Editor’s note: In anticipation of the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic’s arrival in the Upper Valley, we asked Valley News readers to reflect on the last 12 months and to share their thoughts about what has changed in their lives, what they missed, what they lost and what they may have learned. We’re sharing their responses as part of a series we are calling “Our Pandemic Year.”

“Home, is where I want to be

But I guess I’m already there.”

— This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody), Talking Heads, 1983

I thought I knew Bradford and Newbury, Vt., having taught at the towns’ high school, Oxbow, for 30 years. Sure, I lived in Thetford, but I could locate Hackett Hill Road in Bradford and knew how to get from Newbury’s Village Store to Swamp Road.

Helping out on the miraculous school lunch delivery escapade early on in the pandemic, I started with Annette on the Main Street route. I got reassigned to Georgeanne, a gem who drilled down into the history of the South Road route. I rode with “H” a few times along Route 25 and up Flanders Brook and Wright’s Mountain roads, and with Paul on the Goshen Road run. They knew the families and the faces and the stories. I was no longer the teacher on the other end of the student delivery system, but the role-reversed student on the bus, learning the land and homes that had bread-and-buttered my career.

I was an eager student, dazzled by the intricacies of the communities I thought I knew. And then I took another class closer to home.

The summer lunch delivery routes were reworked by Darlene Sanborn, the Bradford Elementary School receptionist and community coordinator who ran the food hub program with Food Service/Nutrition Manager Corinna Magalhaes — those two are worth a story — and I found myself on one of two Thetford buses. Todd the bus driver and I were put to work for Thetford Academy’s Quinn Corcoran.

Knowing how many weekly lunch packages went to each house became a grueling quiz, and Corcoran played the unflappable taskmaster, grading me on my performance, clipboard in hand. She knew the routes because she rode them as a kid.

“Two this stop?” I’d cautiously ask, while Todd would try to shake his head and warn me in the rear view before I lost more points.

“You’re failing again today,” Corcoran would taunt, “It’s three,” and we’d start grappling with the milk gallons and overstuffed canvas bags.

Those two taught me all about Post Mills and Thetford Center. Corcoran is slated to run something somewhere someday. God help the employees.

I was lucky to be a masked rider on the lunch runs last spring and fall. Delivered plenty of reading books and Chromebooks for kids on other days, too.

A retired special education teacher, Sarah Calley of Newbury, told me years ago that every elementary school teacher should do home visits at the outset of every year. I thought that to be a cute but impractical idea. Now, in the twilight of my teaching career, I recognize she was offering some wisdom.

So, colleagues in education, here’s some pandemic-born advice: Get to know where your kids live and the bus route that gets them to their desk each day. It took me far too long to master this lesson, but as we tell the kids, you’re never too old to learn.

Ted Pogacar lives in Thetford Center.