Johanna had traveled to Athens, her first venture outside the United States, for the 2011 Special Olympics World Summer Games. She stood in the Panathenaic Stadium watching Stevie Wonder -- Stevie Wonder! -- croon to thousands at the opening ceremony. She breaks out in song now, nearly 10 years later -- You can feel it all o-o-o-ver -- because she's always loved singing, loved singing that song in particular. She sang it when she was in chorus in high school, one of the few times she was a part of something rather than cast outside of it.
More than Stevie Wonder serenading her with the song she once performed herself, more than walking the same rocky terrain Paul once trod, more, even, than the two bronze medals she took home in equestrian, those games were a stamp of something, a permission. She could travel internationally with her team. She could compete in sports where once she sat on the sidelines. She could find community. She could dream without constraint.
"It was really an awesome sense of independence," she says.
And so she does, still, dream without constraint. She is saving up to get her own place. She hopes to return to school to one day get a license for counseling. She continues to work in a pandemic, opening up to the idea of her own essentialness, waiting for others to do the same.
Her group home, like hospitals and nursing homes across the country, has had to shut its doors to visitors. Johanna says some family members have dropped by to leave care packages on the doorstep, or to look in through the window at their loved ones. Johanna fills in the gaps, helping the residents connect with their family on video chats or acting like family in the absence of one. She helps them wade through the morass of news about the virus, helps them grapple with their place in a pandemic, because it's her place too.
Years ago, long before the coronavirus swept up the country, one of the residents of the group home looked at Johanna and paused for a moment.
"You know why I like you?" that resident asked. "You get me."