Warm holiday greetings to you and your loved ones, and best wishes for a healthy and happy new year.

That said, at the close of our second year of living in proximity with a deadly virus and its various offshoots, I sometimes feel, as you may, that “normal” life is somewhere over the rainbow, and that even the Wizard of Oz can’t make it come back.

I tell myself it’s okay to be both hopeful and skeptical. In the work I’m just finishing–a personal chronicle of the past two years–I’ve tried to frame and to make meaningful the events that began in early 2020 and are still seriously impacting our lives. I’ve called on story in several forms–current events, fiction, memoir–to give some shape and rationale to the ways in which we’ve changed course–and why.

Meantime, it’s good to have you on my mind and in my heart as we close out this year and move onto the next. As E. M. Forster so famously reminded us: “Only connect.”