Moran Remembers

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

March and the beginning of lockdowns in the United States somehow seems like it was years ago and just days ago. Time continues to slip by in strange ways. Emma Moran touches upon this in her nonfiction piece “What I Will Say” found in the Summer 2020 issue of Sky Island Journal: “Times had changed.  The quality of time had changed.  Hours extended and compressed.  Two hours talking to your sister passed in ten minutes.  Ten minutes extended into days, as you listened to the clock counting out the seconds you couldn’t sleep through.”

In this piece, she reflects on her dad’s instruction to “Remember this. One day your grandchildren will ask what it was like, living through this. Remember it all, so you can tell them.” In the following four paragraphs she explains the way life changed during the first few months of the pandemic, and she does so poetically and eloquently: “People built fortresses out of plans.  I will write those letters, I will train the dog, I will learn to speak French, I will learn to knit, I will learn, I will learn.  We would try to learn.”

Time continues to pass and the push to return to the normal life we used to know is insistent, but Moran remembers and gives a reminder of what we did for others and how we “learned; how we changed” during those first few weeks and months, writing with a thoughtful and sympathetic voice.