Jenny | California wildfires and quarantining alone

Me: I’m never going to date ever again.

Jenny: Me either

I sat down with my aunt Jenny, the encourager, to learn about her time in Santa Cruz—through a confluence of emptinesting halfway through COVID, wildfires, new puppies, and road tripping to Wisconsin. I am always so thankful for time in conversation with Jenny, her groundedness and honesty, and am so thankful for her support and willingness to share her story with me. Please enjoy.

“I’m going to share the most emotional time for me. That was during the fires in California.

There was this weird evening and there was all this lightning and thunder and we were out looking at the skies like “this is amazing!” But it wasn’t raining...most people that are unfamiliar with how this can start fires, we were just watched it was amazement like “oh this is cool” and then the next day the entire Monterey county to moraine county— so all along the coasts of NorCal basically had little fires start. And within a week or two it was getting super bad. We had one super close to Santa Cruz... Basin is gone, it just ripped through it... maybe two weeks into the fire, the sky turned literally orange during the day. So, it was like climate change was happening in front of my face. So I had these trifecta of things happening: empty nesting... alone, and the. The skies are organs so this this climate anxiety, and the fires are happening and it smells horrible and the ash is raining down. So I have fire anxiety...that’s like a very big moment for me, in covid in a pandemic that was preventing me from having typical sources of support...and I felt very closed in. I was really aware of how anxious I was at that moment.

”

“For the last two months I’ve been working on a drive-thru gala for the organization where I volunteer, and I am the event chair [...] and last year we did a gala for a thousand people at a convention center with an awesome band and it was dinner and music and probably 30 or 50 food stations. And this year we wanted to do a fall fundraiser, but how the heck do you do it?

What it felt like to me, was the vibe of a high school car wash. We had people holding signs and people banging spoons on pots and we raised, you know, $120,000.
”

“We just came up with ways to make it full of energy [...] We had to meet these bars for COVID that the county had, like the health department. And there were alot of hoops to jump through to make sure everything was ok. But the interesting thing was, no one got out of the car. It wasn’t considered like a church event or like a wedding because it was a drive-thru.
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“Then the puppy happened! I got in my head that I am home so much, it was a good time to get a puppy [...] we finally found a litter through a rescue organization [...] they call these COVID puppies “velcro puppies” because they’re really used to us being around all the time.
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“As a freshmen— just got to be able to leave the family nest, who wants to be sent home? Right? But Lucas is just a very pleasant person to be with [...] He talked about how really it was unfair for the kids graduating in 2020 and starting college, and he had already gotten to start. But I still feel bad for him.

I did have the comfort of starting off the pandemic with someone at my house, because I live alone, besides my dogs
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“This is just our first spring with the lake house. So we decided to do it [...] I have a Tesla that needs to be plugged in every 230-250 miles. So all these decisions went into it [...] I drove, and it was super interesting. In my car I had a sheet and my own pillow [...] I stayed in hotels. And I didn’t see a lot of people. It was actually a great trip. I can’t wait to do it when the world is a little bit more lively and I don’t have to worry about germs. Which is crazy. Such an invisible deadly thing.
”

Speaking of memes, I created an album and I’ve been sticking all these super weird photos in this album [...] capturing some of the weirdness.

“The pandemic is so weird to happen around this time when we are growing up a little bit in America, and coming to grips with our racist past. And you see the protests and I am worried for the people there and their exposure. And it’s been interesting to see them wear masks most of the time, to really try for some safety in that environment. ”