Mary Clay Morgan: Our Smaller World
Being Together While We’re Apart
Because we all miss our Fondren family, here are our Sequester Stories—a series of stories and photos by Fondren folks sharing what our “pandemic lives” are about.
Ellie, Mary Clay, and Margaret Morgan dressed in red for Pentecost.
The beginning of March seems like a lifetime ago. The first week of March, my law firm held a firm-wide retreat in Orlando, so I was travelling the first half of spring break. Matt was supposed to take a work trip to Mexico the second half of spring break, and I had booked a ticket to tag along for fun while the kids stayed with their grandparents. While I was looking forward to the trip, I had a nagging guilt about our travel plans because I was missing out on spending quality time with my children during their school vacation. The night before we were supposed to fly to Mexico, Tom Hanks announced his diagnosis, the NBA shut down, then the rest of the country followed suit. Since then, I've had all the family time I've ever wanted!
As I reflect back on our time strictly sheltering in place from March through the end of May, I think we learned to appreciate the ways in which our world got smaller and turned inward. Busy weeknight activities were replaced by long neighborhood walks. We've spent countless hours following Margaret down the street on her scooter, throwing rocks off the bridge near our house, hunting for wild blackberries, and getting to know our neighbors, many of whom we'd never had a conversation with in the three years we've lived in Fondren. Our OrangeTheory group gym classes were replaced with solitary outdoor runs through the streets of Fondren. We've missed Wednesday nights at church, and especially singing with the choir, but I've spent more time playing the piano over the past few months than I have in many years. Doing yoga in our living room helped save my sanity when the stress of trying to work a full-time job from home while also homeschooling would get the best of me.
Once the school year ended, life in quarantine got much easier. And in recent weeks, we've started to cautiously inch back towards normalcy. The girls love swimming, so we've been spending a lot of time out by our pool. We went to the beach with my family in early June. It was unnerving to observe so many people in Florida taking few precautions against the virus, but we did our best to stay in our family circle. The kids were so happy to spend time with their cousins, and we all needed that change of scenery. We are all crossing our fingers that school will be able to resume in the fall (especially our cat Coco, who really misses having the house to himself all day).
We miss all of our Fondren friends, and I'm grateful that we can start gathering outside on Sunday mornings. We look forward to seeing many of you soon!
