Laurel Clark is a Squad Leader/Program Educator for Urban Adventure Squad. She is a member of the class of 2020 at American University, and has been a member of the UAS staff since 2017. Laurel offered her perspective on life in her family home in New York City in April 2020.
There are moments where things seem to be completely normal, for lack of a better word. Where you roll over in bed and stretch, rubbing the sleep out of your eyes and squinting at the time, deciding if you really have to get up right that second or if you have another two minutes to close your eyes.
Then other images come into view and you see that you aren’t where you’ve been for the past handful of years. You’re once again in your childhood home. For a moment you feel like the child who used to live there and it is comforting to be small and cared for again.
Then you remember why you are home. School has shut down, 222,284 cases of Coronavirus have been identified in New York City, and our city is in lockdown.
My phone pings with every new NBC, New York Times, and CNN update, even though they are all, inevitably, about the same thing, COVID-19. This virus is the new sun that our earth revolves around, as it should be. The people that can’t fight off this virus are the ones counting on others to stay indoors to stop its spread.
There is an odd sense of national community as everyone comes to terms with the gravity of the situation and their role in mitigating the spread of the virus. There is a constant hum on the television radiating from downstairs, reminding me that my parents are as desperate for information as I am. I keep in mind an opinion article by a woman who shamed people for posting memes and Instagram stories about the struggles of stay at home school and no toilet paper. She said that although these may be adjustments for people, the real suffering is felt by people who are waiting in lines to be tested, and Coronavirus patients who are being treated in makeshift beds and small tents.
I try to remember to keep my perspective in check. Although so many things have changed for me--I left American University (AU) in a hurry during the last months of my senior year--these are minor bumps in the road and are not derailing my life the way this virus has for so many others.
I am trying to be thankful for the little moments, knowing that we are all doing the best we can. I encourage myself and others to do better for their body, friends, family, and community by making a phone call, meditating for 20 minutes, practicing social distancing, engaging in self-love, or just journaling. It is all the little things that will make a big difference.
At AU, I was finishing a double major in Environmental Studies and Public Relations and Strategic Communication. I worked as a Resident Assistant for two years and loved every single second of it. Packing my things in mid-March, I kept wondering if somehow I had forgotten that it was the end of the year and my friends and I were all graduating in a number of days. But then I would remember that this was a makeshift goodbye that had uprooted everyone physically and emotionally, not unlike a tornado.
Moving out of the space that had been my home for four consecutive years was extremely difficult and sad. I did feel that I was able to get some closure in saying a hopeful “see you later” to some of my friends, co-workers, and supervisors, in anticipation of a possibly delayed graduation ceremony that we had already heard rumblings of being canceled.
After the 6-hour drive home to New York City, I was so happy and grateful to be greeted by the open arms of my family. I have been able to spend the days with my charismatic four-person family consisting of me, my younger sister Addison, our mom Ashlea, and our dad Marc. We have found a couple of pockets in lower Manhattan where we can walk or run at a minimum of 9 feet away from others. We have also converted our living room into a partial pilates/yoga/weights space, where we do 45-minute exercises following YouTube videos or intensive training videos from the Nike Training App (now free in an effort to help people stay active while also remaining indoors).
On my first Saturday back, we played Jenga for hours, followed by card games and a quick run between a break in the pouring rain.
I did some Home and Garden Television (HGTV) inspired projects the weekend I moved back home and built two "work at home" spaces for me and my sister (you can see mine in the middle photo at the bottom of this article!) so that we can both do our homework and other work while having our own spaces close to but separate from each other.
I have started my online classes, where I call in and participate in Zoom-based conversations. It is taking some time to get used to it, but I am so appreciative of the adaptive work my professors have done to keep our classes engaging, informative, and accessible. It is nice to have some semblance of a routine again.
Each day looks oddly different and exactly the same. I wake up and make coffee, passing by my parents’ room, where I can hear my dad on the phone working from the new standing desk that he built near the spare window in his room. I patter down the steps and hear the soft murmur of a news anchor introducing the morning’s next story.
My mom is at her desk tucked away between the kitchen and the living room, reading emails from concerned parents at the local public high school where she works.
I pour coffee over ice and head back upstairs to my room, where I log onto my first class of the day, my 8:10 am biology lecture. My sister is across the way. She’s already snoozed her alarm once and will do so again before she wakes up to Skype into her first class of the week for her senior year of high school.
We find space in the day for walks, runs, reading, walking circles in our little backyard, and making dinner from the things we have stored in the freezer and fridge. There are FaceTime appointments with friends and family, and big group chats that keep me in touch with my loved ones from school, who have now returned to their homes all around the country. We share funny stories and reach out in moments of isolation.
And every single night at 7:00 my family stands on the sidewalk, neighbors poke their heads out the window, stand in their doorways or peer down from their rooftops and we cheer, banging pots and pans, singing and clapping, and one guy down the street always rings his cowbell, to publicly thank all of the healthcare workers on the front lines working to protect our communities.
There is no real way to tie a neat bow atop all of my thoughts about these changes, but one thing I know for sure is that things will never be the same, and right now that is the only thing there is to know.
There are moments where things seem to be completely normal, for lack of a better word. Where you roll over in bed and stretch, rubbing the sleep out of your eyes and squinting at the time, deciding if you really have to get up right that second or if you have another two minutes to close your eyes.
Then other images come into view and you see that you aren’t where you’ve been for the past handful of years. You’re once again in your childhood home. For a moment you feel like the child who used to live there and it is comforting to be small and cared for again.
Then you remember why you are home. School has shut down, 222,284 cases of Coronavirus have been identified in New York City, and our city is in lockdown.
My phone pings with every new NBC, New York Times, and CNN update, even though they are all, inevitably, about the same thing, COVID-19. This virus is the new sun that our earth revolves around, as it should be. The people that can’t fight off this virus are the ones counting on others to stay indoors to stop its spread.
There is an odd sense of national community as everyone comes to terms with the gravity of the situation and their role in mitigating the spread of the virus. There is a constant hum on the television radiating from downstairs, reminding me that my parents are as desperate for information as I am. I keep in mind an opinion article by a woman who shamed people for posting memes and Instagram stories about the struggles of stay at home school and no toilet paper. She said that although these may be adjustments for people, the real suffering is felt by people who are waiting in lines to be tested, and Coronavirus patients who are being treated in makeshift beds and small tents.
I try to remember to keep my perspective in check. Although so many things have changed for me--I left American University (AU) in a hurry during the last months of my senior year--these are minor bumps in the road and are not derailing my life the way this virus has for so many others.
I am trying to be thankful for the little moments, knowing that we are all doing the best we can. I encourage myself and others to do better for their body, friends, family, and community by making a phone call, meditating for 20 minutes, practicing social distancing, engaging in self-love, or just journaling. It is all the little things that will make a big difference.
At AU, I was finishing a double major in Environmental Studies and Public Relations and Strategic Communication. I worked as a Resident Assistant for two years and loved every single second of it. Packing my things in mid-March, I kept wondering if somehow I had forgotten that it was the end of the year and my friends and I were all graduating in a number of days. But then I would remember that this was a makeshift goodbye that had uprooted everyone physically and emotionally, not unlike a tornado.
Moving out of the space that had been my home for four consecutive years was extremely difficult and sad. I did feel that I was able to get some closure in saying a hopeful “see you later” to some of my friends, co-workers, and supervisors, in anticipation of a possibly delayed graduation ceremony that we had already heard rumblings of being canceled.
After the 6-hour drive home to New York City, I was so happy and grateful to be greeted by the open arms of my family. I have been able to spend the days with my charismatic four-person family consisting of me, my younger sister Addison, our mom Ashlea, and our dad Marc. We have found a couple of pockets in lower Manhattan where we can walk or run at a minimum of 9 feet away from others. We have also converted our living room into a partial pilates/yoga/weights space, where we do 45-minute exercises following YouTube videos or intensive training videos from the Nike Training App (now free in an effort to help people stay active while also remaining indoors).
On my first Saturday back, we played Jenga for hours, followed by card games and a quick run between a break in the pouring rain.
I did some Home and Garden Television (HGTV) inspired projects the weekend I moved back home and built two "work at home" spaces for me and my sister (you can see mine in the middle photo at the bottom of this article!) so that we can both do our homework and other work while having our own spaces close to but separate from each other.
I have started my online classes, where I call in and participate in Zoom-based conversations. It is taking some time to get used to it, but I am so appreciative of the adaptive work my professors have done to keep our classes engaging, informative, and accessible. It is nice to have some semblance of a routine again.
Each day looks oddly different and exactly the same. I wake up and make coffee, passing by my parents’ room, where I can hear my dad on the phone working from the new standing desk that he built near the spare window in his room. I patter down the steps and hear the soft murmur of a news anchor introducing the morning’s next story.
My mom is at her desk tucked away between the kitchen and the living room, reading emails from concerned parents at the local public high school where she works.
I pour coffee over ice and head back upstairs to my room, where I log onto my first class of the day, my 8:10 am biology lecture. My sister is across the way. She’s already snoozed her alarm once and will do so again before she wakes up to Skype into her first class of the week for her senior year of high school.
We find space in the day for walks, runs, reading, walking circles in our little backyard, and making dinner from the things we have stored in the freezer and fridge. There are FaceTime appointments with friends and family, and big group chats that keep me in touch with my loved ones from school, who have now returned to their homes all around the country. We share funny stories and reach out in moments of isolation.
And every single night at 7:00 my family stands on the sidewalk, neighbors poke their heads out the window, stand in their doorways or peer down from their rooftops and we cheer, banging pots and pans, singing and clapping, and one guy down the street always rings his cowbell, to publicly thank all of the healthcare workers on the front lines working to protect our communities.
There is no real way to tie a neat bow atop all of my thoughts about these changes, but one thing I know for sure is that things will never be the same, and right now that is the only thing there is to know.
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