“Hi friend,” I said. “You look lovely today. I like your earrings.”

And so began the kind of conversation you at that time with people who you hadn’t seen much in person since The Before Times. Remember this phase of the pandemic/post pandemic? A season of repair, kind of like what happens in a community after a tornado comes through, except our disaster bulldozed relationships instead of infrastructure. The feeling of being out in public for me ranged from unexpected joy to subtle awkwardness to exhaustion. To some extent it still feels a little that way.

I made my re-entry into the world of strangers and distant friends at Black Cup, writing short pieces and Anchorage Daily News stories as part of a collaboration with Anchorage Museum called the Neighbors Project.

Many of you receiving this newsletter were part of that project, either as story subjects, advisors or as participants in our public writing sessions. The stories and writings have been collected in a Chatter Marks museum journal and you can get free copy at our reading event, which will be Friday, March 1, at Seed Lab, at 6:30 p.m. The magazine contains a pocket zine made by artist Jimmy Riordan that publishes short personal narratives from our writing groups. Live readings begin at 7 p.m. (If you were part of a public writing group and would like to read, please get in touch by Friday, 2/23!)

Contributors to the project include: photographers Loren Holmes, Adan Hernandez, Marc Lester, Emily Mesner, Anne Raup and Bill Roth, as well as work by writers Sarah Freije, Jen Clark, Kate Ginsbach, Kirsten Merrell Kippen, Valerie Kern, Emily Mesner, Sonia Santaella and Brooke Norsted.

The year-long residency that produced this work was a deep look into the ways the pandemic changed us. It began in response to an ugly shift in Anchorage that occurred as the city came undone over covid restrictions. I’d been observing public life in Anchorage as a journalist for 20 years – but the level of vitriol that overtook the city in 2020 felt like a beloved family member having a psychotic break. The fabric of families and relationships frayed. Fear, disruption, misinformation and meanness ruled, as hospital beds filled with patients and obituaries piled up.

In early 2021, as I interviewed people across the political spectrum for this project, I began to notice how every story touched on two essential human impulses: longing for connection and grief over disconnection. There was the wife who said goodbye to her husband via Facetime as he died of covid but was comforted by a stream of gifts delivered to her doorstep by Twitter friends. A pastor learned to give Zoom sermons in an empty church but found himself visiting the homes of his elderly parishioners. One woman who took on her brothers’ children while his wife fought cancer. Another made peace with missing her grandchild’s birth because of the hospital’s limit on visitors. A teenager driven into depression found hope passing along kind messages as he worked a drive-thru. These stories were personal ones, but thousands of people experienced similar longings and losses. No wonder the community had lost itself.

Days after I ran into Kelly at the coffee shop, a hand-addressed envelope showed up in my mailbox. On the front was a quote from the French philosopher Simone Weil that read “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Inside, she’d written a note, thanking me for making her feel noticed. I tucked the card in the frame of my mirror.

I thought about how years of semi-isolation refracted our self perceptions. Who are we when we’re not reflected back in the eyes of our neighbors?  What happens without the essential warmth that comes with seeing familiar faces –  even just the mail carrier coming up the walk with a bone in his pocket for your dog, the cashier at the corner store who greets you with a “How are you, mama?,” the old friend who notices your earrings? I know sometimes over the the pandemic few years, like Kelly, I felt like a ghost. I wonder, have we recovered?

The card sat in my mirror for months before I looked up Simone Weil’s writing. I discovered she was a post-war religious mystic who focused in part on the power of human connection. The act of giving attention to another person and simply accepting them is similar to a prayer, she said.

“People can love their neighbors by emptying themselves, becoming ready to receive their neighbor in all his or her naked truth, asking their neighbor: “What are you going through?” she wrote.

As I wrote last year, I mostly sat in threadbare chair near the windows at Black Cup. After a while, the smell of breakfast burritos and the scrape of old wood chairs against the floor felt like home. Josh, the barista, learned my order. Terry, an ethics professor at UAA, kept my same coffee shop hours. After a while, we started sharing a table.

I mentioned my reading to Terry. He lit up right away, listing  various ethicists’ theories on connection, filling my head with questions. Despite the ugliness, is it actually good for democracy that so many people feel so passionately right now? Would it be worse if people were indifferent? Are the fundamental connections between people diminished when we can’t see each other’s faces? Might empathy transform a society?

I finished my coffee and headed out on an errand to buy bread at Fire Island, driving through the spring grit of Midtown, ravens swooping over gray snow berms. Every building along my path, the old Blockbuster, Taco King, even Queen’s Cleaner, held a trove of tiny memories – passing interactions that built a sense of the familiar and taught me how to exist in community. I’d yet to returned to many my old haunts. I was out of practice. I some ways, I still am.

The bakery was crowded when I got there. As I stood in a line, I saw Janis, whose family runs the business. Once, a decade earlier, when I came in shortly after having my son, she gave me a chocolate cake because, she said, a woman who has given birth deserves a present. I hadn’t seen her much for three years. She noticed me in line and offered a warm challah roll across the counter. “Tear off a piece,’” she said. I did. As it melted on my tongue, it was both no big deal and everything.  

The post This time four years ago, Anchorage had no idea what was coming appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

One of the themes that’s come up a lot in my reporting about culture in pandemic times is innovation. In this case, Dr. Liu has been trying a novel treatment for long COVID symptoms. He was awarded a grant to fund a pilot study out of his Anchorage office. His most fervent advocates are the patients he’s successfully treated.

Here’s how the story begins:

On a recent evening inside an office at Alaska Regional Hospital, Dr. Luke Liu watched an ultra thin needle move on an ultrasound screen as he guided it into the neck of his patient, Becky Hallstrom. Gently, he pushed the plunger, releasing a numbing agent called bupivacaine.

His needle’s target: a collection of nerves known as the stellate ganglion. His goal, using a treatment that will soon be part of a pilot study, was to help Hallstrom get closer to the life she had before a COVID-19 infection turned it upside down.

Liu, an anesthesiologist who specializes in complicated pain and nerve problems, has become a doctor of last resort for hundreds of Alaskans — and a growing number of patients from Outside — suffering from disabling conditions that started after they were infected with COVID-19.

The 300 or more people with long COVID who have appeared in Liu’s waiting room have an array of crippling problems. Among them: fatigue, cognitive issues, persistent loss of taste and smell, tinnitus, depression, breathing, mobility and cardiac issues. Most are frustrated and desperate, having been to many other doctors without successful treatment. People have fainted in his office. They have hobbled in with canes. Two patients lost feeling in their throats and lacked gag reflexes. One man didn’t recognize his wife. Another didn’t recognize his co-workers. Others, people born in Anchorage, can’t navigate the city anymore without GPS.

“We are talking about people who before COVID, they were athletic, pretty much at the top of their career, they hiked, they could do everything,” he said. “Now they’re in bed, they can’t do very simple cognitive things.”

In treating them, he says he’s made some discoveries he hopes might help other patients. He’s among thousands of doctors working to define and treat long COVID, which the government estimates impacts between 7.7 million and 23 million Americans, including a million who can no longer work. The state doesn’t track long COVID, but a University of Alaska survey released in August found one in three Alaskans who said they were infected with COVID had long-term health effects.

Read on.

The post NEIGHBORS: An Anchorage doctor’s office has become a destination for patients whose lives have been upended by long COVID appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Sarah Freije, an Anchorage-based family photographer, made a series of photos during the pandemic that showed images of mothers as saints, as a meditation on the extreme overwhelming and deep sacrifices that came in the era of pandemic parenting. We decided to combine them in the opinion section of the Anchorage Daily News.

A blessing for mothers in pandemic times

Blessed is every coiled soccer sock you unroll before putting it in the wash.

And the peanut butter and jelly sandwich you throw away, uneaten.

Blessed are you for all you have given up, the minutes of pleasure or accomplishment or peace you haven’t felt, because you have been thinking about what your children need and how you might protect them.

Blessed is your trip to the customer service counter to get tooth fairy cash.

Bless your positive attitude. Bless every single secret, negative thought.

Blessed are you, night nurse, pouring medicine into a teaspoon in a darkened kitchen, lying down in the single bed with the dinosaur sheets, dozing between coughs, rising at the regular time, taking another damn COVID test.

Blessed is the custodian of the passwords, the under-qualified pre-algebra tutor, the resident specialist called to unclog the sink and decide whether the wrist is broken, if the dog has been poisoned by Oreos or whether the fish is dead or asleep. Bless you, too, for somehow making soup for your mom and putting it on her porch.

Bless you, originator of The Calendar, filler of the crockpots (clatter of frozen meatballs and glug of sauce). Bless you for thinking ahead. You are always thinking ahead. What if you didn’t have to think ahead?

Blessed are you, on a Zoom call with a boss who could never understand the knot in your gut, on alert for the sound of distressed children you can’t attend to. May you find relief. May we all find understanding. May you find a better job.

Bless you, crying in the car when you hear that song that you once fell in love to. Bless you, asleep with the phone in your hand. Bless the things you wanted for your life before all this. May you find the time. Just a little time to think about what you want. What do you even want?

Blessed are you, alone in the Safeway aisle in the middle of the day, forgetting what you came in for. Remember this: The rest of us are right here with you.

The post NEIGHBORS: A blessing for mothers in pandemic times appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Then came Thanksgiving 2020. Three of her four family members tested positive for COVID-19. They bought dinner. She put the turkey in the oven but forgot to remove the wrapping.

“Nobody could smell the dang plastic bag melting,” she said. “That Thanksgiving was really a bust.”

The next year, as the delta variant surge filled hospitals, they gathered with some friends, but it was small and cautious. This year, for the Marx family and many others in Anchorage, the holiday guest list is finally what it used to be.

Over the last year, life in the city has inched back to normal for many people who had their usual routines hijacked by the pandemic. COVID risk hasn’t disappeared, but with the availability of vaccines and COVID treatments, residents are returning to the office, going to the movies, rejoining gyms, going out for dinner and gathering indoors without masks. For many, this Thanksgiving is going to be one that feels like it did in “before times,” though there are some lessons carried forward from the COVID years.

“It was an isolating, miserable experience having the pandemic. It caused upheaval for every single person. We all share that, but we all felt it differently,” said Aimee’s husband, Rob. “It’s a little bit more special this year because we went through that and we get to share things back together again.”

Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer, will be setting seven places at her table this year. They won’t be taking COVID tests before dinner because they’re vaccinated and there’s no one high-risk on the guest list. Last year, she took an ER shift while her family gathered with some neighbors outdoors and did some ice fishing. It’s important to take care to mitigate risks for COVID and other infections, she said. But Thanksgiving is important too.

“Life is precious, time is short. I don’t want people to miss out on opportunities to be connected as a family,” she said.

There is still a risk for COVID transmission, she said, but it’s relatively low in most parts of Alaska. Alaska’s hospitals, though, are as full right now as they were during the delta surge, she said. Flu, COVID and RSV, a virus that can have serious complications for children under 2, are driving the high number of admissions. There are also more patients suffering from mental illness and illnesses that went undiagnosed over the pandemic. The difference between this year and last year is that all the pressure isn’t on one set of health care workers, because the viruses and health problems lead to a wider variety of admissions.

“While the strain is a lot, everyone is able to help out in this kind of surge,” she said.

Most flu-like respiratory illnesses have a relatively short incubation period, Zink said. If people want to take extra care, they can wear masks for a few days before the holiday to minimize their risk of infection.

Zink encouraged Alaskans, especially those who are having elders and very young children at their dinners, to be vaccinated for flu, up-to-date on COVID boosters, not to attend if they have any symptoms of illness, and to be vigilant about handwashing. Taking a COVID test ahead of the gathering is also a good idea.

“This has been a long, hard couple of years. It’s not all about respiratory illness; it’s about the whole person, mental health and physical health,” she said.

This is the first year Colleen Bailey and her husband, Ryan, are having Thanksgiving in their new home in Eagle River. It’s also the first year they plan to host family rather than attending as guests.

“We have an actual house where I can have a dining room table and I have furniture and I have space for people,” she said. “I have already started putting up some decorations, I planned my ‘tablescape.’ ”

By “tablescape,” she means she’ll decorate with a navy blue tablecloth and a burlap runner, ornamental pumpkins, candles and apples, she said. She’s got her food prep plan mapped out far ahead of time.

“My husband may think I’m going a little overboard but I do not care,” she said.

The last two years haven’t been easy. She was laid off from her job at the Alaska Zoo. She decided to go back to school to become a lawyer. Looking back, she feels lucky to have a strong family.

“I get to show them my house and pamper them and make sure that they feel the level of gratitude that we have for their support,” she said. “Also feeding people is one of the greatest ways you can show them that you love them.”

Molly Johnson’s low-key COVID Thanksgiving last year totally changed the game for her. She’s not going back this year.

“In the past, we’ve traveled out of state and gone down to (her husband’s) family and there’ll be 20 rednecks in a double-wide and a lot of people with a lot of traditions,” she said.

But last year, in the interest of protecting her elderly parents while still including them, they had a small gathering. Instead of the big to-do last year, it was just her husband, son and parents. The turkey was small and they spatchcocked it, so it cooked faster. They didn’t dress up. They ate, they napped, they ate again.

“I had so much fun. Like it’s the first time I really enjoyed Thanksgiving in a long time,” she said. “We’ve never had a family gathering that was so intimate. And we got to, like, just really enjoy each other’s company.”

Upending the usual traditions gave her the opportunity to audit the energy she put into things automatically. Take, for example, her grandma’s Jell-O salad.

“That sucker takes like three days to make and an acre of refrigerator room and no one may ever see that salad again,” she said. “It might be just something that we show the picture and talk about.”

This year her Thanksgiving will be small again. “I don’t want to go back,” she said.

Sara Dykstra’s planning to have a familiar group of longtime friends over this holiday. Some of them haven’t been inside her house for two years She’s a vegetarian and is planning lots of sides. Her husband is smoking a turkey.

It’s only recently that they got back to the practice of getting together with friends for dinner. The pandemic years gave her quality alone time with her husband and children, which helped to distill what she found most important. But she’s got a new appreciation for seeing the faces of friends across the table.

“In Anchorage there are so many people who have come here and created family with the people that they connect with,” she said. “Some people have family here, but I don’t. Having your family be the people that you’ve met along the way, it is just so much more valuable and meaningful now.”

The post NEIGHBORS: After years of pandemic disruption, Alaskans are setting more places at the Thanksgiving table appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

But beyond that, mall shopping in winter is, for some people, a way to connect to the community and to feel connected to the world Outside. It’s a balm for the isolation that happens in the darkest season. Economists studying our retail outlook say brick and mortar retail peaked in 2015 and it may not recover for a long time. Malls are also moving away from pure retail into experiences, like restaurants and entertainment.

Here’s how the story begins:

Kristina Blackadar, 50, a branch manager at an Anchorage moving company, still has a hole in her heart where Nordstrom used to be.

Take bras, which aren’t easy to buy online. For decades she visited the Nordstrom lingerie department, where the same elegantly dressed woman would meet her in the dressing room with a tailor’s tape and return a stack of well-fitting foundations. Recently, on a trip to Las Vegas, Blackadar went to another Nordstrom. As she was being measured, she lamented the closure of her hometown store. “Let me guess,” the saleswoman said. “Alaska?”

“Just that very morning there were three people that had come into the bra department to stock up because of the lack of, you know, any good shopping here,” Blackadar said.

The change for shoppers in Anchorage isn’t just about one department at Nordstom. The store’s closure ahead of the pandemic was part of a wave of retail retraction across Alaska. Among the Anchorage clothing stores now gone: the Gap and Banana Republic in the 5th Avenue Mall and Forever 21 with its large Dimond Mall footprint. As the holiday season approaches, the experience of shopping and what’s available to buy has changed in major ways over the pandemic years. Economists project it’s unlikely to recover soon.

Nationally, retail expansion has been flat, and growth in e-commerce favored online shopping businesses with fewer workers, meaning a decline in retail employment. Overall the sector is projected to continue shrinking , according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Before the pandemic, the clothing sector was retracting across the U.S, but the pandemic accelerated that. It declined 38% during 2020 and 2021. In Alaska, retail positions peaked in 2015 and have been on the decline since, following the national trend, according to the state.

Some of that is due to a shrinking state population that’s changed the market and to technology – cashiers in some stores are being replaced by self-check-out, for example, Fried said. But, like in the rest of the country, much is related to a shift to e-commerce, which got a huge boost early in the pandemic, according to the state. Businesses selling sporting goods, books, electronics and appliances, and health and personal care products took a serious hit, according to the state. Clothing retailers in Alaska were hit hardest, declining almost a third between 2019 and 2020, mirroring the nation. Over that time period, Anchorage lost 10% of its retail positions. The sector is not projected to rebound to 2019 levels until 2030.

Read on.

The post NEIGHBORS: The pandemic years changed shopping in Anchorage. Maybe forever. appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Here’s how today’s story begins:

Inside James Strong’s new Midtown coffee shop, Bema Coffee, the freshly painted mural, new raw wood tables and espresso machine sat ready. He wanted to start serving locally roasted coffee.

“My only problem now is employees,” he said recently. “There’s absolutely no one to work.”

Strong also owns Sweet Caribou, the salad shop next door, and has been struggling with the labor shortage for years now. Early in the pandemic when businesses were limited by mandates and workers became eligible for enhanced unemployment, he thought no one was applying because they were making more money staying home. But those benefits ran out a long time ago. And the workers haven’t come back.

“I now believe there’s a lot of variables,” he said.

The labor shortage continues to burden employers in Anchorage and across the country, especially in retail, hospitality and food service. It’s also a fact of life for consumers who have become used to long drive-through lines, long waits and restaurants closing for two or more days a week. A lot of people are asking: where have the workers gone?

Read on.

The post NEIGHBORS: Where have the workers gone? appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Here’s how today’s story begins:

Annette Rearden discovered she had Hodgkin lymphoma in February of 2020. Within a few weeks, pandemic news turned regular life upside-down. Rearden faced a tidal wave of problems and decisions.

Her life was already full and busy. Her son, Atticus, was 9 and her daughter, Saoirse, was 4. She had been teaching in the nursing program at UAA. Very little was known about COVID-19. She learned she faced months of chemotherapy followed by radiation. She would lose her ability to fight infection. Then, schools closed.

That’s when her sister-in-law, Jessica Clarkson, proposed that her family and Annette’s family become a bubble, isolating together. Clarkson offered to take her children every other week while she underwent treatments. Everyone would isolate.

“I was like, you have got to do this and you can’t do this and be a parent while the kids are home and be a teacher,” Clarkson said. “You have to do you and only you right now. This is the only thing that I can do, Annette.”

Read on.

The post NEIGHBORS: Who helped you through? appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Bring a notebook and favorite writing tool. The workshop is free, sponsored by Anchorage Museum. Capacity is limited; registration required. Registration is for both sessions.  

10:30 a.m. to noon. Wednesday, Sept. 28 & Thursday, Sept. 29. At SeedLab, 111 W. 6th Ave, Anchorage.

Register here. Email with questions.

The post Elders: Join me for a free pandemic writing reflection workshop appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

For Koula Zajac Rodosthenous, the decision point came when the child care program she was working for changed so much during the pandemic she couldn’t recognize it.

For Julia Musser, it was when she realized teaching a COVID-19 pod school could be a permanent job.

For Lisa Stratford, it was after a year of feeling she couldn’t meet the needs of kindergartners who’d missed important socialization.

The longtime educators of young children in Anchorage all left their jobs at larger organizations to become independent operators. They were all immediately flooded with interest.

“I think a lot of people, when they go to open up their own business, think, ‘How can I fail? How would this not work?’ ” said Musser, who opened up a Montessori-style, in-home child care in June. “For me, it would be a lack of children. There is not a lack of children. There are many, many children and there’s a huge need for child care.”

Child care in Alaska is in crisis. It has never been affordable or easy to find, but demand in the state and in Anchorage is at an all-time high. Roughly half the people who need care for young children in the city cannot find it, according to thread Alaska, which tracks child care availability. Because of that, some are choosing to stay home with kids part or all of the time. That’s adding to a persistent labor shortage that costs the economy millions.

Read more.

The post NEIGHBORS: Alaska’s child care sector is in crisis, but market conditions are great for small entrepreneurs appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Here’s how it starts:

Brendan Haviland and Ray Gilkey, two ambassadors with the Downtown Partnership, set out before 6 a.m. Tuesday to wake the people who sleep on Fourth Avenue.

Maybe 30 people had bedded down along the quiet buildings and under trees in Peratrovich Park. Feet jutted out of doorways and bodies lay under piles of blankets. An older woman sat on the sidewalk outside the 4th Avenue Market Place in her stocking feet. She was soaked with urine. A pair of shoes sat nearby.

“Anchorage Downtown Partnership. Do you think you’re able to get up? Ma’am?” Haviland said gently. “Ma’am?”

“We got tourists coming down,” Gilkey said.

The woman started hollering. Her words melted together. She mentioned health problems, but they couldn’t make out the details. They dialed 311 to get her a ride to the sleep-off center with the hope that safety officers would take her to the hospital if she needed it. Then, they waited. This was their routine.

Downtown Anchorage is the historic heart of the city, a center of commerce, a significant source of property tax revenue and an entry point for tourists. The ambassadors are its guardians, a group of 21 people in neon vests and yellow jackets who take care of the neighborhood on behalf of the businesses. They give directions, remove snow, clean public restrooms, pick up trash and hose away all manner of bodily fluids. Some spend so much time interacting with the unhoused population, the regulars greet them with a fist bump. The jobs start at $16 an hour with benefits. The last few years, their work is increasingly complex.

Read on.

The post NEIGHBORS: Chaos for homeless ripples into downtown Anchorage, where ambassadors guard a fragile recovery appeared first on Julia O'Malley.