I sit at the kitchen table and study the wall calendar. I do this every-single- day.
Three more days until the winter solstice here in the southern Hemisphere. Thirteen days til the end of the month. Then I’ll turn to a new page and continue counting days. Until quarantine ends. Until Covid-19 gets under control.
I was counting days and
weeks and months more than a year ago, thinking “Well maybe just a few more
months….” Time concepts have become amorphous, misleading, making predictions
useless. It demands of us gargantuan doses of patience and the ability to
adjust and reframe what we think of as ‘the future.’ Fortunately, some time
concepts are fixed, giving me something to grab on to, to look forward to.
Today I’ll pot the gaily colored primroses I bought to brighten the drab end-of-fall garden.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning (and every morning) I’ll savor a mug of aromatic coffee while reading the newspaper.
The day after
tomorrow I’ve ordered food to be delivered. A weekend of freedom from
cooking. Next week. Next week maybe
we’ll see our grandchildren.
Spring sparkles brightly in the not too distant future. The
emerging sword-like freesia leaves in the garden tell me that I can count on
it. Just three more calendar pages.
Summer, just five months away, tantalizes
with visions of the temperate forests of southern Chile’s Lake District. How I
long for the scent of a forest.
Structure in my days helps
move me forward, gets me round the bend …to the next day, week, month. Ongoing
projects – writing the historical novel based on my Scottish-American aunt’s
life, discovering new facts on my family tree, exercising to facilitate the
healing of a fractured vertebra – these all fill my days.
And I follow the Covid numbers
on the news. Falling. Rising. We’re in quarantine again. Hope rides a roller
coaster. The numbers creep closer to home. A son calls. His whole family has
Covid, though relatively mild. The numbers mean something when they include
family members and friends.
Two days ago, the Delta variant arrived in
Chile. Back on the roller coaster again? I turn to the next calendar page…. and
hope… and feel amazed at how resilient we are.
