There is Good in Even the Worst of Times

               There is good in even the worst of times

        I woke up to the blaring of my alarm clock, at 7:30 in the morning. For every other student from previous years, today would have been just another boring day of school, but for my entire grade, we were not allowed to go into the school building, and we had adopted a way of learning online. At the time, we thought we would be going back to school in a couple of weeks, and everything would be back to normal, but little did we know that Covid would completely change our whole middle school lives. 

        It was a Friday in early May. It was starting to get warm, and you could see more and more green outside every day. I had finished school for the day, and it wasn’t even lunch yet. Our teachers had given us our daily assignments, and I completed them very fast. They were very easy for me, and I just wanted to finish them and go play basketball outside with my brother. Once my brother had also finished his work, we ate lunch, then we went outside to play a one v. one, which had started to become something we do everyday. In the middle of the game, I noticed some boys, around my age, on bikes. I was trying to get a look at their faces, to see if I could recognize them. I couldn’t at the time, but later in the day I realized who they were. They were boys in my grade. 

        I was in disbelief that there were boys in my grade biking around my neighborhood. I thought I was the only kid my age who lived on my street. Boy was I wrong. There ended up being a total of 4 6th graders on that street that year (a lot for Easton!), and we all lived within 600 feet of each other. 

        The next day I went out on my bike, and decided to see if I could find the boys again. Sure enough, I did, and they actually ended up being friends I had at school. Before then, we weren’t really close, and I had no clue where they lived. After that, we all became really close friends. Going out on our bikes every day, playing basketball, wiffleball, and football, we completely forgot about Covid, that is, until the next morning. Going outside became sort of an escape for us, where we got away from the screens of school, and we didn’t have a single thing to worry about. We also had a ton of fun outside. Many of my favorite middle school memories came from that school year and summer. 

        As time went on, we discovered more fun things to do when we were outside. We built a tee-pee in one of our backyards, and we discovered places to bike to when we were bored (such as the Easton Reservoir, which became something we would bike to on a daily basis). Sometimes we would walk back through the woods in my backyard, and we would see all sorts of creatures. One time, we even saw a herd of deers sprinting 100 feet in front of us. 

        Every time I was inside, I would read terrible news about Covid. Things like having to live this way for a very long time. I could not imagine having to do school from home until I graduated from high school. But then I remembered that having to do school from home wasn’t all that bad, because I would almost always finish my work early, and I could go outside and bike with my friends. 

        Before I knew it, I was starting 7th grade, and the plan was that we would be able to go back into the school to learn. Looking back at the end of my sixth grade year and the summer, I realized that I would miss hanging out with my friends everyday. I realized that even in the worst of times, where everything seems terrible, there will always be good. 

 

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