How are things in your corner of the world?
Like it or not, we are every one of us smack in the middle of a worldwide, historic event. How it will ultimately change our world is yet unknown. While we are here living it, we have a unique opportunity to leave a gift for our future selves, our children, maybe even historians.
Document these days.
Virtually everyone has a camera with them at all times in the form of a cellphone. Now is the time to use it. Photographic perfection is not the goal. Documentation and story-telling is all you are after here. A couple super basic quick tips: Get in close for those details. Pull back for the big, documentary picture. Do both. Don't clean up first, because these are real moments of our real days, and I don't know about you, but that reality in my home is far from tidy and perfect.
I'm here in Snohomish County, Washington where we are a few miles from the epicenter of COVID19 in the United States. We have now been ordered by the Governor to stay home. It's best for everyone, and while it's unsettling, strange and changes nearly everything as we know it, it also presents a unique opportunity. Since so much has changed all at once, there are an endless number of new things to document about our days now.
A partial list of things to photograph to get you started:
- Learning at home. What does the set up look like in your home? Papers everywhere? Workbooks? Computer station? What do you have going?
- Morning. How has your morning routine changed? In my home, we have been starting the day with play. We sleep in later than on a regular day, there's no rush to get ready to get out the door. It's more relaxed, even as we wish for our old routine.
- Cleaning supplies. Do you have hand sanitizer stationed around your home? Are you teaching life skills like washing dishes or scrubbing floors or doing laundry to the little people in your life?
- Staying connected. Are you maintaining relationships with friends, grandparents and others via electronic devices? Photograph these conversations for a sweet memory later. Are you or your kids writing letters? Taking a trip to the mailbox? Take a pic!
- Getting outside. Are you able to play outside in your yard? Go for walks as a family? Draw with sidewalk chalk? Dance in the rain? What are you doing to get some outside time?
- Reading. Kids and books. Storytime. E-readers. Receiving a package of books in the mail?
- Family dinners. Have you had more chances than previously to sit down and have a family meal together?
- Games. We are learning chess in our house. We also have favorites like Clue and Sleeping Queens. Plus puzzles, lots and lots of puzzles.
- Cooking and baking. Kids in the kitchen. Families cooking together. The messes, the measuring, the chopping, the final product.
- Things that have changed. For us, the biggest adjustment has been an empty calendar. One by one activities and events have been cancelled, leaving us with a strangely blank calendar. This is picture-worthy, along with gear sitting unused or supplies staying shelved.
- Innovation. My kids' dance school has converted to live online classes. Their running club is switching home lessons. These are things worth documenting too. Hip hop in your living room? Science experiments at the dining room table? What do you have going on at home that's new?
- Gardening. Planting a garden for the first time or the fiftieth? Photograph what you are planting, and again as it grows.
- Pets! All the pets. Pet care, pet snuggles, super long walks, or dare I say, a new addition?
- An empty toilet paper roll just before it's changed. Because, if there's a sort-of-funny icon to this crisis so far, it has to be the community quest for toilet paper.
- Grocery shopping. Holy cow, have you been to Costco lately? Maybe we don't want to remember these lines, but they sure were epic. And now social distance line management, with lines wrapping around buildings. Something to remember, yes?
- Working from home. What does that look like for you? Snap a pic of your work station. Or your couch, or whatever your set up may be.
- And finally, sort out your self-timer, and grab a family portrait at home. On the front steps, at the table, the couch, wherever it speaks to you and feels like home. After all, home is where we are all going to be for awhile.
Stay home. Stay safe.
We will get through this. We don't know yet how long that will take. We do know we will all be changed. Let's document that change together. At the end of this, whenever that may be, you will have a precious collection of images of how we all pulled through. When that happens, print print print! Make a book, individual prints, anything to get them out of that phone and into your family historical records.
