Atrophied Skills

It has been a full year of small groups, small gatherings, much quiet.  With a few major exceptions like Benjamin's wedding last October, we have not really exercised our hosting skills in the usual ways, and last week when we put together the outdoor seder, I noticed how out of shape I felt.

It wasn't that I personally worked that hard. Jon did almost all the cooking, Cookie did most of the Passover preparations including all the charoset and the salt water and the seder plate, Karen made a fantastic matzah ball soup.  We set up everything in the front yard at Mom's house (the new Outdoor Cafe since about the end of last summer), but we kept it pretty simple.  Jon moved more picnic tables over there with the loader, Alissa and I brought all the tablecloths (borrowed from Anna) and dishes (from the Common House) and created a festive space.

What struck me was the feeling afterward. Just an unusual amount of fatigue.  Even Rebecca went to bed early, noting that being social was tiring.  In the old days, we would barely have noticed that we had just created an event for twenty.  The next night we found ourselves making dinner for twelve, unexpectedly, and I was a little more prepared for the fatigue.  This is just family. It's not even people we don't know or have to impress.

We have become so accustomed to having lots of down time.  Couch time.  Quiet time. We have adopted the routine of happy introverts, barely ever needing to be sociable with more than ourselves.  I expect that our socializing muscles will start to be used more, pretty soon, and it will be interesting to see if we like that or if we just wish we could go back inside where there are only three of us.  As the summer unfolds, I expect that the potlucks and various annual gatherings and common meals will resume and we will remember what it was like to be friendly with multiple people simultaneously. 

It seems amazing that we live in this community that ate meals together at least twice a week for 20 years, and then we just stopped.  Our farm and family used to host fairly large scale events, and that ended.  It feels lucky that we planned and executed the PVF reunion in the fall of 2019, a three day extravaganza with meals and meeting and dancing with as many as 100 people at a time.

I wonder whether this pandemic year has changed our socializing capabilities or whether we have discovered that we like the quiet or whether this was just a blip and we will go back to our old ways.  I am pretty sure I will never attend the same number of meetings that I used to.  Those days are over.