Tolkkinen: When the world stopped during the pandemic, we banded together in rural Minnesota — for a bit.

Society was shutting down.

It was March 2020, the earliest days of the pandemic in Minnesota, and major sporting events were canceled or took place without an audience.

Colleges across the state and country closed campuses, directing students to study online.

The National Guard blocked off an entire New York suburb. Elderly people were dying in Washington state nursing homes. And it wasn’t just old people. Young people were also ending up in intensive care.

It was unreal.

At the Alexandria newspaper where I worked, the news staff talked about how to cover what everyone was still calling the coronavirus. Some, exasperated, felt the whole thing was overblown. Others got emotional and said people were dying, and that the threat was real.

If big-name sports teams are putting public health above profits, I thought, something is seriously wrong. My old enemy, anxiety, began to creep back into my life.

Minnesota banned get-togethers of more than 250 people. On March 13, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency. Schools closed. Our son’s school wanted us to pick up his things; they’d cleared out his desk like they didn’t expect him to come back.

My chest felt tight, like I couldn’t get enough air. For all my fascination with post-apocalyptic literature and film, the actual teetering of society was nearly unbearable.

Then I realized something.

The closures and cancellations and mounting death toll were scary. But people were trying to help. People were working together to try to contain the harm from this new virus that nobody was immune to. Nobody knew much about COVID then. What worked as a treatment, what didn’t. How it spread. Leaders were making tough decisions to keep us safe.

That realization lifted a weight off me.

In Alexandria, good-hearted people swirled into action. Who knew that people with sewing skills would one day be called to save the nation? When stores ran out of masks, sewing machines whirred into life, stitching thousands of fabric masks available for free. We later learned that fabric masks weren’t effective against COVID, but at the time they provided some peace of mind for people who had to go out into public. And not only peace of mind. Those needleworkers made us feel cared for. It was like a brigade of loving grandmothers had taken charge, and everything was going to be OK.

There was a lot of kindness in Alexandria, a resort town of about 15,000. People volunteered to help in whatever way they could, whether it was shopping for medically vulnerable people or raising money for the local theater. It was a time of unity not unlike the aftermath of 9/11.

In western Minnesota, the sandhill cranes returned, creaking and honking in the fields. Red-winged blackbirds trilled in the cattails and robins twittered overhead. I began working from home, thankful that we lived in rural Minnesota. The elderly were trapped in their nursing homes, and in some places, people couldn’t leave their homes. But we could slog down the thawing gravel roads in our mudboots and listen to the birds.

Just when a person started to feel like we were all in this together, the whispers began. The pandemic wasn’t real. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was filmed not wearing a mask. On Facebook, the message spread that getting us to wear masks was the first step toward loading us all onto cattle cars. Canceling religious services was an effort to persecute Christians. (Although not, apparently, Jews or Muslims.) Unity was fracturing. It was no longer us. It was us vs. them. Republicans vs. Democrats. In an Osakis nursing home, people were dying. A pastor set up an interview between me and the daughter of a woman who had died. She was so angry. She saw the media as perpetuating the so-called hoax. She wanted to lash out.

COVID touched everybody. A 40-ish farmer we knew, who would no sooner wear a mask than a seat belt, died of COVID. He left behind a wife and three young children, including a baby. One of my cousins, estranged to me because of politics, lost her husband. COVID damaged the lungs of another family member so badly that he couldn’t work anymore.

Many patients denied COVID even when they or their loved ones were hospitalized with it. The truth became a wobbly Frisbee nobody could seem to catch. People only believed what you said if you were on their side. Everybody seemed to be waiting for that moment when someone would fess up or leak the truth, like the release of the Pentagon Papers. But there was to be no a-ha moment. No release of the COVID Papers. It was a constant daily struggle for control of the truth.

And here we are, five years later. A house divided cannot stand, the Good Book says. But we are still standing.