2020 - The Year Behind the Fate Ball
Dear Henry,
2020 was going to be the year, the year when everything finally came together. I imagined something like a modern echo of the 1920s: optimism, renewal, creativity layered with a century of hard-earned wisdom. I was even looking forward to the return of the flapper sheath dress (a look I pull off very well) and a fresh wave of Art Deco.
I’m not sure why I was so certain the rest of the world would cooperate, but I was.
I had personal plans, too. This was supposed to be my year. The year my photography and writing finally found their audience. The year Take the Back Roads, Rite of Fancy, and Everyday Patriot stopped feeling like messages sent into the void and started feeling like conversations. I imagined readers, recognition, maybe even a show or two, proof that the work mattered beyond my own persistence.
That is not what happened.
Instead, the year unfolded like something written by P.G. Wodehouse: unseen in the background, fate quietly slipping lead into the boxing glove.
The COVID closures erased nearly all the spaces where my work lived, libraries, archives, and places of quiet study and creation. Photography became difficult; cyanotypes nearly impossible. Research shrank to what could be digitized or Googled. I found myself working almost entirely from archives, memory, and whatever stillness I could gather.
On a personal level, the losses stacked quietly. Events that mattered deeply were canceled or postponed. I said goodbye to Pookie, my old cat and longtime accomplice of nearly twenty years. Then came the news that we would need to move, to Tulsa, leaving behind the house in Arkansas that held our dream: a forested acre by a lake, a place we thought we were building toward rather than away from.
Tulsa is a good city. I believe we’ll be happy here. But grief doesn’t negotiate with logic. I mourned not just the house, but the future I had layered onto it, the mahogany floors I’d saved for, the plans deferred for “someday.” Selling it felt like closing a chapter mid-sentence.
The move also scattered my family. Children are no longer nearby. Pets displaced. And after a frantic search, we landed in a small apartment that accepts all of us, but only just. I refuse to unpack fully. This place is temporary. It has to be.
Throughout all of this, a single line from Henry David Thoreau stayed with me: If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. I’ve been trying, unevenly, imperfectly, to live into that idea.
Right before the move, I was given The Sacrament of the Present Moment by Jean-Pierre de Caussade. The timing could not have been more exact. The book reminded me that resilience often isn’t forged in great triumphs but in attention, attention to ordinary duties, small acts, and daily gratitude. That peace doesn’t arrive passively. It asks for participation.
Or, as Paulo Coelho put it, Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest.
Gratitude, at least, has been easy. I’m grateful this apartment is temporary. Grateful our Arkansas house sold quickly. Grateful that soon, very soon, we’ll be home again.
Joy, though? That’s been harder.
Ziggy went from a wooded acre full of smells and sounds to a small apartment by a freeway. Keeping him occupied has been a full-time endeavor, and I am deeply tired of playing “pet the dog.” The cats are coping better, though they’ve turned clingy. And yet—even this has its strange grace. All the walking is excellent training for my eventual Camino, which I still plan to walk, despite everything.
Perhaps that’s the quiet truth of this year: plans collapse, dreams bend, grief interrupts, but not everything ends.
Some things simply wait.
P.S. I once wished aloud for a return to the art and vibrance of the 1920s. Tulsa, of all places, has a remarkable collection of Art Deco architecture. Consider this a cautionary tale: Be careful what you wish for.
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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