25 Nov December at Experienced Goods Thrift Shop

by Jennie Reichman

Looking back over the articles I have written for this newsletter, I’ve noticed how I tend to track time by the seasons and what is going on in the natural world. January: It’s snowing. Again. March: Snowing, but the light is shifting toward longer days.  May: Leaves on the trees!  July: Garden, garden and more garden. October: Foliage, harvest and a chill in the air, cooking stews and baking bread. Now it’s December and the muted colors of grey, brown and pine green outside echo my desire to hunker down and appreciate the slower metabolism of winter.

But wait! The holidays are upon us! Just writing that makes my heart rate go up a little, so ingrained is the belief that Thanksgiving and Christmas and all they entail requires a packed schedule of planning, shopping, cooking and festivities. THIS year, however, . . . we all know about this year. The year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the year of a very fraught national election, the year everything we have taken for granted as normal has been turned on its head.  Perhaps hardest of all has been forgoing plans to gather with family and friends to celebrate, knowing that this year it’s more loving and thoughtful to keep each other safe from potential infection.

In so many ways this has been a year of learning to wait, of having patience and tolerating uncertainty. I got a healthy dose of that lesson in early November when I woke up one morning with a sore throat. Allergies, I thought as I drank my morning coffee and made plans for the day. It was a Monday: Experienced Goods was closed and I had grocery shopping to do and an appointment to go to. Then the sneezing, runny nose and congestion kicked in, tell-tale signs of a head cold. And because it’s this particular year, because we’ve all been drilled in the importance of treating cold symptoms as possible COVID symptoms, I cancelled my appointment, called my doctor’s office and made an appointment to be tested that afternoon. I also called Karen and explained the situation; to keep my co-workers and anyone else I came into contact with safe, I could not return to work until I got a negative test result. In the before times, I would have taken a day off, two at most, to get over the worst of the cold symptoms and then returned to work with a box of tissues and a supply of cough drops in my bag. But everything is different this year and I would have to wait, 3-5 days said my doctor’s office.

This was also the week of the presidential election, and like many people, I was consumed with worry about the result. It was clear we would not know a definitive outcome for several days after the election as votes were counted, a process I likened to watching the movie The Exorcist for the first time when I was in college: mostly with my eyes closed but sneaking a peek now and then. So, more waiting. Waiting to find out who would be leading the country for the next four years. Waiting to find out if I had a disease that has killed hundreds of thousands of people so far. Worried that if my test was positive, I might have exposed my co-workers and the many people that shop at Experienced Goods to that disease. Waiting and feeling awful and binge watching The Umbrella Academy on Hulu. Also REALLY missing being at work. Now, I have had quite a variety of jobs in my life, some strange, some boring, some relatively tolerable. I would not say that I ever missed being at any of them when I had time off. Until now. I missed my co-workers, I missed how we laugh and work so well together. I missed the ever changing and fascinating variety of goods we sell. I missed the quirky, you-can’t-make-it-up energy of our customers and how much they appreciate us and the shop. I wanted to be back in the thick of it, not stuck at home waiting, waiting, waiting.

I called my doctor’s office on Thursday, no test result. I called again on Friday, no result. Tests were being sent to the Mayo Clinic due to a problem with the lab at UVM in Burlington, so I was informed it would probably be Monday at the earliest. At this point I was feeling good enough to work on some sewing projects and do a little yardwork, so I used those activities to help me embrace the state of uncertainty, and to remember that my job at Experienced Goods would be there for me whenever I was able to return.  By Saturday, we had a new president, and by Monday afternoon, I had my test result: Negative! Two reasons to be overjoyed, two reasons to dance a little jig and hug my cat!

At Experienced Goods we are selling holiday decorations at a mad clip, people are shopping for gifts and party clothes (Dress up at home! It’s fun!) and despite everything there is a festive mood in the air.  During this extremely abnormal time, there is something wonderfully normal about that, and after a year of too many aberrations, too much waiting and too much stress, normal feels like the best gift of all.