A Few Days Off

I ran into this orange peel heart on my way to work Tuesday and took it as the "Hello, I see you, keep going, hang in there" from the Universe that I always choose to view these found hearts.  Gahhhhh, what a week.  As I limped up the front steps near midnight after last night's shift, I muttered "Thank you, God.  THANK YOU, GOD!" out loud, so glad I was to be home--and for three whole days.  I will soak in cocoa butter and shea bubble baths.  I will make myself mixing bowl-size "Grandma salads"--endive with oil and vinegar--for my lunches.  I will enjoy Mike's homemade chili and finally catch up with him after this aggravating-to-us-both week.  I will write some more of my 80s memoir:  The house that belonged to our next-door neighbor back then was listed for sale a few weeks ago, and seeing the realtor's pictures of it online has spurred me on anew with my project.  I will sleep until I've slept this week's bad mood away.  I will treat myself to a new tea:  I gave up caffeine more than a year ago and have been trying herbal teas, yet to find one I love, but this could be the weekend.   (←  I trust you'll all be waiting with bated breath for an update.  These Covid Times thrills are endless, I know!)  I will walk in near-balmy upper-50s weather for the first time in months.  I will read in bed.  I will read in my chair.  I will read while I do my laundry.  And Sunday night, I will cook a healthy lunch to pack for the next day's 12-and-a-half-hour shift.  Sunday is the last day of February, so even if next week is as "gahhhhh!" as this one was, at least it will be March.  Onward and upward.  But first:  Sleep.  ♥

Winter 2021

Winter drags on with more storms called for this week, but it finds me having received both doses of the vaccine and having visited family twice, so my gratitude outweighs my eagerness for spring.  We are all getting each other through it--did you see the sweet love note Monique's grandchildren left her and her husband in the snow?!  ♥--and while a number of people in the family have been sick from Covid (my nephew, three aunts, one uncle, and three cousins, at last count) this past year, we are still here as we look forward to the next season together, so how can we complain, really.  May spring come soon, though, if I may say so, and may it bring healing for us all. 

Thursday's Last Bite of Lettuce

:)

Love Around Town

43 Begins

'Surreal days, all of them anymore, but a new year begins and I face it determined to focus on kindness and goodness and gratitude and beauty as always.  My seemingly-adult-life-long fight against depression rages on daily (hourly!) these days, of course, but I can lose a few of those battles and still win the war.  I have little concentration for writing or reading the past couple months, but I  journal a bit, at least, and I can get through about a chapter of a book before finding myself reading more news stories again instead.   I usually write a dozen pages a week and am such a fast reader, but not lately.  (What's turning into this spring's--and at this rate, maybe this summer's--books, then:  Unbroken: A WWII Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand and The Splendid and the Vile:  A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson.)  The lost time between loved ones is what makes me saddest.  I know you know.  I have been writing and rewriting this paragraph off and on for three hours.  Ay yi yi.  'Alternate blog post title tonight:  The Pandemic:  I Know You Know. 

As in my last post, almost every picture I take anymore is taken on my walk to work or my walk home from work--Essential Workers, unite!--as the only other place I've been since March is the grocery store weekly and the post office once.  From what little I see of it on my walks to/from, though, this has been a beautiful spring.  I've missed seeing and smelling Lilacs this year, since there are none along my to/from work-route and I've been skipping longer walks until it feels safer to be outside, but all the other spring blooms have been lovely, and I've appreciated spring--both the fact of it and the specifics of it--more this year than any other.  Birdsong, for example, is especially lovely and welcome in the wee hours when I'm either still struggling to fall asleep at all or awake too early after another night of nightmares.  I have somehow always loved birdsong but never truly appreciated it until this spring--so now, I suppose, I can say I'm truly loving it for the first time.  It is one of the good things I will likely most vividly remember about this anxiety-filled time, the tender sounds of the birds breaking into the darkness.  There have been more than a few days this year I've gone to work on no sleep or two-or-three hours of sleep.  On my days off lately, I sometimes relax enough to fall sleep only after the sun's come up for the day.  Maybe I'd never truly loved mornings until now either.  Maybe even I, then, ever-determined to live looking for the pretty in the rough patches, will now learn right-down-to-the-bones-and-beyond levels of gratitude. 

Take care of yourselves and of each other, Friends.  If we can't be kind to ourselves and to each other during a PANDEMIC, though, really. . . Heaven help us.  And I do think most people are rising to meet the moment.  ♥  I leave you now with not only a flower petal heart,

but also--and this year would be the year I find one--a heart in a roll of toilet paper.  :)

Spring 2020

Well, how are we all doing, I emerge to ask.  ♥  'Not even four full months into it, but this has been such a trying year in my own little world, every month a new heartache and stressor, and now all this. . .in the larger world for us all.  Ay yi yi!  We focus on the positive as much as we can, though, don't we, and we plod on as always.  2001 still holds the record as the worst year of my life--24 was a humdinger--and I never think of it without remembering that a couple weeks before it finally (Thank God) ended, I was stunned to find myself getting excited about painting pink snowflakes onto my Christmas cards' envelopes before I mailed them:  If I could still get blissfully lost in creativity, even in a project as simple as painting snowflakes onto my outgoing mail, then obviously, this sometimes-devastatingly awful world hadn't beaten me.  My heart may have been broken many-times-over that year, I realized, but it was still there and still a good one, and I would be okay.  These silly bunny-shaped dinner rolls this Sunday were the 2020 version of 2001's hand-painted snowflakes.

"Next time, I'll knead the dough a little longer," I told Mike as we sampled a couple Easter afternoon.  (Why?  I think they're good, he responds.)  "Maybe I'll scratch on some whiskers with a cake-tester or toothpick next time so they look more like bunnies."  (He nods while he eats.)  "And I think I'll pinch little puffs of dough out of the backs for tails."  (More nodding and eating.)  "Anyway, they have potential, but they could be cuter."  If I'm already looking forward to the next batch of bunny rolls and to future Easters that will find us sharing our meals with our families again, hope is still alive and well here, despite furloughs, family layoffs, face masks, and the seemingly-constant BREAKING! NEWS! that mark all these spring days.  I keep you all in my heart and wish you your own dinner roll revelations, whatever it is you need to keep yourself going. 

(Always love.) 

♥