A few weeks ago I was at the annual Blueberry Jam festival. My boyfriend and I pulled our car up to check in as others milled about, bought drinks and found their seats. We parked in the field, grabbed a blanket and some snacks and made our way to the ticket booth. As we checked in I looked into the field where the festival was being held. Dozens upon dozens of people were sitting on blankets or beach chairs, drinks in hand as they chatted with friends. As it was being held out in the open field and because the numbers of the festival met the standard amount allowed at the time, masks weren’t necessary.
The excitement was palpable.
How long had it been since you could go out with a friend? How long had it been since we could go to concerts, like real, live concerts? With music and laughter? How long had it been since we could bump into a friend and see their face? Their whole face? No muffled words, no “CAN YOU SAY THAT AGAIN?”, no awkward distancing, no nodding in response to someone just because you actually had no idea what they had said. Everywhere I looked, people were smiling. They were greeting their friends and waving to people they had never met. There was an unspoken, unanimous joy among everyone in the crowd.
As we walked around to find a place to sit I heard people saying things like, “It’s so nice to see you again!” Or “we can finally sit together!” Or “I love being able to see your face!”
My boyfriend and I met up with my friend Em, laid out our blanket and talked until the music started. The whole evening, people kept hugging (yeah, like, in real life), moving their chairs around, getting up to say hi to people they hadn’t seen in months.
It’s weird to think back to 18 months ago, before the world flipped upside down. It feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? We would watch live music or to head to work or to a friends house without a second thought. There was never a moment of wondering how long will we get to do this for (thinking of you HRM folks)? We would dance and meet at bars and hike mountains. Businesses would have their doors wide open and we didn’t have to stand six feet apart and we never stopped to think about the goodness of it all. At least, I didn’t. I would go out to eat with people I love and hop on buses and shake a stranger-turned-friend’s hand and I never had to think about sanitizing my hands or wondering if someone else’s breath had touched me.
We didn’t realize, I think, all that we, quite literally, had at our fingertips.
And while I don’t want this to be another blog with the “C” word, I’m not sure there’s any way around it. I know we’ve talked about it a lot but I’m not sure we can do much anymore without acknowledging it.
Anyway, so the world turns upside down and here I am, 18 months later, sitting at the Blueberry Jam festival. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve seen a crowd gather together and hug. There are some hand sanitizer bottles hanging around, for sure, but people around me seem less timid. Less afraid. The joy of being together outweighs pretty much any worry we could have, I’d say.
A band finishes up their set and a new one makes their way on stage. They’re young and their songs carry a more upbeat rhythm than the previous performers. Everyone around me is smiling and I lean over to my boyfriend to say, “wow, they’re amazing.” And I think about a friend of mine that I worked with last summer; we were sitting together one day and she said, “had I known the last time I danced would have been the last time I danced, I would have been out all night long.” At the time, we smiled and then frowned (you know that face? Where you laugh and then the sad reality sits in? That was us.). How true is that. If we had known the last trip we took would have been the last “normal” trip for a long time, what would we have done differently? Been kinder at the airport? Taken in every view? If we had danced with our friends and gone home early to get some rest, would we have stayed out a bit later instead, just to savour the brevity of it all? If we had known that we would be separated from loved ones for months or years at a time, would we have laughed louder, put our phones down, held hands?
And as I’m thinking about this I see a woman stand up. She’s got a drink in her hand and she starts to dance on her own. At this point in the night, the sun has set and there’s nothing but the twinkling lights on the stage and the stars shinning above us. The woman is probably thirty feet closer to the stage than we are so I can just see her silhouette as she twirls and tilts her head back to laugh.
Are we even allowed to dance? I think. What rules apply when we’re outside and still six feet apart?
And then I see the woman wave her hand for her friend to join her. She’s still dancing and laughing and she’s wiggling her fingers at a friend. The friend stands up, starts dancing, makes her way toward her friend and they dance out of view. I look behind me and see that others have started to dance where they are, with their groups, in their spots. I think about how this has been such a longtime coming. We’ve been waiting for months to hug our friends and go to concerts and, my gosh, to just dance.
I pick up my phone to my notes app, tears brimming in my eyes and type out the words:
And maybe that’s the way we come out of all of our bad things:
dancing
I set my phone down and watched as people danced and twirled and I thought of how much time we waste and how precious and rare and wonderful it is to dance with someone under a star-filled sky. I thought of how life is always throwing curveballs at us and how this will not be the last one. We have learned to pivot and we will have to learn to pivot again. But what if, admits all of it it, we could just dance when the time came? What if we could tilt our heads back and let laughter escape our lips on a warm summers night because we get this one, wild chance to dance our way out of a pandemic.
Yes, we will have to stay on our toes. We can’t seem to go too long in this life without the unexpected happening. But when it come- the difficulties, the loss, whatever it may be- I hope you stand up, beckon a friend over and dance your way through it.
Sending you love and light.
Written by: Annika Phillips