Tax-free weekend one normal thing

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Back-to-school may look a bit different this year, but the annual sales tax holiday is still on.

There’s an uneasy sense of normalcy in the familiar, like buying backpacks and uniforms, printers and purses. Whether we’ll have use for 257 pencils this year is unclear, but we take comfort in putting them in our cart — virtually or in-person — and feeling like we scored a deal by saving 11% off of $4.99.

We’ll take our ease in remembering that we’ll still pay full price for jewelry, cosmetics and furniture, but we’ll throw it in the cart anyway. And we’ll bring it all back home and organize, whether for our fresh homeschool space that we carved out in the guest room between the sewing machine and the laundry-draped treadmill, or for masked and shielded, Plexiglas-separated, regularly sanitized, in-person learning.

A lot of things are weird now, but back-to-school shopping we’ll hold tight to, the same as we have since we were on the receiving end of the new goodies.