How Are Things Changing For You?

They keep talking about how life will be different when this is all over.

Say, what?  Life is different NOW!

I don’t know about you but while things are the same in some respects, they have changed a lot for me.  I have morphed back to my childhood.

Second childhood, you might ask? Ha! No, not yet but without a doubt I have fallen back on the things of my childhood that were comfortable.  I wonder if you have as well.

Food is what comes to my mind most readily.  For years now I have been trying to be more natural, more ‘green’, more non-toxic, if you will.  Less processed.  Enter pandemic and my pantry now consists of copious amounts of canned goods — not Amy’s — Green Giant.  I have cornbread mix rather than the raw ingredients to make it from scratch, cans of soup, store bought cookies, frozen breaded fish rather than the fancy schmancy ready grilled salmon from the fancy schmancy HEB store.  All of a sudden my paradigm has shifted — clearly quantity over quality.  The need to stock the freezer rather than hitting the store every two days for the freshest of the fresh.  Frozen fruit and vegetable — and — frozen garlic bread.  These are all things my mother bought, things I grew up with — grilled cheese sandwiches on white bread with soup — and I have completely gone back to my happy place.  How about you?

Reading.  Reading is a great escape for me and now is no exception EXCEPT I had progressed to the new era — reading on devices.  Love them— have several — love being able to buy books at the click of a button or check out library books without the library.  But, I am having difficulty reading on the devices.  I keep going back to reading books — physical books — because I am taken back to when I was a kid and would go to the library, get a stack of books and curl up through the winter, through the thunderstorms, through the bad days at school.  I feel like I am in that chair or on that couch reading through this storm.  How about you?

Hobbies.  I have dabbled in hobbies all my life, from the first set of embroidered dish towels when I was five (disaster by the way).  I have quilted, I had done paper crafts, needlepoint, regular embroidery, cross stitch, tried knitting — and I have lost interest with all of it at various times.  Now I have picked up the needle again.  Cross stitch.  Not because I have this huge desire to cross stitch images for which there is absolutely no use but because it brings back memories — like when I had pneumonia and I cross stitched a pillow top for my mother for Mother’s Day, the times I would carry small projects with me while hospital sitting with parents — it gives my hands something to do beside grab those store bought cookies.  How about you?

Laundry and house work.  I am really bad at housework however, I am finding comfort in cleaning and doing laundry and “feathering the nest” so to speak.  For some reason vacuuming and dusting and decluttering and putting things in order is making me feel good.  When I was first married I kept a very simple, mid-century house and I kept it well, it was always clean (down to the baseboards) and I didn’t have a lot of clutter.  Over the years, with kids and stuff and aging and less energy things aren’t as easy as they used to be.  The house I live in is three times larger than that little first house and sometimes I dream of that little first house with it’s ONE bathroom — green and brown tiles — so much littler so much easier.  But, I am working my way through it one room at a time and it is comforting — I am putting things out that I used to have out in that first house, I am not trying to be modern and sophisticated — I am going back to my roots.  How about you?

The yard.  I am not an outdoor person.  I don’t do yard work, I don’t like gardening for a variety of reasons but in the last few days I have been looking at the yard (which is quite large) and making plans.  We don’t have flower beds because neither one of us wants to maintain them, it is just a big lot with grass and a lot of trees.  I am longing for a fire pit, a swing of some sort, a few chairs around the fire pit.  A picnic table would be nice.  Family playing in the yard would be great — I hope to see that again soon.  I think about how during my childhood we spent lots of time outdoors — and I long to go out after dinner and just sit in the yard, just sitting and talking, having a cup of coffee or a soda — just enjoying the yard and the stars and the stupid June bugs.

So, I guess the question at the end of all this musing is — how will things be at the end of this?  Will I go back to being a foodie, will I go back to shopping every couple of days, will I decide I don’t need to dust those baseboards and will I decide the Kindle is superior to a book?

I have to idea.  I had no idea this pandemic could ever happen here.  It doesn’t seem possible, it doesn’t seem real and I can’t get my head around it.  Since I never had to deal with anything like this before, as an adult, I have no idea what the lasting effect will be.  Is this going to be our “depression”? I am sure my lifelong dislike of crowds will not change and will serve me well because I don’t imagine I will ever go anywhere full of crowds again and I will probably always have hand sanitizer with me — if I can find some!

How about you?