Somewhere. Somewhen.
When I started writing this little essay, I meant it to be a story about my first time contra dancing in more than a year. Then my calendar started changing. Life got darker. My return to contra dancing crept further and further away. Now … I don’t know when I will return to contra dancing. Firm dates on the calendar have slowly receded into uncertainty.
I started contra dancing when I was a student at Appalachian State, up in the mountains of North Carolina. Before that, I’d tried swing dancing. The swing club at the time was small, cliquey, rife with interpersonal drama, unfriendly to most newcomers, and danced to canned music in the corner of a gym. Most of the more involved members were more interested in training stunts for competition than dancing socially. The contra dances were large events with live music and friendly fun-loving people.
Later on, I contra danced living in the mountains of Virginia; when I moved north to Ohio; and when I moved back down to North Carolina. I danced whether I was single or had a girlfriend; I danced whether I was happy or sad. I danced in the cold and the hot. I even went to faraway dances and danced for whole weekends, sleeping in a tent or a hotel room or a hammock.
And then one week, half the people at my regular hometown dance nervously brought hand sanitizer, myself included. The virus from China had been detected in the United States. We weren’t sure if it had really reached North Carolina yet or not. We didn’t know that it spread mostly through the air, not through our hands.
The next week, we didn’t dance. Then a dance in Brasstown made news as ground zero of an early North Carolina outbreak.
I didn’t leave the house for a while. My aunt went to the hospital. My birthday came, and I didn’t dance. Instead, I donned gloves and a mask and a face shield, loaded up two carts of groceries, and brought them to my parents and my uncle.
An announcement came soon after — not a surprising one: The Roanoke Railroader, my old home dance weekend from when I lived in Virginia, was canceled. I had intended to go.
Some dance groups started trying to hold virtual dances, but I had no contra dancer partners in my bubble, just a non-dancing girlfriend and my close family. At least one bold dancer I knew from my travels started quietly holding private dances. Time passed, and I didn’t dance. The vaccine came out, and I got my shots. Case rates dropped. I still didn’t dance. Not yet.
Announcements went out that the 2021 Roanoke Railroader would happen. I thought about going, but my non-dancing girlfriend would neither have wanted to attend nor approved of me traveling out of state and dancing face to face with so many other travelers. We made other travel plans for the weekend, ones that were in her comfort zone. Even as we did, I reminded myself that in another month, there would be a special dance in my home town, one marking the wedding anniversary of one of the local contra dancers. With cases in decline and vaccination rates rising, dances would be everywhere.
Having decided to stay home from the Railroader, I promptly broke my finger. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to dance in a month’s time; broken bones and dancing don’t mix well. However, there was good news: Even if my finger wasn’t ready in one month, the local contra dance group would hold a dance near the end of August. After that, there was another dance weekend coming at the beginning of September, an exciting two-in-one event with all sorts of dancing — Balkan, Scandinavian, English, and contra.
Delta surged. Case numbers spiked. My finger kept hurting. The special dance was canceled. I still hoped that case numbers would go down, that my finger would heal, and that I would be able to dance.
I made an orthopedic appointment.
I went in, getting X-rays and good news: The break had healed, it was just stiff from being immobilized. Pleased, I went home. For several hours, I was happy. Then I checked my e-mail: The local dance group, concerned with the continued Delta surge, canceled their upcoming dance. Two days later, I got word that the Labor Day dance camp was canceled as well.
Some day, I will get back to contra dancing. I don’t know where, I don’t know when. Delta variant has made things complicated.