From the Editor

ON THE COVER

Mural Hunt

Artist Shawn Fitzwater stands in front of the wall on Central Avenue where he painted a “We Are All in This Together” mural at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic last spring. Today the design lives on in his T-shirt design. Photo by Lindsey Culver Design by Connor Martin-Lively AAround the time this issue arrives in your hands, we’ll be hitting the one-year mark since our world was forever changed by a virus. None of us had any clue then just how long this strange season would last, and even as more and more of us get vaccinated today, we now know there won’t be one magical day where suddenly everything snaps back to a pre-pandemic normal. What we do know is decades from now we’ll be telling stories from the pandemic of 2020 (and beyond) to kids and grandkids, so I am starting to think of just what time capsule our photos and magazines from this time will be. At first glance, this issue might not scream “pandemic magazine,” so I thought I’d share how it is, in many ways, very much one. Our Out & About event photos take up very few pages and come with masks, the specifics of We Love Homewood Day are still TBD as of printing this issue, and any events we preview in The Guide come with fine print to check for updates online before attending. Most of the writing in the pages that follow started not with our usual in-person interviews but with emails, old-school phone calls and Zoom calls, and our photography all took place with social distance, masked photographers and often outdoor settings. To photograph our school story on a multisensory approach to reading, we met up with a teacher and just two students so we could all keep proper social distance. For our interview with children’s author Charles Ghigna, we used existing photos he shared with us of himself and combined them with photos we took of kids reading his books at the Homewood Public Library. For our cover photo we captured mural artist Shawn Fitzwater in front of the wall on Central Avenue where he’d painted “We are all in this together” at the start of the pandemic last spring. In some ways this all feels like the pandemic that never ends, but a couple of days before I sat down to write this letter, we had one of those glorious Alabama winter days where the sun hangs out all day and the temperature climbs to 70 degrees. I moved my “office” to my front porch, felt like I could run 10 miles as I laced up my running shoes and, as the ice on the cake of a day, picnicked with sushi, laughter and social distance in a friend’s backyard as the temperatures hovered above 50 degrees for a few hours after sunset. There’s a lot we still don’t know about the future, but that day left me confident in saying this: Spring is coming. More vaccines are coming. And good things are in store. Wishing you well as days grow longer and trees grow brighter,

madoline.markham@homewoodlife.com