What did you miss the most?

The pandemic descended on Washington on March 15, 2020, giving new meaning to, “Beware the ides.”

Like they were cut in glass, I remember a bar mitzvah on March 14, with subdued dancing. A dinner for five at Sababa, mirth covering dread of what was coming.

The world changed as we knew it would. We never dreamt for how long.

For a raging extrovert like me — free and single in the city — the pandemic’s shutdown of casual socializing was cruel. Even eye contact on sidewalks seemed taboo. Life lost its carbonation.

I miss talking to people I don’t know, the part played by chance in a city’s daily life.

The grand Marriott Wardman Hotel, now shuttered, was perfect for coffee chats. The Kennedy Center canceled Beethoven’s 250th birthday concerts. The city pools were shut all summer. My history talks at the Georgetown Library were, well, history.

2020 was the centennial of women winning the vote.

Life was stripped to bare bones and Zoom’s thin gruel. You had to draw on reserves you didn’t know you had.

On Thanksgiving, I was invited to join a small family dinner across the river in Virginia, where we spoke of Puritan Pilgrims versus Virginia Cavaliers.

Christmas I spent alone and managed not to feel sorry for myself. My family in Santa Monica Zoomed in with the children singing and some gift opening. Three thousand miles felt as far as Saturn.

The kids missed their friends. There were tears. Asa Stiehm, 13, wrote a poem: “The end of this is near, but we are scarred by this miserable year.”

The long winter of COVID-19 echoed a girlhood story by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her pioneer family stays indoors, raging blizzard after blizzard, burning candles and going through their meat and milk.

The prairie town was in quarantine and might starve since trains couldn’t cut the snow. Pa couldn’t play the fiddle, so frozen were his hands.

The shriek of the wind, I heard it outside on Wisconsin Avenue.

When I trudged past the dark Cathedral to the Giant, that was the highlight of my day. I knew the cashiers and managers by sight. They knew me behind my mask. At least I wouldn’t go hungry.

Still, woman does not live on Zoom alone, Reader. Book club, alumni council, therapy, classes, medical visits and speaker panels can be done that way. Yet something human gets lost in the ether: present company.

Some pupils in my sister’s kindergarten stay in bed for their online class.

The one-year pandemic is a much larger chunk of children’s and college students’ lives. Their generation may suffer an emotional fallout, a sense of being alone even if they’re all afflicted.

I dearly wish we didn’t believe in screens and texts for everything. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone for good reason. It boosts morale to hear human voices.

My parents call every evening to trade tales of the day. When they ask, I can’t always remember what I did. The days blur. They play Scrabble with my sisters every afternoon and tell me who won. So, I go to bed feeling jealous of the Scrabble game.

“I feel very alone,” I said to my father, a doctor.

“You are alone,” he said. To laugh or cry?

My high July birthday party was the pandemic summer social event. A masked garden party, just champagne and candles on strawberry shortcake and sparkling water. Six to eight, but the last guests stayed way past curfew.

Twelve of us — eight married, four single, good alchemy — felt as if we had broken out of jail. We forgot our cares. We were thrilled to be under swaying trees amid midsummer blooms in the sweet night breeze.

Pouring flutes with bubbly made me feel that way, among friends I’d known forever, one since college tennis court days. My ex-cousin-in-laws, too, don’t ask. You can’t get closer.

This was living large, paradise regained in a short enchanting spell.

I mean to do more of that “when this is over.” The coronavirus hollowed out our public life and took half a million souls.

It sure made me see how much we need one another.