Back in February, our family left for Tobago.

I brought my DSLR camera with me. The autofocus had become a little unreliable, but not bad enough for me to do anything about it.

The first day of our vacation, it stopped working completely. I was able to take a couple of photos, and then it refused to do anything further. I packed it away and made do with my old iPhone for the remainder of the trip.

I had nice photos of most of the places we had gone from previous years, I told myself. It was Ok that I wasn’t getting new, nice photos of the baby doing the things I had nice photos of the other kids doing at his age. And it was Ok.

While we were away, I did some research and found out there was a camera repair shop not far from my parents’ house on Long Island.

My dad and brother picked us up at JFK the first week of March on our return. The airport was deserted as fears of coronavirus picked up steam.

I asked Dad to take my camera to the shop for me.

We stood making small talk in the JFK parking lot. Things had started to get weird, but it was still unclear how big a deal corona was going to be.

My dad took my camera. He dropped it off at the repair shop. Less than a week later, New York went into lockdown.

We couldn’t have known then, but my camera would be gone for a very long time.

I didn’t want to ask about it. Camera repair shops were pretty far down on the list of priorities for reopening businesses. Long Island was hit much worse than our city, and I felt terrible even thinking about wanting my camera back with so much going on there and in the larger world.

Months passed. The Chaplain got me a newer iPhone so I could take better pictures until my camera came back to me.

So many times, the stress of current events made me feel like my creativity had been put in a meat grinder. The only tool I could easily use to create or document something beautiful, my camera, was missing, and all the other creative options felt like so. much. work.

Finally, this past week, my parents came to see us for the first time since quarantine began. And my dad brought me my camera, fresh out of the repair shop. I didn’t even know what it was when he put it in my hands.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. When it comes to cameras, I feel like we  are going to have to get to know each other again.

I’m treasuring the photos I’ve taken of the kids this week, the “good” photos with a short depth of field and crystal clear resolution. I’m getting a feel for it again.

It’s weird, writing about this. It feels so superfluous.

I made a conscious choice to give up a lot of things during lockdown, including the ability to take high quality photos of my kids, as we spent endless hours stuck together, the beauty and the stress of it.

Lockdown has been hard for a lot of reasons. It’s still hard. Least of all because I didn’t have my good camera to document our life during this time.

It is lonely, in lockdown. I long for the things I used to do, alone and with friends. With lots of moving parts and three essential workers in our house, we haven’t been sure how to re-engage with the world without putting others or ourselves at risk.

Spring has unfurled fantastically into summer. The birds are louder this year than I’ve ever heard them. I spent more precious hours with my kids than I sometimes wanted, and not enough time alone.

It all happened without the sharp record-keeping of my camera.

Now, she is back, after 4 months away. I feel like it needs to be acknowledged.

This is an in between time. New York is kind of coming to land while other parts of the country spin out of control. We know we could be back in that place at any time if we’re not careful.

Maybe we’re girding our loins for the second wave this fall and winter, if we can ever completely hop off the first curve.

This time, I’ll have my camera to document it.