Items

• 2020-04-04

  Family Quarantine

  When I think of COVID-19, I think of all the wonderful quality time I got to spend with my family. I was lucky enough to have moved back in with my parents at the beginning of the pandemic for what I thought was going to be a short time, but turned into a year and a half long party. My family and I would spend our days doing homework, working, and driving each other crazy. Coming from an Italian family, we tend to all be loud and annoy one another easily (with love of course). At night, we would have themed dinners, dressing up like we were going to the Grammys, making fresh pina coladas and hanging out by the pool. At the time, I was annoyed. Annoyed to be finally 21 and have to spend the whole summer stuck at home with my parents and younger siblings. Annoyed that I was unable to go back to school, or see any of my friends. Looking back now, I feel so blessed to have had the opportunity to drive my family nuts. Now, in 2023, life is returning to “normal.” I see my parents once a week, my brother lives outside of LA, and my sister is busy with her own life. I miss them. I miss waking up to my dads new hobby of the week, or playing cards with my mom till midnight. COVID brought us together and allowed us to forge a different kind of bond and make positive memories that I will cherish forever.
• 
  2021-10-20

  Picnic in Royal Park

  This was a more joyful moment from lockdown. For long periods of Melbourne's lockdown a picnic in the park was the only way to catch up with friends. It became a very popular activity for my friends and lots of other people in Melbourne. Every evening when the weather was good the parks would be full of groups.
• 
  2021-08-08

  Revisiting the family archives - HIST30060

  In isolation, I found myself coming closer to my family. I was living in Melbourne at the time, away from my home in Tasmania, but maintained constant connection via video calling and messaging my family. One way I connected with home was by sharing old photos with my sister. This is one she sent me while I was in lockdown. It was taken around 2008. Trawling through thousands of old photos was an easy way to keep occupied during lockdowns, and I’m partially glad that COVID gave me the free time to do so as it was a fun way to bond with family and massage out the homesickness.
• 
  2021-09-15

  Going home party - HIST30060

  When the new Delta variant led Melbourne’s COVID cases to explode over the second half of 2021, smaller states looked set to shut borders with Victoria. Consequently, I had to leave my new home at in Melbourne to get back to Tasmania in late September. Not knowing when we’d all see each other again, my flatmates held a small party for me. We stayed up until 4am. This is a picture one of them took at the event.
• 
  2020-12-10

  Lumpia During COVID-19 Shutdown

  This picture is when my roommates and I cooked lumpia in St. George, Utah, and classes were all moved online during the shutdown. We ended up with a lot of time on our hands during the shutdown, and we decided to cook and bake our favorite recipes, and lumpia was one of them. While COVID-19 changed our educational experience, it also changed our eating habits because we used to depend on ordering food a lot that we hardly used our shared kitchen in our dorm room together. This was one of my favorite memories with my roommates because, through food, we were able to spend more time preparing recipes, cooking them, and eating them together, unlike before. While COVID shut down everything, it gave us more time to bond together as roommates through food.
• 
  2020-04-07

  Rediscovering the tastes of my childhood

  Some of my earliest memories are of the sights, sounds, and tastes of my grandmother’s kitchen. She passed away almost exactly one year before the stay-at-home order was put in place in Washington State. At that time, I was already an online student working from home and my partner was driving across the state every weekend to work and come back home. When lockdown started, I didn’t realize how cooped up I would feel. I decided I needed to revisit the feelings of my grandmother’s kitchen. Around the same time, my family got a trailer full of boxes of my grandmother’s things. In this box was a handwritten cookbook filled with the recipes and stories from my childhood. There were handwritten letters from my great-grandfather to my grandmother, recipes she had clipped out of newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s, and family recipes I thought were lost when she passed. One of which was a Spiced tea, also known as friendship tea, recipe. For me, this tea is the epitome of Christmas time spent with my grandma. This recipe exists on the internet, but it was never as good as the one my grandmother made. When I found these recipes, I set out on cooking my way through them to pass my time during lockdown. My partner was working remotely so he was home to try them with me. It was an emotional experience for me after the loss of my grandmother and it reminded me how much food can bring people together. This recipe no longer represents Christmas and my grandmother, it now is something that makes me think of lockdown with my own family and how it brought us together. If it wasn’t for the stay-at-home order, I probably wouldn’t have connected to these recipes again and I definitely would never have had to buy tang. The pandemic has brought a greater connection to history and sensory history. The pandemic has also changed the way we experience our senses and even changed those senses for some people. Sensory history shows how people experienced the world around them during the pandemic. If you try this recipe, don’t be afraid of adding more or less of what you like. I don’t know what measurement a scoop is, but as my grandmother always told me, we don’t measure to be perfect we measure with our hearts. My best guess is that there are about 2 tablespoons in a “scoop”. Ginther’s Spice Tea 1 ½ cup Tang 6 scoops lemonade ½ cup instant tea ½ cup sugar ½ teaspoon cloves (or fresh whole cloves) 1 tablespoon cinnamon (or fresh sticks) Combine the above ingredients. Add 2 Tablespoons of mix per cup of hot water.
• 2021-01-25

  COVID Thoughts and the Journey through the pandemic

  I thought the pandemic was not as bad as I expected for me. Since soccer was still open, I got to get a lot of physical activity during the pandemic and I love playing soccer. School was different since the first semester I was online the whole time. This was very frustrating since I had no social interaction with any of my friends. The second semester however I transferred schools and it is going much better now than before. In general the pandemic was very hard to get through with all of the rules you had to follow and everything else, but it also made some memories.
• 2020-12-11

  Before Quarantine In COVID-19

  February 2020 was the last month before everything would change. Then, I went to comfortably to school, played with my friends, went to public places, and much more. I remember thinking about how much I used to dislike going to school and classes but now, I would give anything to go back there. Toward the end of that month, news was spreading about a new virus going around and I never thought much about it. In March, the virus began rapidly spreading and businesses and schools began to close. This included mine. It was exciting to begin a new experience at first but I hope I can go back and make more memories at school.
• 
  2020-03-20

  Artis-Naples Social Media Post

  Instagram post by the Artis-Naples. The photograph is their sign that reads “May memories of this season’s iconic moments help you through this difficult time. Be well!” The Artis-Naples is home to the Naples Philharmonic and The Baker Museum. The post itself announces that they will be taking time on their Instagram account to go through the memories of the season’s moments. There is a link to their website regarding COVID-19.
• 
  2020-10-08

  The Time to Grow is Now

  2020 was a year that started with a struggle. On December 6th, 2019, my childhood best friend, Collin, died from a drug overdose. He was the first person that was my friend in this world. 3 days before my 21st birthday, he was gone. I have never grieved a person like this in my life. The pain stuck with me like nothing I had experienced. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I could only think of Collin. In February, right before everything shut down, my friend Jeff and I went to New York City. On Collin's birthday, we went to a drag show, and I could feel the world breaking under my feet knowing he couldn't be there. During quarantine, he was always on my mind. I was stuck in a house with 4 other 21-year-olds for months on end. It was suffocating. Processing trauma and grief in a world without distractions as been one of the hardest challenges of my life. I recently moved back to my hometown where I am surrounded by memories of Collin and other past traumas. It is especially difficult to process traumas in a new place during a pandemic. A hug has never felt so cherished. Community has never felt closer but also so far apart. I am grateful for the friends I see and people I am close to in a new way. While the world can feel like its crumbling, there is always a smile to be had. I can now smile when I pass places I went with Collin as a kid. The world slowing down has made sit with these feelings in a way I never could before. I had so much time to feel everything. Collin's name makes me smile and I feel so blessed to have known him. COVID made my world slow down enough to get through this loss.
• 
  2020-08-24

  How I've Been Occupying My Time to Not Occupy Spaces

  Like most people, I have discovered an interest in hobbies that I never really had the time to indulge in prior to the pandemic. I was living in San Francisco, beginning the end of my college years and looking forward to what the future held for me and my beautiful, and not at all expensive, B.A. in philosophy that I was to receive in December 2020. Most of my friends were graduating in the Spring and I was so envious... that was until the pandemic hit. Everything moved so quickly. I had only 3 days to move out of my apartment, say good-bye the the people closest to me, and leave the city I've had the privilege of living in for the last three years. A city where I've scattered memories all over the place, danced through the streets with kindred spirits I hadn't met before, and developed a fierce love for my first home as an independent young woman. All stripped away from the palms of my hands, and in a matter of days it was the end of an era. It was the beginning of a global pandemic, something barely anybody had experienced before. The world seemed to only inhibit negativity and death, a cocktail very few people could take, and that's including a chaser. Sadness filled the air and polluted social media platforms. We all felt uncertain, scared, and alone. These feelings crept up, and leeched onto us. But one thing was absolutely certain, I had all the time in the world. There I was, 22 with no job and nowhere to go. There was nowhere I could go. So I did what any ordinary person would do in this situation, and I taught myself how to function the way humans did before social media and the internet. I learned to do some of the things that were once taught to young women in school with the intention of making them a qualified wife, but I called them hobbies. I learned to knit, embroider, sew by hand and by sewing machine, thoroughly clean a bathroom, and I also mastered the art of Mediterranean cooking. In the photo I have a attached I am showing off a scarf that I made in the first couple of weeks in quarantine. I playfully boasted my finished craft to my philosophy of nature class, and we all had a laugh. I miss that group of people. I do, however, find some happiness in being able to take a step back and slow down. The only reason I was able to do so was because I didn't have a choice in the matter. The world was crashing down right before my eyes and I couldn't do anything to stop it aside from staying home and staying away from others. What I think this narrative has to say about the pandemic is that people actually have the capacity to entertain themselves outside of the internet. Growing up I was always using the internet. I went from selecting my Top 8 on MySpace to watching prank videos on youtube to having class virtually. I have become sick of screen time that I have no choice but to pick something up to stay interested in the ordinary day to day. I've developed skills that could help me out in the future, if I could be so brave to assume there is a future of course. It is important for me to find some light, to find some joy. I giggled before this global pandemic, I've giggled during, and I will giggle after. Heck, I giggled while writing this personal narrative called an assignment. I have to giggle, it keeps me young and alive. It is important to find some light in all the darkness, and I think that's one of the most important things I've truly learned through all of this: To be the light you so desperately want to see. I've called that scarf my quarantine sqarf, and I can't wait to wear it for the rest of my time and then gift it to someone I love one day when I am old and saggy, if I am so lucky to get there. Stay safe and wash your hands.
• 
  2020-07-23

  Keeper of Memories

  During the pandemic, I decided to reflect on the deaths and the tributes given to deceased friends and [well-known] personalities. This article is the output of this process.
• 
  2020-07-17

  A Warm Meal Shared

  It's my story in how something mundane like cooking a meal and the community of sharing a meal is affected severely by COVID 19. Since I live alone at present, it is difficult, let alone near impossible to share a meal with anyone else and the disconnect I feel affects me and possibly some people who have to live alone and no one to communicate with. It's also a story of longing forward to see my fiancée again and trying to live life with a semblance of normalcy in an uncertain world.
• 
  2018

  Jewish Melbourne - Applesauce In The Meatloaf

  An unveiling of a dear friend , an unexpected lesson learned, and the value of every day.
• 
  2020-05-23

  From 4 times a year to camping in the living room

  My family and I have go camping multiple times a year and since this pandemic started our plans of going camping were cancelled due to the closure of national parks. Camping was something that helped me get through the school year and motivated me to work hard until the very end so that then I can go camping and forget about all my worries in the city. Now without being able to go out my 5 year old brother gave my sister and I the idea of building a fort in the living room. Although its not the same of getting out of the house and being surrounded by nature it helps forget about anything going on in life and just having fun.
• 
  2020-05-20

  Our life during Coronavirus pandemic

  A photo journal of a family in Florence Italy during Covid19 pandemic
• 
  2020-04-30

  March 11th, 2020. The Day I took COVID-19 Seriously

  A personal account.