A year of living pandemically

You could almost hear a delirious giggle accompanying

Annette Christian's email sent with an assortment of assembled jigsaw puzzles she and husband Butch, above, have done over the past many months under the Covid-19 pandemic at home in

Cloquet. "Puzzles, puzzles and more puzzles," Annette wrote in all capital letters. Steven Brown of Minneapolis, a 1970 Cloquet High School graduate, says he's been creating artwork inspired by the pandemic. One work is called "Autumn in the Year of Covid." Another is "The Thaw After the Winter of Covid." Claire Persons has also taken to the canvas "to help me cope with the pandemic." One of her works, at left, depicts a scene on the Brule River in Wisconsin, where she spent a February afternoon skiing near the fish hatchery. "There the river was open and lovely and I had to paint it." On Page 11, find a column from John Hatcher, who was forced to leave a university program in Vietnam with partner and Barnum farmer Heather-Marie Bloom, below, at an empty airport in Japan, and then quarantine in Minneapolis a year ago as the Covid-19 virus closed in.