March 14, 2020: A Wedding, a Walmart Cart, and the Day Before Everything Changed

Where were you when everything changed?

My cousins got married on March 14, 2020.

Let that date sink in for a second.

The day before the United States shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic.

And this wasn’t a tiny, whispered-about wedding. This was a real wedding—100 to 150 people, with 20 to 30 relatives flying in from all over the country. Planes, hugs, handshakes, dancing, clinking glasses… all the things that would soon feel unthinkable.

The weekend unfolded exactly as weddings do.

Friday night was the rehearsal dinner.

Saturday morning, everyone gathered at the hotel for breakfast—laughing, catching up, lingering over coffee. There was a hotel happy hour, some downtime by the indoor pool, and then the big event itself— a beautiful, joy-filled wedding surrounded by family and friends. On Sunday morning, we all met again for brunch before packing up and heading home.

And miraculously—somehow—none of us got COVID.

At the time, though, there was a low hum of something in the background. A few news stories. Some rumblings about a virus overseas.

Nothing that felt urgent… except to one person.

My brother-in-law, Matt.

Katie and I were absolutely making fun of him. He kept saying he’d heard things. That stuff might shut down. That we should be prepared. We rolled our eyes, laughed it off, and teased him for being an alarmist.

Then Saturday night, after the wedding, we decided to stop at a Walmart in a small town in Illinois.

And something came over us.

Katie, my niece Rachel, and I suddenly turned into contestants on Supermarket Sweep. We were running through the aisles, laughing so hard we were out of breath, tossing random canned goods into the cart like our lives depended on it. Canned artichokes. Canned green beans. Things none of us regularly eat.

We were hysterical.

Katie and I laughed about it for years afterward. In our panic we bought things like canned asparagus—foods neither of us had ever eaten before and never planned to eat again.

In Walmart with Rachel, she has the look of “how is this my life?”

On the drive home to Michigan the next day, Matt was no longer laughing.

“Everything is shutting down.”

“There’s no food in the grocery stores.”

“We need to stop.”

So we did—Paw Paw, Michigan.

And that’s when it got real.

We walked into the grocery store and left with hundreds of dollars of canned goods and boxes of pasta. The cart was overflowing. The SUV was overflowing. The back was packed with luggage and groceries. Rachel and I ended up sitting on bags of food in the backseat, surrounded by cans and boxes like we were preparing for a siege.

The back of the car. Loaded to the roof with groceries and luggage.

In addition to the bags of canned goods, pasta, and every other “essential” item we thought we might need, we had our priorities straight.
If the world was shutting down for a pandemic… we weren’t going down without a fight. 🍷🥃

Still, we laughed.

Until Monday.

When we got home, the country shut down.

Stores emptied. Shelves went bare. The world changed overnight.

And Matt?

Matt was right.

Looking back now, that weekend feels like a snapshot frozen in time—the last moment when we hugged freely, gathered without hesitation, and laughed without knowing what was coming next.

Two weeks earlier, I had just returned from Antarctica, standing at the edge of the earth, completely unaware that I was about to step into a different kind of unknown. I went from the most remote place on earth to a crowded wedding ballroom, and then straight into a global shutdown.

We didn’t know it then, but that wedding weekend was a gift – the final exhale before everything changed.

So now I wonder, where were you when everything changed?

From Juju with love 💙✈️