Home Again 2020: a story of survival

Home Again 2020, the sequel to Too Close, is the story of Jason, Marty, and their mother, Mary Matters, after their return from Ohio to their home in Ariana. Right hemisphere brain injury has caused Lou Matters, the father, to suffer left side neglect and vision loss. As such, Lou is to stay until Thanksgiving in Ohio on his sister-in-law’s farm where he will help with milking the cows. Family members there will monitor his safety as he navigates the house and barn areas. For Mary and the boys, returning requires an adjustment to Lou’s absence as well as challenges to the boys settling back into school after being reunited with their family following a year on the road during which they had fled to avoid the potential for radiation contamination after the Magdum Heights nuclear plant meltdown. The first semester of the 2018-2019 school year brings them academic challenges, but Marty establishes a warm friendship with Carl, a black peer who is new to the school. And Marty’s interest in producing Tic Toc music and dance videos blossoms into making them with his brother Jason and their neighbor’s son, Ricky, who is a year younger than Jason. In time, they also involve Carl. Steven, Ricky’s younger brother is only six and spends after school times with his after-school sitter, Sandra, and most of his weekends with his mom or visiting another first grader who lives nearby. As for Mary, she has returned to her position in Aesopolis as a licensed school-based speech-language pathologist working with emotionally disturbed students in public school setting. For her it is business as usual. At Thanksgiving, Lou comes home to study and become a web designer as he is no longer safe to serve as a nuclear engineer. Toward the end of the first semester of the 2019-2020 school year, the boys’ lives settle into a comfortable rhythm, but a year later in January 2020, COVID-19 rears its ugly head. The effects of COVID-19 and its accompanying stay-at-home order impacts the family deeply only to be complicated by the emergence of a Black Lives Matter movement which impassions Marty who involves everyone in it, including Carl and eventually, his mother and brother. Home Again 2020 is the story of the every day life of an American middle class family caught up in a prolonged situation in which they must constantly seek new answers, first in settling into life as it had become given Lou Matters need to change professions and his sons, who need to settle back into school after a year of hit and miss education while having to incorporate a new awareness of the importance of isolation, mask-wearing, and social distancing while developing a increased awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement. And meantime, it is the year 2020, a year in which climate change, political and social upheaval rock the country.