know what the significance of that would be, and it seemed very uncertain how much to worry. 

By mid-march, of course, it had been announced that the state of California was shutting down most businesses and other public gatherings. Our coding class was remote for the remainder of the program. On our final in person day, I snapped a picture of the bridge I walked across each day, connecting the part of the UCI campus where my course was to the central part of campus. It was an unusually rainy and misty day for sunny Southern California and, as someone who has spent a lot of time steeped in past centuries,  I was reflecting on how common the term "plague year" has been across history. I wondered exactly how long it might be before I would be crossing the bridge again from my tight little family circle into the larger social world. 

Many things struck me, along with the rest of the world, about those early days of shut down. It was strange not being able to instinctively gather with others during a time of fear because it was those very gatherings that would make things worse. It was strange to see the streets suddenly empty along with certain grocery store shelves. It was strange not to be able to see the faces of other human beings or feel comfortable walking among others. For me, it meant suddenly deferring my new starts, both social and professional yet again. 

For me, it also meant lots of time with my parents, who I was living with, and my brother who lives near by, and I quickly realized how fortunate I had been in landing among loving family during these times of isolation. For most of my adult life I had lived alone and far from family, first in the midwest, and then on the East Coast. Of course, I had many friends who found themselves living alone in 2020, and carried on with grace, and I would have handled it as best I could if that had been the case,  but I was very aware of how unexpectedly fortunate I was not to have been caught living alone and far from loved ones during the pandemic. I was also glad to be back in my native sunny Southern California where outdoor activities are almost always possible. Definitely our most frequent and successful way of getting out during the pandemic was to go on many happy picnics. 

Our very first picnic, in those early shutdown days, followed several weeks of going absolutely no where, apart from my father's necessary masked visits to the grocery store. We remembered the canyon where a family friend, an old Catholic Priest, lived in a monastery. It was remote enough not to draw big crowds, and not as well known as other more popular coastal picnic spots. We set out on the eerily empty California freeways. I had never in my life seen the freeway with little to no traffic like that. When we arrived at our picnic spot by a little creek, across a two lane highway from the construction fo the new St. Michael's Abbey church, the feeling of freedom was almost overwhelming. After weeks of whiling away time in home and garden, and figuring out every variation of walking routes around our neighborhood, being at this picnic spot felt nearly as exciting as overseas travel had a few short months ago. Though our lockdown time had been relatively pleasant, psychologically the feeling of being able to be both out in the world and feeling safe was a profound relief. 

Me and my mom at our first, freeing, 2020 picnic. 

We watched the completion of construction for the new St. Michael's Abby across several months of pandemic picnics in Silverado Canyon. 

As the pictures show, for this initial picnic we were still wearing our initial covid gear: a set of bandana-like gaiter masks in different colors. Soon enough I was getting fabric and sitting down to the sewing machine to make better and more custom masks for us from the many patterns suddenly proliferating among the crafting set. One of these early masks, was a picnic mask, made with fabric showing a picnic basket and blanket, among other cheerful park and ice cream themed images. 

These picnic masks accompanied me and my family on many happy escapes, as we discovered little hidden gems of parks all around our beautiful California environs. We enjoyed watching the little rabbits in a small park in Laguna before taking a walk up the hills of the neighborhood with views of the ocean below.

We found a little neighborhood park in Dana Point, about an hour away from home, with spectacular views of the sea and harbor. 

Picnics even became the way to celebrate family occasions, like this lazy Father's Day pic: 

Our go to lunch was sandwiches, chips, macaroni salad, and a little dolce from a local deli. The tastes of savory, creamy, and sweet became woven in with memories of our little excursions. Over time, without being fully aware of it, we had formed many happy times and memories tied to our picnic activities. Our picnics became travel, social time, meal time, and an escape from the monotony and the vague dreads of those early pandemic months of total shutdown. 

I designed this first square of the my Covid Quilt in the shape of a picnic blanket partly because this was an easy first pattern to make. It was simply a matter of cutting out squares of my picnic fabric and the green background fabric and stitching them together. 

Almost from the very start, I had realized that masks with i-cord or ribbons attached with them, so that the mask could hang around our necks when not being worn, made things much easier.  The brown and white fabric that made these neck cords for another mask were perfect for bordering the parts of the finished picnic blanket. I did, however learn a valuable lesson from my use of the ribbon. When quilting, I've discovered that frequent ironing is important in order to keep the fabric smooth and flat, and to press the seams flat (as shown below). However, I learned the hard way that you have to really know what materials you are working with, since when I began to iron a section of the square with the ribbon attached, the ribbon melted! I was able to replace the section with new, unmelted ribbon, but it was definitely a lesson in testing your iron with materials before you accidentally ruin part of a completed project. 

The picnic blanket was not only an easy initial quilt square to make, but also the perfect symbol to start my quilt made up of the mask fabric from the pandemic era. The picnic blanket became a touchstone for my family symbolizing the ways people can slowly build up patterns of happiness and normalcy even in troubling and abnormal times.