From a story on lithub.com by Megan Buskey headlined “When Russia Invaded Ukraine, My Family’s Past Became the Present”:

In February 2022, the omicron variant of COVID-19 had shuttered all the places I frequented as an urban thirty-something—restaurants, coffee shops, bars, music venues. The days had the agonizing slowness of previous COVID waves, but February felt particularly ominous. Pulsing beneath the stillness of this second pandemic winter was the drumbeat of possible war.