GREENFIELD — Lupe Carnes couldn’t have been happier to get a call informing her that the Greenfield Senior Center was reopening. It was March 16, a year to the day since the center had shut down for the first time due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For Carnes, missing out on her line dancing group was one of the worst aspects of the shutdown.
“It was miserable,” she said at the center on Tuesday, March 23. “It felt like there was a big load on my chest and I couldn’t breathe, that’s how bad I felt. I didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all.”
With COVID-19 case numbers down and vaccination numbers up, some aspects of life are beginning to return to normal. Among them are the activities at the senior center, which closed at the beginning of the pandemic, briefly reopened in the summer of 2020 before closing again, and opened its doors again — hopefully for good — this month.
Carnes said she felt that missing out on activities like line dancing and playing bingo during the past year contributed to her feeling worse physically. When the center reopened for a short time last summer, she missed out on attending due to an injury. Now, she’s been fully vaccinated and was ready this week to get back to dancing.
“There’s not many places that people my age can go to enjoy themselves, and the one place I had, that I really enjoyed, I was cut off from it,” she said.
Kim Voorhis, the coordinator at the senior center, which is located inside the Pat Elmore Center at Riley Park, said not all of the center’s activities from before the pandemic have returned. Some regularly-scheduled groups have not yet resumed meeting, and some former sponsors of bingo games haven’t returned. The center usually regularly hosts day trips, but isn’t doing so at the moment because of the difficulty of social distancing during transportation.
For the first few days after the center reopened, Voorhis said, only 20 to 30 people visited, but the number has begun to pick up since then. She said it’s gratifying to see familiar faces return after months away.
“We had one gentleman in here yesterday who hadn’t been here since last March,” she said.
In another room of the senior center, a small group of guitar players sat together, playing through some of their favorite songs. The music group originally began as a regular guitar lesson but evolved into a weekly chance for the musicians to simply get together and play.
Ken Benbow, who has been playing guitar at the senior center for about seven years, said he was excited to learn the center would reopen.
“In between times, there was just always the telephone or email or something like that,” Benbow said. “It’s nice to be here together in person.”
The music group is held every Tuesday from 1-3 p.m. Frank Schwartz, another regular attendee, said the group is always excited to see new faces and encouraged people to join.
“It takes me 25 minutes to get here. I live in Cumberland,” Schwartz said. “It’s worth making the trip.”
When visitors arrive at the senior center, they are asked to sign in and to fill out a form asking whether they’ve been vaccinated for COVID-19 as well as whether they’ve had any symptoms that could be signs of the virus. The form allows for easy contact tracing, but entry to the center is not limited to people who have received the vaccine.
Voorhis said that many of the center’s visitors have been vaccinated, but staff decided not to make it a requirement for spending time at the facility. She said they did not want to limit who can use the center.
At the senior center this week, some said they had chosen not to get a COVID-19 vaccine because they had heard the available vaccines were not very effective. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that’s not true. All vaccines currently approved for use in the United States have been shown to be highly effective at keeping people from getting COVID-19 and preventing serious illness if people do contract it.
“Wearing masks and social distancing help reduce your chance of being exposed to the virus or spreading it to others, but these measures are not enough,” the CDC website reads. “Vaccines will work with your immune system so it will be ready to fight the virus if you are exposed.”
Music group member Ralph Zimmerman said getting the vaccine was what made him feel comfortable mingling and socializing with others again.
“Without that, I didn’t go out. We’d go out for just the necessities, medication and things like that,” Zimmerman said.