The month of March brings with it some notes of both professional and personal significance from yours truly.
Professionally, I began my life in this wacky, turbulent, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes good, sometimes bad thing called news journalism on March 27, 2007.
Personally, the day of March 28, 2021 will always hold a sad spot in my heart because that was the day I lost my mother.
However, the month of March, and in particular, THIS March that we're all in right now holds another notable significance.
It was five years ago this month that COVID-19 rocked our world, taking a strong grip on our everyday lives and our everyday activities and shaking us all up like we were all in a massive snow globe. Some of the absolutely normal, daily, never-thought-twice things that perhaps we took for granted were suddenly ripped away from us, and we were faced with having to live in this new, weird, and modified picture of life in North America, Canada, and Saskatchewan.
I gotta tell ya, those first few weeks of "The Shutdown" in our daily world were bizarre and they definitely took some getting used to from my perspective.
I remember posting the following on social media on March 15, 2020:
"With cancellations and postponements of events left and right, including at the local level, it's going to be interesting to see what we can fill a newspaper and a website with each week. All I know is I do not want The Outlook to become "The Corona Times" for the foreseeable future. There has *got* to be a functioning world outside of this somehow..."
That was certainly one of the biggest questions on my mind at the time; just HOW were we going to put together a weekly newspaper? There were no public events for the foreseeable future, no sports taking place at the rink or any of the schools, and even a number of local businesses made the choice to close up shop for the time being. In short - the standard fare of community news really wasn't there.
So what did we do? We looked to the people and the readership of the local area. We asked them, 'Hey, how are you doing with all this? How are you coping? What's your family up to?', and the responses we got back were both plentiful and emotional. People needed to vent, they needed to say their piece, and they needed to show others that their lives could still move forward, even in this bizarre science experiment that everyone was living in at that point in time. We received photos of outdoor family barbecues, birthday celebrations, and even something as simple as just having a game night around the kitchen table.
It felt like as if looking at photos such as this told us, 'Hey, we're gonna get through this together. There's light at the end of this tunnel - we promise.'
And then, a couple of months into it when the springtime weather returned and all the snow had melted, we saw what people were really capable of with their creativity.
I remember standing just off to the side at the Pioneer Home here in Outlook on Mother's Day weekend in May as a large group of the longterm care residents were brought out to witness what was about to take place. Luckily, it was a gorgeous and sunny Saturday morning as a vehicle parade proceeded to stroll by the facility, with people poking their heads out of the windows and greeting the residents with signs, trinkets, and other eye-catching flare. There must have been three dozen vehicles or so, and it just made for a heart-warming occasion.
But that was just the start.
With it being the spring, attention was quickly turning to how local high schools were going to handle their graduation ceremonies. You couldn't hold a big event where hundreds of people gathered under one roof yet, so what did schools do? They got creative and took their celebrations outdoors.
I drove down to Dinsmore Composite School, where teachers and the principal literally drove to each graduate's own house and presented their certificate to them in neat little "mini ceremonies". From there, a parade was held around the village with each graduate spotlighted in their vehicle of choice. Seeing people flood the streets of Dinsmore for that event is something that I'll never forget anytime soon.
Loreburn Central School did something similar, asking each graduating student to stand outside the school while a parade of community members drove by, honking and waving their congratulations to the students.
Outlook High School got into the same spirit, with each grad standing outside the doors of the Home of the Blues and watching as a very long parade contingent rolled its way past them. There were some very eye-catching vehicles in that one, and I got a cheer myself when I told a truckload of kids that I would take their photo and put it in the paper. Yay me! From there, a section of bleacher seating was put onto a flatbed and hooked up to a truck, and all the graduates sat on it and were then paraded around town themselves.
It was events like this that showed a whole new side of the people who call this part of Saskatchewan home.
You can tell us to stay home, you can try and instill fear and concern in us about a virus that any one of us can catch (I myself never did contract it), and you can tell us that THIS, THIS, and THIS are off limits for the time being. But what you can't do is stifle peoples' creativity, or their ability to follow through on something that kids have been working towards and looking forward to for literally years of their lives.
In a lot of ways, when it came to COVID, the world stood still, but people found ways to still move forward.
But let's also remember the obvious here; COVID-19 did a whole lot of damage and caused pain to many, many people and families who lost loved ones. It also fractured relationships among many others because of unfounded conspiracy theories floating around online, many of which were created out of sheer boredom and social media has a certain way of manipulating some people. It did bring out the worst in some people, but luckily, it also brought out the best in others, providing a sense of universal balance to our everyday lives.
The effects of the pandemic are still being felt today. For instance, the presence of hand sanitizer is something that's stuck around in businesses everywhere, and that's not surprising at all. Happen to touch something on one of the grocery aisles that may have been cracked open? Ugh, better give me some of that goop.
I saw a lot from behind my lens of that insane time in our lives. I saw togetherness, I saw strained relations, I saw communities pull together, and I saw some people pull apart. Life is always a mixed bag.
But I also saw perseverance, and that's what rural Saskatchewan has in spades. That's why I love calling this place home.
For this week, that's been the Ruttle Report.
