What a year: a look back on some of the stories of 2020

By Gordon Lambie
What a year: a look back on some of the  stories of 2020
Fancy and Lacey Comeau Eryou beside a sign of hope, taken earlier in the year. (Photo : Gordon Lambie)

Whether it was the year you would rather forget or, somehow, the best year of your life, it is hard to deny that 2020 was a year of many chapters and changes in the world. Although defined most by the COVID-19 pandemic, a look back through the pages of The Record over the last year offers an enormously diverse look at what life in the Eastern Townships has been like through these unusual and challenging times.
It is perhaps most striking to look back on the months of January, February, and the beginning of March: a time when the paper’s journalists had no second thoughts about the headline “Caring is contagious at North Hatley Elementary School,” and there were still such things as crowded rooms and public gatherings.
In January Record readers read about the journeys of Lennoxville’s Meaghan Rivett and Greg Cheal to the Canadian Junior Curling Championships, the challenges the Mae Sot Education Project was facing in trying to attract new volunteers, and the 60th anniversary of Sherbrooke’s Mont Bellevue ski hill. The month also brought news that the Richmond Arts Centre’s entire board of directors had stepped down, that the Bravehearts fundraising team was preparing for its very last Relay for Life, and that the community mental health initiative being run by Drs. Claude Charpentier and Catherine Malboeuf-Hurtubise out of Bishop’s University was making a slow but steady start.

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