Stateside: Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025

From Michigan Public, this is a special presentation of stateside. I'm April Bear. Today we mark five years since COVID came into our lives, throwing families, workplaces, the health care system, and more into chaos. It's kind of like having an injury that didn't heal, but you still have to go on. You just might walk a little slower, or you might walk with the limp. One business owner talks to us about the complex professional and personal choices forced by the pandemic. You have tremendous change, but then you also have a desire to restore what is perceived as normalcy. And we meet a group of neighbors in West Michigan that found ways to be together, apart, during COVID lockdown. I just thought like I love my neighbors and maybe we can figure it out so that we all can just have a little bit of social life because it was depressing. Those stories coming up today after the news.

Welcome to stateside. I'm April Bear. You know, this time of year as I'm getting together with friends and family, I find myself thinking so often about all of the things that we've been through over the past five years. We lost a lot of people during COVID, but we lost other things too. Certainly our time together, we lost a certain amount of predictability. And many of us found that we lost a sense of community. Today on the show, we're taking a moment to revisit the things that remain in our lives five years into COVID. Our series on COVID Year 5, which first came out in March, is called Revival. Living in a time when infectious disease is running wild means you're going to learn things the hard way. Before we talk about how this worked in 2020, we want to go back to a period when knowledge wasn't necessarily something that people rejected out of hand. I'm Saeed Khan. I am currently an associate professor of teaching in Near East and Asian Studies and Global Studies and also the director of the Center for Study of Citizenship at Wayne State University. We've asked Saeed to come and talk to us today about a remarkable person who lived through his own pandemic time and made it possible for a lot of others to learn things that could help them survive outbreaks of bubonic plague. He lived in Persia in the 11th century. And his name was Ibn Sena. So Ibn Sena is a fascinating character. He was born in 980 of the Common Era, only lived to be 57 years old. He was not just a prolific writer. He was a polymath. I mean, he was one of these people who was a physician, a theologian, a scientist, a scholar, a poet. He was really a master of all.

And so wherever Ibn Sinha went in the Islamikid in the Muslim world, he was received by rulers, he was fetid, he was in many ways patronized by people who wanted to commission him to go ahead and produce knowledge so that they could take credit for the fact that he did it under their auspices. He grew up in Bukhara. Yes. What might a major outbreak of plague have looked like in cities of that day? Well, one of the things that the Muslim world did was that they had the preparations in place. And these preparations come from really two sources. One, of course, is the science and the research that people like Ibn Sina provide. But there was a background level to that, and that really comes from the theological. Well, washing your hands is an essential part of the ritual of ablution, which Muslims must perform as a precursor to prayer, which is five times a day obligatory. So along with rinsing out your mouth, rinsing your nasal passages, washing your face, washing your hands, you are going to be, at least for a good amount of time, clean. And it becomes such a part of your thinking and your consciousness to be in a state of cleanliness that it then has these benefits elsewhere. So if you are amongst Muslims, you are going to be less likely to transmit something that is infectious because your hands are clean.

Our modern understanding of quarantine comes directly from him. There's a linguistic link here as well, isn't there? There's a linguistic link, and then there's also, again, a religious link. There's something about the number 40. And we've seen this, of course, in the biblical tradition when it comes to Noah and the Ark. The other thing about 40 days in some traditions in Islam, 40 days becomes a general period of mourning. In the case of Ibn Sinha, he then devised that perhaps 40 can also be a way to ensure that if somebody is infected, that the disease will take its course one way or the other within 40 days. Either the person will lose their life or the person will then not only start to recuperate, but that the infection will no longer be communicable. When it comes to Europeans who engage with the Muslim world, particularly those from the Italian states like Venice and Genoa, they are mystified at seeing the relative ease by which Muslim societies are able to absorb infections and pandemics. And they, of course, inquire from Ibn Sinha and those who follow his example. What are you doing? And he says, well, this is the 40-day thing. And so then we find that the translation of 40 into Italian is a quarantine journey, which then quarantina becomes quarantine.

Eden Senna's teachings about disease, including infectious disease, were shared in his book, The Canon of Medicine. The book was translated into Latin, and it was the most popular medical textbook in both the Arab world and in Europe for several hundred years after his death. I feel so hard to remember now, but there's just so much that you don't know when a new infectious disease crops up. Five years ago, we certainly knew about quarantines. But many people were willfully ignoring the hard-won expertise around us. I mean, think about the president's chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci. Wear a mask. Keep social distancing. Avoid crowds. You can avoid those kind of surges. Anthony Fauci also revealed that he's protected round the clock by federal agents because he and his family are getting death threats. That's sad. The very fact that a public health message to save lives triggers such venom and animosity to me that it results in real and credible. threats to my life and my safety. Much of the reaction to Anthony Fauci's recommendations was based on fear. We didn't know how to protect ourselves from the new virus. And we didn't know how to take care of the people who were catching it. It was scary because nobody really knew anything about COVID.

Christina Hanson is a nurse at a hospital in Marquette. Her field is care for cardiac patients. But when COVID struck up in the UP, her workplace became the hospital's COVID unit. It's funny. The manager at the time went around to all of the nurses and asked them, like, do you feel comfortable taking COVID patients? And when I was asked that, I looked at her and I said, is that a serious question? Like, We have an obligation to care for these people. Like, that is our job. And for Christina, the learning, the things that she and her colleagues did for their patients, it began almost immediately. We would isolate. and put all of the COVID patients on the same team to minimize exposure to other patients. So we weren't going in a COVID room and then going in somebody else's room that had COVID. We were also made to do other people's jobs because people wouldn't go in the room. So the nurses had to draw all the labs and do all the housekeeping. And at one point, we were doing our own EKGs because the EKG attack was just like, well, here, I'll walk you through it and you can do it. Were you scared for yourself? Oh, of course. Yeah, I was terrified. I would strip every day after work and, like, immediately go to the shower. Some of us didn't even live at home with our families. They decided that they would stay somewhere else because they were afraid of exposing their families. But me being like, I'm the mother of four children. I didn't have that option. Like, my household would have fell apart. Like, I still had to come home. But, yeah, it terrified me. I have never been more hypervigilant about germs before. And COVID really changed the way that I look at things like that, too.

My memory of those early months is that the people who ended up in hospitals were very sick. Very sick. We used to call it happy hypoxia. Like when we would get one of our COVID patients up to 86%. It was like we were celebrating that. And it... As somebody that worked in as a nurse for years prior, like if I see somebody at 86%, I'm really concerned. I'm throwing on oxygen. Like I'm trying to figure out what's going on. And these people just lived there. The patient population, like they were scared and they were sick and they were alone. Like the only people that they would see sometimes is us. It was very hard to watch them struggle to breathe. We also had the patients that died, and they were alone. And we felt morally obligated to stay in that room and hold that patient's hand because nobody else could be there. And, you know, we're holding up tablets so the patients can, you know, say goodbye to their family on a screen.

There's a lot that won't leave my brain from there. I think we're all still suffering with a moral injury. I don't think I know anybody that took care of COVID patients during that time that doesn't have some form of either PTSD or anxiety or something. I think that a lot of us have boxed up everything that happened during COVID and put it away in a closet and we don't look at it. And I'm still saying to this day that what we are doing is not sustainable. It wasn't during COVID. And I kept telling people it would get better like this isn't normal. And now years down the road, I'm just trying to figure out what normal is because it hasn't gotten better. That's Christina Hanson. She lives and works as a nurse in Marquette. Christina says if there's one post-COVID thing she could change right now, it would be a change in what Michigan law says about the number of nurses that must be assigned to each patient in critical care. We need to take a break for just a moment. After that, how small business changed during COVID. We'll be right back. This is stateside. I'm April Bear. Today, we're revisiting episodes from a March series called Revival on all the things that are still in our lives five years after COVID appeared. There's this cafe that's right near our studios. The first time I went there in January of 2020, it was pretty busy. The place gets a big breakfast crowd.

Then, two months later, COVID happened and the door's closed. I ordered takeout from there as often as I could, but it was three to four years before I set foot inside the cafe again. If you go in now, the place is usually wall-to-wall people. I think about that every time I drive by, the crazy things that the owners did to stay in business. It's been five years this week since COVID-19 upended so many things about our lives. This week, we present Revival, a stateside podcast special about how the pandemic changed us. Today, we're focusing on how business and work changed. March 2020 was not the first time entire economies have been upended by a pandemic. It's actually a pretty common thing. The epidemic a lot of us think of when we think about a plague totally changed life in Europe in the 1300s. I think the thing to say here is that, of course, as a pre-modern society, the vast majority of people were involved in farming. This is Robert Berkhofer. He's a professor at Western Michigan University and a specialist in medieval European history. There's, you know, 10 or 15%, maybe 20% of people are living in towns or cities. And there are, there is manufacturing, there is craft production, there is trade across Eurasia. The world is much more connected than we might think. But the vast majority of people are involved in the agricultural economy. So living... And what we think of as farms, in small villages, in rural places, and these are the focus of most ordinary people's lives. Less than 5%, maybe less than 2% of modern Americans are involved in farming or agriculture in any significant way. And, you know, that means that we're sort of detached from the rhythms of the land, which medieval people were not. Starting in the mid-1300s, Cases of Yersina Pestis, the Black Death, start cropping up along major trade routes in Europe. And I guess the first and main thing to know about this is that the death toll was massive. Can you give us a sense of the scale? There's been a lot of debate over time how much it is, but the current best estimates are somewhere on the order of 40 to 50% of the population. So one person in two or maybe one person in three, the death toll was truly astounding. I'm thinking back to what you said about how many people in the Western world were involved in agriculture at that point in history. And I'm just thinking who was left? I mean, farm work at that time needed a lot of people to produce the kind of crops that would just keep everybody getting by. And I'm trying to imagine if you've got maybe 100 people working on an estate or a piece of land and suddenly...

there's maybe 50. I mean, did people just keep on keeping on trying to make do? Well, it's not exactly clear. We know that in some cases, systems collapsed and people died, or they moved, they migrated because they could no longer survive in the place where they were. So, for example, a lot of people, when they flee the countryside, tend to flee into the city because that's where they have sources of charity. So the church, for example, giving out food as alms. But then, of course, you have people moving into more congested urban environments, which of course spreads the disease, and so more people die. Now, medieval people, of course, dealt with famines before because of weather changes primarily. And when you're dependent on farming, you come up with ways to either store food or preserve food in order to last out a difficult winter or a crop failure. The patterns of agriculture and the patterns of manufacture do try to continue, and I think that this is partly psychological. People cling to things they know when faced with terrible circumstances. By the time the plague starts to subside, how are people living differently in Europe at that point? The plague comes 134751, its first wave comes then. It comes back. It comes back many times. It comes back every five to ten years in the 1350s, the 1360s, the 1370s, 1380s keeps going till about 1500 or 1550. After the first huge wave, people know about it. They do have some theories of contagion, so they can take some actions to mitigate its effects. And so one of the things that we think happened is that the economy, the agricultural economy and the economy overall became more diversified. It didn't become as dependent on a single staple crop. You know, I think what I'm getting from all this is that there were generations of people living in times of constant change. Yeah, I think that's right and you know some people have argued some historians have argued that um because of the changes that were going on, people were more receptive to ideas of change or doing things differently. On the other hand, other historians say, no, no, no, they're in shock and they may have had to change their behaviors, but they cling to traditional things more fiercely because they are concerned about what's been taken away from them. And that's particularly true, say, of religious services. or fraternal orders of craftspeople, they want to try to continue their traditions even more fiercely because they feel like they've been taken away. You have tremendous change, but then you also have a desire to restore what is perceived as normalcy.

I mean, there I'm drawing on my own pandemic experience, right? You know, I want to go back to the restaurants that I wanted to go to before the pandemic. Some of them aren't there. But the ones that are there, I want to go back to, and I want to spend money there, so they're going to stay there. And, you know, I think that that's the kind of thing that you just have to think about that having been multiplied by like a hundred times. Grieving. That thing he said about grieving really hits when you think about the things that we missed as the lockdown began. Suddenly, stuff like your local coffee spot seemed to mean so much more than it had before. On the other side of the counter, Some people's work environments didn't change very much. If you worked repairing electric lines or if you do plumbing or work in a grocery store, it's very likely you just kept showing up every day with some social distancing or masking. I'm Jermel Eddy, former owner of Malamaya Juice Bar and Malamazin Juice Company. And now I would say that I'm a director at a local nonprofit here in town that works with small businesses and startups. But before COVID, during COVID, and even now, I'm a father, I'm a husband, and I'm a community member. Jermel and his wife Anissa ran a well-known juice bar in a 312 square foot space at the downtown market in Grand Rapids, starting in 2013. My dream for the space for the business was to simply be good for my community. good for Grand Rapids, good for the state in terms of a place where individuals can come and leave changed based off of great customer service. And oh, by the way, we were selling healthy juices and smoothies. Slowly, the business took off. And after nearly a decade, Jamel and his wife decided to expand to their own storefront still in downtown. Very hopeful. nervous, excited, did I say nervous, that we didn't know what to expect, but we knew to expect great things and greatness based off of projections, based off of location, based off of now having our own space, being able to control our menu, what we wanted to sell, who we wanted in, and yeah, we were just really, really happy and excited that we arrived at that point.

The opening was slated for the beginning of 2020. But then, plans started to unravel. And just after three months, the COVID pandemic forced Malamaya to shut down. And suddenly, nobody was walking in anywhere. We didn't really have a good understanding of everything. I don't think anyone did. But we knew that we weren't going to allow people to come into the doors and sit down. People were scared. And the state was working out guidelines day by day. So was Jermal. Early on, it was, okay, we will carve out a spot where you don't have to wait outside, but you can come in and we blocked it off with tables and put your order or call in your order. And it was a grab and go type of situation. Get as many masks as you can and hand sanitizer and gloves. And then the next thought was realizing that we needed to do more. Meaning to say, the business probably wasn't going to make it just on in-person sales. So he started thinking, what if he could get juice and smoothies to people without them showing up at the store? I was able to act and do deliveries, and that was going door to door. I would joke with people and say, you know, it's just your friendly neighborhood juice, man. I'd drop it on the door, ring the doorbell, and leave. Because again, you know, nobody even wanted to interact with any delivery type of person. They just put on the door, I'll roll out. You know, remember at that time, two people were still, people were washing their groceries or wiping their groceries down or leaving them in the garage or something. And so at that time, even for me, while many were sheltered in place, including my family, I was out every single day working. And I know my wife was like, hey, don't bring any of that. germs or that stuff home, changing the garage or leave your clothes or just whatever that wasn't because again, no one knew. All in this felt crazy to Jermal, but he'd worked so hard to get Malamaya this far. As far as he was concerned, this was no time to fold. However this thing is going to go down, we're not closing our business. We have employees as well who are depending on the checks and let's face it, we also had bills to pay too. told that it wasn't going to be that long of shutting things down. I believe it was a matter of weeks. But weeks turned to months and months turned to years and things didn't get back to that and instead it was a new normal. And for a while, this new normal kept business afloat. And his customers were willing to pay the extra fees to keep Malamaya going. So many things were evolving. A lot of people had never ordered takeout delivered to their homes before 2020. Suddenly DoorDash and other third-party apps were everywhere. Jamel was noticing brand-new customer preferences and needs taking shape before his eyes.

There are people whose homes that I was able to make deliveries to who It may not have even been customers originally, but they just heard of the work that we were doing for the community and decided to give us a try and kind of kept on purchasing as long as they could. And this community, in turn, allowed Jermel to help essential workers like child care providers who were also struggling. My wife and I decided how can we help individuals, but more so how can we help, say, for instance, child care, in-home childcare facilities who couldn't get to the store. So we utilized our wholesale pricing, purchase stuff we would never purchase, like, you know, can. tuna and chicken and milk and bread and chlorox bleach and buckets and things. It was at cost so we didn't make any money but we didn't lose any money besides time. But to me that was an opportunity to be to be a good neighbor even in spite of what was going on.

Even though things slowly started to open up and more and more people ventured out, prices stayed high. For example, the company that cold-packed his juice raised prices 188%. And Jermel just didn't feel comfortable passing on the increase. For us, we felt like the consumer confidence in the economy changed. Buying habits changed. Though we... had a healthy product and a very good product that in some ways perhaps we had a luxury product where we may not have been the very first thing on someone's list and so I get it you got to make some of those decisions I'm not pointing the finger I'm not faulting anyone you have to decide on what's more important and We recognized that. Now, we didn't close without going down with the fight. We were trying all that we could to make things work, and it just wasn't. It just didn't turn out the way that we saw it. We put up a good fight. We were 10 years in this game here in downtown Grand Rapids. Jamel kept the store going through lockdown, through vaccines, but he'd paid the price. Enduring burnout from COVID. It's kind of like having an injury that didn't heal, but you still have to go on. You just might walk a little slower, or you might walk with a limp. Had it not been for the pandemic, we could still be around. For Jamel, closing Malamaya Juice Bar felt like the death of a beloved friend. Kind of felt like a terminal illness where you started to see at some point, Even though you were hopeful, we might not make it. So I believe that over the course of time, there was various incidents where I was grieving what may be lost, what may be coming. And now, grieving the loss of Malamaya Juice Bar had forced Jamel to be vulnerable, reaching out to his friends, and allowing his family to witness the pain he's experiencing. It made it easier when I started to share what I was feeling, what I was going through. And then that got me into the direction of... finding a therapist. That's something that I had never done before. These days, Jermel is taking his knowledge of having run the business for 10 years and using that experience to help others as a coach and mentor to other small businesses in Grand Rapids. Although Jermel never expected to shut down Malamaya Juice Bar, today he's celebrating making it through. Being in Michigan and being able to get outside. and just enjoy nature, to walk, to feel the breeze, to hear the waves if I'm near water, to feel the gravel under my feet, and to just experience that freedom and really have an inhale and an exhale moment. That's how I'm making it through. Not how I made it through, but how I'm making it through.

Jermel Eddy. He lives in Grand Rapids with his wife Anissa and his three boys. Let's take a break now. After that, we're going to have some thoughts about the things solitude can do to you during a pandemic and why sometimes it's important to just find a way to be together. I just thought, like, I love my neighbors, and maybe we can figure it out so that we all can just have a little bit of social life because it was depressing. We'll be right back. This is stateside. I'm April Bear. This hour, we're taking some time to replay episodes from a special series called Revival. First broadcast back in March. It's all about the ways life changed during COVID and how we've changed, too. Everybody's responded to COVID's isolations a little bit differently. However, there is some evidence to suggest that American social habits became more solitary. Fewer people joining civic groups or worshipping with others. This type of change in response to an epidemic is part of a really long tradition, all over the world, even on the other side of the planet 800 years ago. So this is the period that I actually work on. It's a really fascinating time. That's Aaron Brightwell. She teaches pre-modern Japanese literature at the University of Michigan. And there's this short story that she teaches every year that shows how people were reacting to big, scary infectious disease incidents. It all began with a civil war before what would be Japan's first shogunate. It's not just... a time of civil war. It's also a time of famine. We have a two-year famine in the middle of that war, and then it's a time of kind of recurring epidemics. So at this time in Japanese history, smallpox was endemic in Japan, but we also had measles epidemics. So there's a lot going on. This is also a time when Japan was believed to have entered the final age of the Dharma. Another way to put that, Buddhists in early Japan thought that these were the end times, the last years of living right, when teachings and religious practices would start to disappear.

It's a long age. It doesn't mean the world is ending tomorrow. But people are seeing this breakdown in society, you know, this civil war. As I mentioned, there are a lot of natural disasters. And these epidemics, they see these as signs that, you know, this really has come to pass. And it's in that time that a man named Camo No Chome decided to turn away from the world. Kamuna Tomé, he was a minor aristocrat. He was a poet. He was an essayist. And, you know, when we talk about his writings, nowadays we think of him as part of this long Japanese tradition of recluse literature. And these are people who kind of withdraw from society to... contemplate some to engage in religious practices and in Cholme's case to kind of write his way through. So, Choume withdraws from the aristocratic society in which he's been living. He sets up in a 10-square-foot hut, and it's there he writes his most famous works, including Ho-Joki. It's like he's looking back on some of these really horrible and traumatic things that he has lived through. So he describes this great fire, for instance, that... demolishes a huge chunk of the capital. The bodies that are piling up in the street because of starvation. I mean, this is a really dark time in Japanese history. You know, he's experiencing it and kind of trying to figure out what do I, what do I do? How do I kind of survive? And I think he's trying to reconcile. Well, we would probably say Survivor's Guilt nowadays. But, you know, he's looking back, but he's also trying to understand his place as someone who identifies as a practitioner of Buddhism. And I think he doesn't find a happy or a neat ending. I think he's still kind of unresolved in the end, I think.

The translation for Hojoki, roughly, is an account of my hut. What does he say about that life? He's very in tune with the natural beauty around him. And I think he seeks solace in that, although he does come to a point where he wonders, you know, am I too attached to my hut? Like I'm supposed to be cultivating, you know, being not attached to anything, but I do really like my hut. I think he's really in tune with this idea of things being cyclical. Tomé sees that in the natural world and is moved by it. The beginning of the piece opens with this very famous line, like, Yukukawa no gregers, which means like the flow of the moving river never stops, and it's also never the same. So he's really talking about the constancy of change. And then he applies this logic to the denizens of the capital. And he says, you know, all of you are vying for elaborate homes, fancy lifestyles, and to what end? We are no different from the bubbles on top of the flowing river that come together and break apart. And nothing lasts. Erin Brightwell, she teaches pre-modern Japanese literature at the University of Michigan. What she had to say about Hojoki and turning away from the world hit me hard. But you and I both know, most of us can't really live like that. We need each other. And there's so much evidence that America is living through a loneliness epidemic that followed the COVID epidemic. Sometimes you just have to get yourself out there and talk to other people.

So I really, I describe it to people that this was an emotional support group. That's how it functioned, especially those first few months. There's a neighborhood on the west side of Grand Rapids where the pandemic drove people toward each other instead of a way. We were a safe place for one another because everyone except myself was either high risk themselves or caring for someone who was high risk. That's Susan. She's one of the neighbors on this little cul-de-sac dotted with a half-dozen brick mid-century ranches and split-level houses. The windows here are flocked with cheerful decorations for whatever holiday's most current. The field across the street is home to a high school, a middle school, and a dog park. So you see plenty of people walking, biking, or driving by most days of the week. When the weather's nice, folks are out, mowing their lawns, waving to passers by. Now let's go back to what this same street looked like in March of 2020. Here's another one of the neighbors, Sally. It was very quiet. Tremont Boulevard is a fairly active street because there's a school and there was no school. So you didn't hear the children leaving school. You didn't hear the cars driving by. It was very quiet, eerily so. So March 23 was when the stay-at-home orders went into place. So it was March 24 that Tuesday that Ray texted us and was just like, hey, anyone want to meet up in the cul-de-sac? So it took about a week and after every day texting to... make a plan, that's when we said, okay, let's just say 4.30, and that's when it switched to like, okay, who's going to put their garage door up first, and that was the signal to all meet out on the cul-de-sac. The person sending those texts every day was Ray Bunce. Whose idea was it to start meeting? Ray. Ray. Absolutely. Ray's retired from the school district. She's a petite blonde woman with four grandchildren and enough energy to match them. When the pandemic hit, she managed to convince her neighbors, Barb and Joe, Dot and Cow, Karen, Sally, and Susan to get together every afternoon from their socially distant driveways. Do you remember what was going on the week when you decided to ask everybody over? Just before that, my dad had passed away. It was March 12. Did he catch the virus? He did not. No, he had dementia, and my mom couldn't take care of him. So he put him in the nursing home just for nine days, and then he passed away. But it was just a really hard time for me because I am like very social. And then I just thought, like, I love my neighbors, and maybe we can figure it out so that we all can just have a little bit of social life because it was depressing. No matter the weather, no matter what season, if you were healthy, happy hour was in session.

On the day we visited, the temperature was a very frosty 16 degrees. And five years into COVID, everyone is vaccinated and scattered about Ray's living room in front of a fireplace and a big picture window. It's true. You're right. It's true. We're elderly. Some folks have glasses of red or white wine. Others brought travel tumblers of water. Rays put out cheese, crackers, and fruit. Sally's all wrapped up in her own crocheted Afghan, extra cozy. Why was it important to be outside even with all the books? I don't know. I think we just got so close. I think we just needed each other right then. It was the only human contact we had the whole day, some of us, you know. The early meetings weren't like this at all. Even though the weather was just about as frigid as on the night we visited. Does anybody remember what the weather was like? The first day you meant? The first winter, when we first started this, we started to do drinks in the driveway. And one, we all sat at the end of our driveways and yelled across the cul-de-sac to each other. Do you remember that? The group almost seems a little startled now by the lengths that they went to to spend time with each other. We sat in the garage with rice bags, heated rice bags, that bought new boots. We had... We had 14 layers on. We all acted like we loved being there. We all... Ray emptied her garage, cleaned it all out, and strung party lights. And we had one of these little fake fireplace things that gave off no heat. Make it festive. Yeah. And every afternoon we sat in Ray's garage. With the garage store? Exactly like you're shivering. It was what we could do, though. It was, I don't remember who decided the time, kind of happy hour may or may not have always been like at 4.30 if we did do it. But it was like, raise your driveway up, your garage door, pull your launchers out, bring your drink of choice, and sit at the end of your own driveway. What was it like trying to have a conversation like that, Sally? Well, you know, we're elderly. Talk loud. So we had to talk quite loud and say, excuse me, I didn't hear you. And people would have to repeat themselves quite a bit. But. It was good company. Everyone here had known each other or at least known of each other for years. Some on the cul-de-sac are retired. Since 2019, the homeowners here have included a truck driver, a health care analyst, a university employee, a scientist, and a family publisher of religious literature. Before the COVID lockdown, they wouldn't have said they were close friends until the pandemic. And then, the cul-de-sac was all they really had.

I knew early on probably March or April there was something going on with Joe. This is Barb. Her husband Joe actually grew up on this cul-de-sac. When they got married, she joined him and his parents in the house that the family has owned since the 1950s. He just kept saying, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, but I said, no, you're not. No, you're not. I'm calling the doctor. You're not fine. We're going in. Now we're about mid-May, and they said, okay, we're going to do this whole. other blood test kind of a thing. The doctor calls and she said, get him to the hospital. Everything is abnormal. Every single thing is abnormal. He spent six days at Butterworth during the time when there were the riots in our city. But the blessing in that all was that that was the first week they allowed one person to be at the hospital with your loved one. The other blessing was when he came home out of the hospital with a lymphoma diagnosis, there sat all of this group out in the cul-de-sac.

Six weeks or so later, when he came home from a 12-hour day for his first chemo session, there they all were. So when you talk about Susan said, this is an emotional support group. in every sense of the word because there were times when I'd get home from treatment with Joe and I just needed to relax catch everyone up with the text message Joe would come out to the group and just sit there even if he didn't say anything he would sit there and it would give me a break to fall apart times when he stayed in I came out and fell apart so there were good times they were bad but for a lot of things very much emotional support Weeks turned into months. And like so many other people all over Michigan, the cul-de-sac's neighbors saw other people occasionally. For several years, though, these daily meetups were a constant. Eventually, the months went by and things loosened up. Vaccines became available. Ray was able to be in person with her elderly mom more often. The daily meetings became weekly. But everybody kept meeting up. I work at Calvin University and had a position that I could do remotely, so I had the opportunity to be working full-time. Summer hours ended at 4.30, so it was perfect. It was always this motivation for the end of the day. So I lived by myself. Went 10 weeks without visiting anybody outside the cul-de-sac, but had that opportunity to work all day and know that I could talk to humans at the end of the day. The group just kept on laughing through the good times and supporting each other through the hard times. Being with this group was far from sad, even during COVID. It was fun. They won't admit it that they like sitting in the freezing cold weather, but I'm pretty sure they did. April, think about going ice fishing every single day. And never catching a fish. Not one fish was caught. The pandemic changed something for all of them. Ray says she feels like she's become a bit of a germophobe. Barb had back surgery. She and Joe moved to a nearby condo, although they still come back when they can for Happy Hour. And the young family that bought Joe and Barb's house includes two small kids and a dad named Josh, who's now joining the group for Happy Hour. What did you notice about this group when you got here? Careful now. Don't say elderly. Elderly is an accurate description. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very friendly. I think maybe the first or second time we checked out the house, they invited us over because they were sitting outside. And so it came over, sat down for a little bit and chatted.

I like the drink, so I'll sit down on that one. Have a glass of wine or something. And word of the cul-de-sac happy hour, Susan tells me, has spread beyond Tremont Court, too. Literally, all of the other cul-de-sacs around here were jealous of our community, and they all knew if you said we were on the cul-de-sac that did Happy Hour. They knew us. So it was fun to kind of spread that community. I know one of the cul-de-sacs, two streets down, had their own one-time gathering. Just recently I went, I saw my granddaughter, ran into her to a store, she was with her coach. And her coach came up and hugged me and she said, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm meeting you. I tell my kids all the time that I drive by this cul-de-zac, and I see all these people sitting out, and you never see community like that anymore. One day I'm going to put my chair in the back of my car, and I'm just going to drop in on them. My granddaughter said, that's my grandma. She's like, what? I'm going for sure now. So she's probably going to join us.

Ray Bunce, she and her neighbors on the cul-de-sac still meet on Wednesdays. That's all for the show today. If you'd like to listen to full episodes of revival, they're available on the Michigan Public website. Just go to Michiganpublic.org slash revival. We'll also put a link on today's show page for quick access. Stateside is produced by Mike Blank, Ronia Caban Sugg, Michelle Jokish Polo, and April Van Puren. Our senior producer is Mercedes-Mahia, and our executive producer is Laura Weber-Davis. I'm April Bear. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Thank you.