Two years ago this weekend, I was writing about experiencing shiva from the inside. My mother had just died and the world had turned upside-down. I felt tender, thin-skinned, permeated with grief. How could the world keep turning with her gone?

One year ago this weekend, I took my son to Boston to see his cousin in the national touring production of Fiddler on the Roof. (She played Chava. She was dazzling.) We had Shabbat dinner with family, then all trooped into the Emerson Theater.

I remember consulting with friends beforehand about whether it was safe to go. Surely we were safe from the virus here? I decided to bring Clorox wipes in my purse, to use on the gas pump handle on the Mass Pike on the way home, just in case.

That was the end of the old normal. I look now at the selfie of my kid, my friend, and me in the theater and I shudder: we were surrounded by so many people! And no one was masked, of course. None of us knew anything about masks, then. Not here.

If someone had told me that half a million people would die in the USA alone, I'm not sure I would have believed them. If someone had told me that there would be three working vaccines within a year, I'm not sure I would have believed them.

Sometimes I can't believe Mom's only been gone for two years. It feels longer. I think because this last year has been interminable, and grief-soaked, and horrifying, and it's almost unthinkable that she never knew anything about any of this. 

Sometimes I can't believe that Mom's been gone for two whole years already. The first year was a fog of grief. The second year was... well, a fog of grief, again: not intimate and personal, but global. Time takes on a strange quality, when there is grief.

This morning I spotted a first brave spring shoot beginning to push up through the frozen soil in my front yard. It was 22 and windy here today: nothing else is beginning to green yet, but this one hyacinth is eager for the growing light. I am, too.

I'm eager for the day when we can shed our winter garb again. When we can greet one another outdoors -- even if it's still masked and at a safe social distance, again. And oh, to think of the day when we will be able to embrace again...! 

Something I used to take so for granted. A simple hug. The clasp of a hand. A tight embrace from a friend. I miss it more than I can say. I miss it the way I miss Mom. I won't see Mom again in this life. But someday, the rest of us will hug again.