Facebook friends have posted about how they’re dreaming of dancing. Yes. Memories of contra-dances crowd into my head, too.

The first memory, from twenty years ago. Shaky and bewildered from a recent divorce, I’ve forced myself out of the house and over to the UU church in a nearby town. Dudley Laufman is the dance caller. I know no one in the hall. But soon I’m swept up in the “Paul Jones,” an easy circle dance.

“Dudley dances” get me hooked. Contra-dancing, however, is a progressive drug, and soon I’m eager to try more complex figures. Looking down from the balcony at the dancers in the Peterborough (NH) Town Hall, I admire the patterns they make on the dance floor.

Best to my mind are the chestnuts: Chorus Jig, Petronella, Hull’s Victory, Money Musk. The centuries-old tunes come from England, Scotland, French-Canada, Appalachia.

My dance habit escalates. I attend the regular monthly dances: Peterborough, NH, Norwich, VT, East Concord (NH) Community Center. Then I start going to the big dance weekends that draw folks from all over the country.

More memories from those:

At the Brattleboro (VT) Dawn Dance, at three in the morning, I have surrealistic conversations in the refreshment room. On hearing that I grew up in India, an elderly Indian gentleman seizes my hand and kisses it.

On a bitterly cold weekend, my dad pleads with me not to go to the Dance Flurry in Saratoga Springs, NY. He fears my car will break down and I’ll freeze to death. I go anyway. The cold is brutal! When I take off my gloves to get gasoline, it feels like my fingers are going to fall off. At the festival, though, the dancing gets the blood flowing. Leaving the dance hall at midnight, I hardly even need my coat.

At the highlight Saturday night dance of the Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend in Durham, NH, the atmosphere is electric: people giddy, high on dancing, laughing at goofs that send dancers off in the wrong direction. We’ve been at it all day, barely pausing for dinner. I’m in a state of altered consciousness, floating, twirling. Suddenly, I trip and go plunging toward the floor. But before I can land, two or three pairs of arms scoop me back on my feet. Not an iota of the dance figure has been interrupted.

Now, I look at old Youtube videos of people dancing. Chorus Jig, Petronella, Hull’s Victory, Money Musk. I recognize lots of dance gypsies, old dance pals, people I used to carpool with. Even myself, messing up a figure.

Oh my, look at how people used to clasp hands, pivot with their arms around each other. Dozens—sometimes hundreds—of people in the same room. Unmasked.

With the perspective of 2020, I feel startled. Those people are in danger! They don’t know what’s coming! Yet there they are, living to the fullest.

When will we get the chance to do those contact-intense, socially non-distant dances again?

I don’t know. In the meantime, I’m coronadancing, as follows: Put on a CD of jigs and reels, curtsy, and start walking. Down the hall, into the kitchen, around the dining room table. Forward and back to the laundry room.

Sigh. It’s burns a few calories, but it’s not the same.

PS: I wonder what dance my grandmother and her friends were doing here, in 1910. Maybe a Paul Jones. Whatever happens to us, I think the music and the dances will survive.