December 7th's Book of Good Things

Yesterday's walk to work was surreally bright, the sky glowing a golden-white despite the many charcoal clouds in it.  I had forgotten my gloves as I walked out the door and soon had near-numb hands but was otherwise warm enough in my raincoat, while parents and children around me were emerging from cars bundled up in coats and hats, and a runner darted past me in just a t-shirt and shorts.  When there was a pause in traffic, all around me was hushed and stilled save for the leaves skittering down sidewalks and being whipped off the trees by the wind.  My umbrella stood up to the weather the entire walk, but I heard an embarrassed-sounding whoop behind me when another woman's began to turn inside-out in the wind just as we approached our building.  Yesterday's rain and wildness have moved on now, though, and a morning that began here in the low twenties will end with snow tonight only to disappear again this weekend with temperatures in the low sixties.  I give children at my workplace coloring pages depicting "Sesame Street's" Elmo making an igloo--I is for igloo!-- and Winnie the Pooh building a snowman and wonder if they even relate, the weather is so strange anymore and December is so rarely the way it was when I was their ages.  My work-schedule for today is an adjusted one that sees me starting four hours later than usual, so I've had precious time to catch up a bit with Mike before I leave for today's walk back to work.  The sun is shining.  I slept well.  My work-day is only eight hours.  I will treat myself to a slice of cheese pizza for lunch halfway-through it.  This news story keeps making me smile.  I am off tomorrow.  I feel I'm on an upswing.  'One day at a time, as ever, and today looks good. 

I'd Be Running Up That Road, Be Running Up That Hill. . . .

While napping yesterday afternoon, I dreamed that while talking with Mom in her kitchen, I mentioned missing being able to write letters to Grammy and how I always ache when I see pink things in the stores that look like something she'd love.  "You can write to her or send her anything you want," Mom responded, clearly puzzled.  "She loves hearing from you." It didn't feel at all like a dream, our interaction and the setting were so realistic.  I goggled at her a few moments before telling her I didn't understand.  What was wrong with Mom neurologically now, I wondered, just as I would in real life, that she didn't remember that her own mother has died?  She looked back at me with what was probably an expression identical to mine until I finally explained, "Mom--Grammy died.  Or. . .I thought she died. . . ?"  She looked both pained to hear me say that and relieved to understand finally why I had been so baffled.  I spelled out for her that I had thought--wrongly, it was turning out--that Grammy had died last January, we had all gone to her service in New York, and I had even spoken at it.  I told her I could share more details but that I didn't want to hurt her.  She said, sounding just how she would in real life, that it hurt her more to find out that I had thought Grammy had been gone going on two years and that I hadn't been in touch with her in all that time.  None of it even happened, I realized, a thrill of horror and gratitude sweeping over me:  Grammy is still alive!  Sommer's cousin isn't on a ventilator post-Covid!  Stuffed is still here with us!  Mikes' mom didn't have a stroke!  It was all a dream!  All the other losses of 2020 and 2021 were just bad dreams!  I started to cry from the incredible relief of it, and I woke up then for real, and really in tears.  Mom called a couple hours later to tell me that one of my cousins has a brain tumor.  January 2020-onward:  And so it goes. 

I pray and rest and appreciate beauty and keep in touch and listen to music and walk and work and cook good food and try to write and try to read, but life has felt more rough-patch-ish than not for so very long now--and for so many of us.  I told Mike the other day that although I don't feel like I can focus enough to write very well the past couple years and can't concentrate long enough to read as voraciously as I did before either, I need to keep trying.  It will be creativity that saves me this time, just as it has so many times before.  Bear with me, then, as I try to find the words to tell the stories.  It's been a long hard slog that has almost muted me, but I will keep trying.  

I will keep trying. 

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. 

To Better Days

I received the first of two doses of the Covid vaccine last week and wish I could bottle for everyone still waiting their turns the hope and peace it has brought me.  When I can visit family post-second-dose next month without worrying that I am unknowingly bringing the virus home to them. . . .Well, it will do my heart good.   I am already gathering Valentine's Day baking supplies and recipes to try out on them.  :)  Here's to love, faith, science, and buttercream!  May a brighter year be ahead for us all.  ♥

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.) 

♥