When quarantine first started, everyone in my family was excited for the change from our boring, monotonous lives. It was an opportunity for us to leave Tirana and spend two weeks with my grandparents in the half-abandoned village they had called home for decades. None of us had any idea then, but the six months we would be stuck there would connect us in ways we never thought possible and teach us lessons we would never forget. 
“It’s beautiful,” my sister whispered gazing at the green fields, orchards teeming with fruits, and endless acres of unbroken forest. 
“I wish we could stay here longer than two weeks,” I replied, as we made our way down the cobblestone path. 
After two weeks, though, we had been barely coping, counting down the days until life could go back to normal. I still didn’t understand how everything had become so hard so quickly. Maybe it was the fact that the internet never seemed to work properly, or that Zoom was just really hard to get used to, or that I was never free from helping my younger sister with her homework, doing my own assignments, and completing my seemingly endless chores. None of us ever really went outside, because what was the point? And even though my grandparents lived a two-minute walk away, we seemed to be a world away. 
“Aren’t we supposed to be packing?” my sister asked on Sunday, the day we were supposed to leave. 
“What do you mean?” I asked, distractedly. 
“Oh honey,” my mother replied, “your teacher didn’t tell you? The lockdown has been extended for another two weeks.” 
I slumped back, crestfallen. There was no way we could stay locked here for another minute, much less however long the government was going to ask us to stay. Little did we know that things were going to get much worse. 
“Can you get me a can of peas from the pantry?” my mom called out from the kitchen. 
But instead of the shelves full of different kinds of pasta, rice, canned vegetables, and exotic sauces I had seen a few weeks ago, there was nothing but a box of spaghetti, a sad bottle of tomato sauce, dripping liquid on the ground, and a lonely spider. 
We couldn’t just go down to the corner store or order food online. The nearest town was an hour away on the worst mountain road imaginable, and in that place, the quarantine laws were especially strict. 
So, from that moment, we had to change. As my mother spent hours trying to learn how to make bread properly, I pored over hundreds of articles about foraging. I spent even more hours hiking through forests, rocky creeks, and green meadows to come back with bags filled with dandelion leaves, grape leaves, wild greens, wild strawberries, and every kind of fruit that was ripe then. Homework stopped being the highlight of my day for lack of anything better to do; instead, it became something to finish quickly so I could go out and enjoy the afternoon sunlight. 
My uncle taught me to hunt and set snares, while his wife taught me how to preserve fruits and light fires. My grandmother taught me how to cook and sew, while my grandfather taught me all his hidden secrets for growing vegetables and making alcohol. After months of speaking just English, I started to speak Albanian again, first because of the necessity, but later because I loved the beauty and uniqueness of the language. I spent hours with them learning about my culture, my history, and all the fun little anecdotes from their lives, but also entertaining them with my gossip at the same time. On my own, I studied German and geography, determined to return to Tirana more knowledgeable than I had come. The struggles of my friends, cooped up in their apartments, seemed to be a distant world. So, when they told us that we could come back to school in August, I was secretly not just a little bit upset, because it wasn’t just survival skills I had learned; I had learned how to take care of myself, and to connect with the world around me. Those days are long gone now, but I still treasure those memories and my connections with my family.