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It sparked an early memory of The COVID Times. So, I scrolled through the pictures on my phone, and sure enough, there were the bare spots, down to nothing but dirt, right under the volleyball net we had purchased early in the coronavirus pandemic. We were stuck at home, looking for family activities to occupy ourselves for a few days, that turned into weeks, then months, and, now, more than a year.

I tend to obsess over growing grass. I think it goes back to our first house, which had a massive sycamore tree in the front yard that made it next to impossible to maintain a lawn, between all the shade, the dropped leaves the size of pancakes, and the roots that would pop through the soil from time to time. But I never stopped trying, babying any tiny sliver of green that would emerge in spring, as though it might turn into the lush turf I desired.

Like Facebook memories that pop up at random moments, a scroll through one鈥檚 photo roll tells a story, particularly over the past, most unusual of years. In the photo showing the bare spots in the grass (probably where I was standing, as I don鈥檛 move as well as my children or my wife), there is a corner of what used to be a gravel pit. There was a playground there when we bought the house, and the children were young.

Last year, not long after we bought the volleyball net, we put a concrete pad there, moving the basketball hoop from the driveway to the backyard.

Those early days of the pandemic had their silver linings, for those of us lucky enough not to come down with COVID-19, nor to be doing the heroic work of saving lives in crowded emergency rooms in hospitals. We played volleyball, and basketball, as a family, with the teenagers even talking to us, and to each other. We had family game night. We took more walks with the dogs, and pictures of the cat.

We cooked at home and ate together, a tradition so easily lost in the years when it seems all we do is drive from one ball practice to another. There is a picture of my first self-haircut, which, in retrospect, doesn鈥檛 look so bad. There鈥檚 the socially distant baseball season, with games being held in surrounding rural counties. There are the pictures of the take-home growlers I picked up from my favorite craft beer bar, and then the take-home margaritas, which the Missouri Legislature is headed toward making legal all the time. What鈥檚 that old political saying? Never let a crisis go to waste.

There are the deer pictures, as I worked outside on the deck on nice days, and wildlife became my new 鈥渨ork colleagues.鈥� They were quiet, but they ate the plants.

It鈥檚 odd, now, more than a year into the pandemic, with my wife and I having been fully vaccinated, thinking about the seasons of the past year. We watched my youngest granddaughter become a toddler through FaceTime sessions. We bonded as a family, and then, for periods of time, buried ourselves in our phones, doom-scrolling through Twitter, or binge-watching the latest series on Hulu.

Every Sunday would come the depressing reminder: 鈥淵our screen time last week increased 25 percent 鈥︹��

My family has been blessed with good health, and so our memories of this odd, disconnected year have been, probably, better than so many others, separated from loved ones during death, dealing with the rising daily stress of being a first responder or health care worker. My camera roll has pictures of some of those people, too, as I wrote about the scourge of this deadly and uncontrolled virus, mostly from the comfort of my own home, interviewing people by Zoom and snapping screenshots of their faces. There鈥檚 Rosemary Britts, who lost her husband, Monte. There鈥檚 a video of Dr. Kenneth Remy, urging people to wear a mask after a particularly tough night in the ICU. For more than 500,000 American families, the past year has been about loss, and the emptiness of dying alone.

I鈥檓 grateful that the only sacrifices my family has made have been small ones, in retrospect.

What a year it鈥檚 been, I thought, on a recent morning, looking at two depressed spots in the grass, where the tragedy of a worldwide pandemic created unexpected family memories not soon forgotten.