Here We Are

Add title! Start writing!

That’s what this new WP block editor is telling me to do, except without the exclamation points, which seriously they should think about adding for people like me who seem to need more than the normal amount of encouragement. It’s not like I haven’t thought about writing. I’m always thinking about writing. In fact, earlier this year I thought about it so hard I actually sat down and did it with this astounding result.

Since my last attempt to say something vaguely intelligent for posterity was in mid January, and it is now finally May, I’ve decided to pretend the last one hundred and six odd days were ALL just one big extended January because that’s what it felt like. Now that the sun is shining and the days are longer and the grass is green I believe I can let my January mood go at last. So tell me, what’s the new normal like for you? The whole world has seen so many changes, and post pandemic it will keep on changing because that’s what worlds do. We might as well embrace this new reality. The old one was so “January” after all.

I guess all that reality embracing stopped me from going on with whatever I was about to say next and then it got me through another three months of writerly procrastination as this blurb sat in draft purgatory. Don’t ask me to explain that explanation because I don’t think I can. And suddenly here we are in almost September.

I have been more or less home bound since…I don’t know…mid March? My kids joke that my life during this pandemic has been eerily similar to the pre-pandemic one. I like my house and can go days and days without coming across a really good reason for leaving it. Like running out of coffee cream. That one gets me off the couch. Mostly I’m relaxed and happy, if you cut out the COVID worry. And maybe my Twitter likes.

W didn’t go east this summer because of the travel restrictions and the quarantine guidelines and a healthy fear of getting sick. It’s been harder on him, all this staying home. Introverts like me just accept isolation. Prefer it over crowds and noise and gawd awful things like shopping. There was a new rule early on about one person/one grocery cart, and one shopper per household. W gladly grabbed that role just to get out of here. He also does lots of over the fence visiting with neighbours in three directions, plus the ones across the street and also down the street in both directions now that I think about it. People walking their dogs probably avoid our street altogether so he can’t start a socially distanced yelling conversation with them. Anyway I’ve appreciated all the grocery shopping and grass cutting and gardening he’s done. I could live without all the info about what everybody around us is up to, but it seems to be important to him to share it with me so it must be equally important for me to pretend to listen.

And that’s the bare bones of our existence to date. Next up I will choose one topic and supply relevant details with less rambling. As pigs fly. We are so incredibly blessed to have our immediate family close and healthy and concerned. I can’t tell their stories because they’re not mine to tell and I’d never get them right anyway. Once again it’s all about me, and boring or not there’s no point in caring. My therapy, my blathering drivel. Here we are.

The other night I woke up from a dream telling some random dream person to “put an axe and a sock in it and then we’ll talk”. Then I lay awake for a long time wondering what the hell that meant. So, you know, have low expectations is all I’m hinting at here. I’m older and even more confused now than I was last January. It can only get more weird.