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  2020-12-20

  Borders

  The way covid has affected me has been through seeing my family in Canada. Each year my family travels from Akron Ohio to Ontario Canada so we can see my mom's family. My dad's side lives in Akron so we see them a lot, but it is hard to travel to see my family in Canada sometimes. Covid just made it that much harder. Clearly traveling up there in the middle of the epidemic in the spring would be a bad idea so that already took away one of our three trips out of the year. Then halfway through the summer before we were thinking about going up to our cottage the borders shut down. That really put a damper on things because now two of our trips were cancelled. At this point it has been a little over a year since I have seen my family and that is unprecedented in my lifetime. Finally, as Christmas was approaching, we had hopes that covid would be handled by then, but the borders remained closed and the cases and deaths kept rising. This was upsetting because I was looking forward to seeing my family at least once in 2020 and those dreams collapsed. When we go up to see my family at Christmas time it normally starts off as the first few days are catching up with each other. I love to tell them my stories and they all love to hear them. We then proceed to relax the next few days by going out to lunches with everyone and then making dinner at someone's house. Things can get pretty wild once the people of age start drinking. We have had many karaoke nights along with pool parties and barbecues during the spring. They may not go smoothly, but everyone ends up having a great time. I miss goofing around with my cousins who are all younger than me by one to 8 years, so I always am the leader of the group and decide what fun we get up to every night. Often times we end up chilling in their basement listening to music and telling stories after everyone starts to go to bed. Then on Christmas we wake up to a big breakfast and start opening up family gifts. After all the gifts are open it's time for lunch and to start partying again. We then proceed to get dinner ready and then after dinner we go right back to partying. We normally stay another two days and then leave. All in all it is a really relaxing experience and a chance to get away from the world. It really sucks that covid ended up taking that away from me.