From the Editor

ON THE COVER

What Remains

Steve Bishop has owned Treadwell Barbershop in Mountain Brook Village since he purchased it from J.T. Treadwell in 1996. Photo by Patrick McGough Design by Brittani Myers 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 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. Our photography all took place with social distance, masked photographers and often outdoor settings. You’ll especially notice this in our photos of Treadwell Barber Shop—telling of times where anyone who enters a business is wearing a mask to protect themselves and others—and of Founders Place, a ministry out of St. Luke’s Episcopal

Church that has reinvented how it cares for people with dementia and their caregivers during these socially distant times. Elsewhere in this issue, we chronicle the stories that have gone on in pandemic times—of a mother-daughter set of artists who have continued to paint and a cookie baker who has continued to bake, of a high school soccer player whose epileptic seizures have gone away following brain surgery, and of an Old Leeds Road renovation that has its owners ready to entertain again. 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 to head to the Jemison Trail 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.