Promises to keep

A friend gave me a 5-year mom’s journal five years ago. I have kept up with it because you can only write a sentence or two a day. It’s a gem I will hold onto if only as a reminder that some things change, and some things do not.

I took down the breakfast cup I bought in an antique store in San Francisco many moons ago. It’s precious and my fear that it will break keeps it safeguarded in back of the cabinet. I needed to risk its preciousness. Unlike a mug, you can’t walk around with it. Unlike a tumbler, you can knock it over. So this breakfast cup invites me to sit in one place, still, and take studied sips of the tea I don’t even know I’m drinking when using another vessel.

I cut the first hydrangea blooms and brought them in to put in my Aalto vase. I rarely use the vase because I rarely cut flowers from my garden to enjoy. When I first moved into the 100 Men Hall, I had noticed the old growth hydrangeas in the back garden, and I thought I will take cuttings and put them on my kitchen table. And I never did until this pandemic allowed me to do the one thing I have been yearning to do and that is garden.

So the pandemic has offered me time to write in my 5-year mom journal, use my precious breakfast cup, garden and enjoy fresh cut flowers in a vase rarely used. While this pandemic has been horrendous for many people – losing loved ones, fighting on the front lines, enormous revenue loss – it has offered some of us an escape from a life that was not serving us. I was not really living. I was on a conveyor belt to my grave.

The real question is how to do we retain what we’ve gained when the pandemic is over?