Happy Holidays 2020
Dear Friends and Family,
It’s been a few years since we’ve written a holiday letter. We’ve been through many changes in that time, some good, some not so good, and some just different. As we shelter together for the holidays this year hoping to keep everyone healthy until the COVID vaccine reaches us, it seems like a good time to reflect and update everyone on our family.
All three of our children are in one stage or another of leaving the nest, though where we used to have three sons we now have two sons and a daughter. Emily (née Stephen) seems to be handling her change well, though as parents we naturally worry since being transgender can be a challenge all its own along with the other challenges of finding your way in the world as a young adult. Emily has finished one very surreal semester at the University of Minnesota at Duluth with the hope of teaching math and computer science, while her twin brother Nick has finished his first surreal semester at Iowa State University studying computer science. John, our oldest, is living full time in Duluth now and taking classes at Lake Superior College with plans to pursue creative writing.
With the twins in college, we’ve had our first taste of life as empty-nesters, though one could hardly have chosen a stranger time for such a significant life transition. We are both very fortunate to have stable jobs where we can work entirely remotely, so for most of the fall months we have hardly ever left home except for shopping and a few socially-isolated getaways. Thanksgiving rolled around and all three kids returned home, and while we are grateful for their company and the fact we are able to be together safely as a family, we’ve also discovered that it’s kind of nice to have a home that stays clean and not have to pester anyone to do the dishes.
Perhaps the highlight of the year was a family trip in the late summer with our family, Peter’s parents, and Peter’s brother and his family. We rented two cabins at Gunflint Lodge for a week and kept everyone in careful isolation for the two weeks before the trip, allowing us to all be part of the same COVID bubble for a short time before school calendars started increasing the risk of infection again. The Boundary Waters region of Northern Minnesota is full of natural beauty any year, but this year it was all the more special for having this brief respite from the extended isolation and lockdown. It was our hope that with similar care and isolation after Thanksgiving we might be able to all gather again for Christmas, but unfortunately the pandemic had other ideas: with the number of cases at Thanksgiving far higher than over the summer we cancelled all plans. When Carla’s sister and brother-in-law both came down with COVID right before Christmas (fortunately both mild cases so far) we knew this was the right decision.
Another highlight of 2020 for Carla was the camping trip with her father, Gary, in September. Camping together has been a tradition since her childhood, and even though they slept in an RV this year instead of tents, being in the Boundary Waters together was a welcome break from the pressures of work. And while the camping part of the tradition required a little modification this year, they still did manage to maintain the tradition of getting lost when they paddled down the wrong channel in Kelso Lake and couldn’t find the portage. Fortunately they encountered another canoe party and quickly got back on the right track.
Our professional lives have also changed significantly. At the end of 2018, Peter shut down his company, Vocalabs, and sold the assets to a competitor. After a few months of self-reflection and another few months of job hunting, he started a new role at U.S. Bank as part of the Customer Experience team. Going from running a small company for many years to a role in a large enterprise has been a major shift, but so far it has been fun and enjoyable, with an unlimited supply of fresh professional challenges and a lot of talented and dedicated professionals as colleagues.
Carla is still working as a software quality assurance engineer, and in early 2020 she also decided it was time to move on to a fresh set of challenges. Coincidentally, she also took a job at U.S. Bank one skyscraper away from Peter’s office in downtown Minneapolis. But Carla hasn’t actually had a chance to work from that office yet, since her first day on the job was also the first day of the COVID lockdown in March. She went in to the office to do the HR paperwork, get set up with her new laptop, and has been working from home ever since. It has been one of the strangest ways to start a new job that either of us can remember.
The enforced work-from-home has been working reasonably well so far, and having each other as “officemates” has occasionally proven useful even if Peter likes to joke that he’s “romantically involved with a coworker.” Carla tries not to roll her eyes too hard. We’re both finding that we miss being in the office and interacting with our teammates, but would like to keep having the option to work from home from time to time after the pandemic is over.
And of course we have to mention just how strange and awful 2020 has been. In some ways, it’s like we’ve been bystanders this year, with our safe jobs and our safe home and our safe children. But so many of the people and places we love have not been safe, and we have not felt safe. The anxiety, isolation, and sometimes depression are all real. We are torn between deep gratitude for the privilege we have and anger for how badly mistreated those less-privileged have been. Our deepest hope is that we can all come out of this together with a better understanding of our shared humanity and a renewed commitment to make a better world.
Please stay healthy, stay safe, and always remember that this, too, shall pass.
Peter Leppik and Carla Hennes
The Leppik-Hennes Clan
Carla, Peter, John, Nick, Emily