The hug is back.
“I hugged my parents for the first time in over a year,” my dentist told me the other day, and to my surprise her news brought tears to my eyes.
A year. She and her parents don’t live far apart geographically but for a year they hadn’t been able to touch. Now, because they’re all fully vaccinated, they’re liberated back into the old-fashioned body squeeze known as a hug.
I got a little misty again — and again my emotion surprised me — when a Chicago friend texted me a photo of her mother, who lives in another state, being hugged by her nephew. It wasn’t my hug, but I felt it, as if this sudden return to hugging has been a collective exhale, and we share each other’s relief.