As we wave goodbye to a year of changes and adaptation, Addison Independent intern Florence Wu visited the shops on the Main Street of Middlebury to ask what people are looking forward to in 2022.

For Narender Kaur at Taste of India, her biggest hope for 2022 is for the COVID-19 pandemic to just end so she can travel to visit her family in India. Although her kids live in the U.S., Kaur’s parents still live in India.

“We haven’t been back in five years, and it’s so much harder with COVID because you don’t want to be on a plane with so many other people for so long. I think my kids, especially the little one, miss going back home a lot,” she said.

Kaur also shared her disappointment at her son’s study abroad program in Sweden being cancelled due to COVID. “They cancelled the program right before they are about to fly. We planned and looked forward to it for so long,” Kaur said. “It was supposed to be the first time he will travel and live in another country other than India on his own.”

For Brook Kilburn, a Cosmetologist at the Main Street salon Parlour, 2022 will bring important changes — the biggest thing that she is looking forward to is having a baby.

Chloe Clark, a clerk at Sweet Cecily, is particularly excited about starting her higher education at Bard College in 2022. She’s already sporting Bard shoelaces in her purple hightop sneakers.

Clark’s Sweet Cecily colleague Janice Stearns said she is simply hoping for a “nice and relaxing winter with less COVID.”

Meadow Osmun, a salesperson at the Vermont Book Shop, is especially excited to see a particular new book come out in 2022; it’s called “The Dawnhounds” by Sascha Stronach. Osmun categorized it as post-apocalyptic sci-fi that also deals with queer identity.

“It’s not published yet but here at the bookstore we get an advanced reader’s copy, so I have read it already and I am really excited to see it come out,” she said.

Osmun is particularly interested in Stronach’s indigenous Māori racial heritage and sees it as a change in the publishing industry.

“I think with mainstream sci-fi we mostly have white men. But more recently we have been getting more and more books by non-white men authors, which is really exciting,” she said.