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.  :)

Bee Boxes

My grandfather, my beloved Papa, kept honey bees in a few bee boxes in his and Grandma's yard. I wasn't as interested in all of that while my grandparents were alive as I am now, and I wish I had been: I want to keep bees someday too, and while I will learn the how-to when I need to, I wish I had the memories of having learned all about beekeeping firsthand from Papa. I would watch the bees from a safe distance as some exited the boxes and others flew toward them, and I was fascinated by the design of the honeycombs Papa would bring into the kitchen--the honeycombs are edible, although my parents still wince when they tell the tale of the time Papa bit into a honeycomb and ended up swallowing a live bee--but I didn't pay attention to the actual honey-gathering. While helping my parents clear out my grandparents' house in 2001, we came across an old instructional booklet on beekeeping, and I was shocked to realize that Papa hadn't always known how to do this either--that he too had been interested and had had to learn from others. There is comfort in that knowledge for me.

My very last visit to my grandparents' house about a month after they had died, I waffled for an hour over whether to disassemble the bee boxes and pack them into the car to take with me, but I ultimately decided to leave them behind. I didn't want the bee boxes unless I could also have the sloped part of the yard they had always sat on, near where my childhood Beagle was gently buried by Papa, across from the raspberry bushes and tomato plants and flower gardens, feet away from Papa's thinking tree. . . . I didn't want to keep the bee boxes unless I could also keep Papa and Grandma's yard and house and Papa and Grandma always inside. I sometimes think I should have taken the bee boxes after all, though, and just lived with the heartache of their missed surroundings. I don't know.

Papa and Grandma and their bee boxes and their jars of fresh honey are all on my mind tonight as I keep adding store-bought honey to hot tea as I battle a cold, and also because I had a sad dream about my grandparents last night. I have dreamed of them only a handful of times since they died in the spring of 2001, and most of those dreams have been nightmares like last night's. I miss Papa and Grandma so much, and part of me will never believe that if I knocked on their door right now, they wouldn't open it and welcome me inside. Ah, Life. I am so blessed just to have had a "Papa and Grandma" at all, and I will someday have another happy dream of them, and I believe there will eventually be a reunion. Papa and Grandma missed people they had loved, as well, there are still bees out there traveling back and forth from boxes to flower gardens, and life goes on.