Christina deVillier: Getting Creative for the Socially Distant Winter
Instead of resigning ourselves to our bunkers until the “cure” comes along, let’s challenge ourselves to reimagine how we show up for each other during the holidays and the winter.
Christina deVillier is a writer, a gardener, and a fourth-generation explorer of northeast Oregon's mountains, canyons, and communities.
A few afternoons ago my husband and I socially-distantly gathered with two of our neighbors and their dogs on their porch. We brought the beef-and-kohlrabi deep-dish; they made a salad and broke out the sake. We sat six feet apart and sipped and ate and traded stories. It was chilly—late November is no joke out here in Northeast Oregon—but we watched the sun go down together and imagined a winter of socially-distant get-togethers.
These neighbors happen to have a riverside studded with potential bonfires: “a whole season’s worth,” they joked. Over the summer, they got support from the Natural Resources Conservation Service to clear the junipers out of their riparian corridor, between the cottonwoods and aspens are many piles of aromatic slash.
Around here, bonfires are a mainstay of winter parties. My neighbors always light a big pile on Christmas Day. Last year’s was an epic cremation of two huge cottonwood snags that had fallen in the spring.
On the chilly porch, gesturing with our mugs, we strategized: if you lit the big Christmas bonfire and also several of the juniper piles, so that people could spread out and move around, wouldn’t that be safe(ish)? With responsible precautions in place, couldn't we bonfire the winter away? Bonfire parties are warmer than porch potlucks! And bonfires feel like the appropriate centerpiece for winter gatherings, anyway. There’s no more ancient strategy for counterbalancing the darkness and isolation of midwinter than a big pile of fire.
I want to be clear that I’m not endorsing this (or any other) specific strategy for gathering together this winter as the Covid-19 crisis continues to worsen. Please refer to public health experts and your own good judgement as you decide whether and how to spend time with one another “in the real world” in the upcoming weeks and months.
Oregon has instituted its current two-week “freeze” for a reason: the coronavirus is spreading fast and some hospitals are overburdened and people are ill and dying. This pandemic is serious, and I hope you take it seriously. I do, and my family and friends (most of them) do too, weighing the relative risks of various activities and following public health precautions if and when we gather: masks, handwashing, good airflow, small groups, staying home if we’re sneezy, measuring six feet between the chairs, and/or staying outside.
Staying outside was easier, of course, in the warmer months, which is why questions about how to spend the winter have begun to feel quite urgent, to me and many of the people I love. All of us dread the idea of accidentally spreading the virus to our loved ones. Catching it doesn’t sound like fun either, even for those of us who are younger.
Of course, very reasonably, we also dread spending the holidays and the long winter alone, seeing each other only through screens. We dread the possibility that our loved ones will feel abandoned. I have friends who live alone and haven’t hugged another human being since the spring; thank goodness for their dogs. I have other friends who live in multi-generational households and have to work and simply can’t socially distance given their inadequate and unraveling social safety nets.
All of this is a lot to balance.
Some of us are especially vulnerable to infection; many of us, too, are already struggling with deep loneliness in our “safe” isolation. Indeed, Americans were experiencing an “epidemic” of loneliness even before the pandemic; in a sense, coronavirus has simply drawn our attention to a more systemic and existential problem.
In any case, taking each other’s mental health as seriously as we take our physical health—both now and into the post-pandemic future—means finding, and creating, low-risk opportunities to spend time with one another.
Recognizing this, nearly every time we’ve spoken since it began to get cold, my friends and family and neighbors (and perhaps yours, too) have slipped into brainstorming: thinking creatively about our future together as we gaze into the long (out here, very long) dark winter ahead. We are staring down these dark days and asking each other how the hell are we going to take care of each other now?
To my mind, taking care of each other means taking public health precautions, as much as possible, as advised by the experts and directed by the CDC. Taking care of each other also means making sure our loved ones feel seen, cared for, and held through what looks to be a lonely and dangerous holiday season and winter. How do we balance these needs?
We can do it, I think, if we work creatively, together. It’s time to stretch our brains.
I’m a poet, among other things, and one of the truisms of the writing world is that “rules are generative.” What does this mean? Simply that for many of us, creativity flourishes with (some) structure. Guidelines and rules, if we engage them proactively, can distill and channel our creative energy. And if we apply that powerful creativity to our shared problems, I suspect that we can grow synergistic and innovative responses to the challenges of this time that serve all of us. Maybe we’ll even experiment our way into some truth or practice so good it’s worth continuing after Covid—some tactics for addressing our more existential loneliness and precarity.
So here’s what I am endorsing:
instead of resigning ourselves to our bunkers until the “cure” comes along, let’s challenge ourselves to reimagine how we show up for each other during the holidays and the winter. How do we best take care of one another within the structure the pandemic has defined for us? Let’s understand Covid-19, and its associated restrictions and rules, as a call to get really creative about the ways we support our families and communities (and ask for support) in the dark months ahead.
How might that look? Well, that’s where you come in, and your communities, with your boundaries and your synergy and your judgement and particular needs and restrictions and your imagination.
Maybe it looks like a bonfire, or a conference-call book club, or a BYOBPB outdoor film screening (BYOPB = Bring Your Own Big Pile of Blankets). Maybe it looks like carving the turkey (or smoking the salmon) over Zoom, then masking up to deliver a plate to your homebound elders. Maybe this is the perfect time to cultivate some pen pals, to share your art or co-create some, to demand universal basic income, to volunteer time to your favorite nonprofit or community foundation, to DJ out in the yard for passers-by (shout-out to Rozzell), to reevaluate your missed connections and commit to growing a new friendship.
We’ve been calling for good self-care during this difficult time; let’s emphasize community care, too. We have many concerns and contexts and needs to balance. Given this structure, these rules, if we bring our creativity to bear, we can be sure that it will serve us—maybe long into the future, beyond Covid-19, when we’ll still all need the best we have to offer.
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