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Shiny sparkles
Recently, on social media, someone posted a little blurb about how we’ve changed since the beginning of The Pandemic. At the beginning of this pandemic adventure, we stood on balconies and front porches ringing bells, singing, making music and shoutchatting across the street to our neighbours. On one of the most touching, exciting, tearful days, my brother and his wife dropped by and porched-dropped half of an orange Easter egg cake. I cried as we shouted to each other, me on the porch, them on the street by their truck. Thanks to social media, we were joined by others who needed to make a connections. When we weren’t making music, we baked extra cookies, shared an Easter egg cake, or freshly-baked loaves of bread and muffins. When we had enough flour to bake something, we baked with our friends and neighbours in mind. When we weren’t baking, we were hunkered down reading scads of books and then sharing those books via porch pick-ups and drop-offs. In the evening, we bingewatched Netflix series’s and shared our “thumbs up or thumbs down” on FB or IG. For those of us who could get out, we shopped for ourselves and friends, we delivered groceries and divulged the greatest secret of all time: which retailer had toilet paper or, at least, where to buy a product that would serve us in place of the elusive rolls of Cottonelle™. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, we became tired of riding the curve. We started looking around to find out who wasn’t on-board with our agenda and a campaign of finger pointing began. Instead of singing, we were shouting and spouting science and blathering about “our rights”. We stopped sharing our baking, our books and our stash of paper products.
And here we are, on the eve of Valentine’s Day 2022 thinking about chocolates, maybe a special dinner and perhaps a glass of something bubbly. It is our opportunity to change things around. Valentine’s Day is our Mondaydo- over. I don’t have to pick a side. I already know where I stand on all things “pandemic”. I can respect the choices people make and offer words encouragement to those who are feeling challenged by decisions to be made. The state of my well-being whether it’s our political, mental, physical or loving well-being is my problem. I’ve decided it doesn’t have to be all about those mean-memes or about reposting statistics, videos showing scads of disrespect. As I ponder the friendships lost because of our right to be right or wrong, I wonder if any of it was worth it. I don’t know about you, but I want to put some love and laughter back in my life. I had a “lightbulb moment” on Saturday while our youngest grandson and I were sticking sparkly hearts to our dining room window. He showed me how to peel the back of the heart stickies and he “oohed” about how beautiful those sparkly hearts were when viewed through a little, hand-held magnifying glass. He and I had at least twenty minutes of giggles, snuggles, love and happiness while we made that dining room window a work of art. Twenty minutes of Alfred-the-early describing the colours and of him being amazed, and entertained, by how the sunshine made the twinklies twinklier. The kid even found some fun in the peel-off backing from the sticky hearts. They were relegated to a special jar, “For later, GranGran.” And that sums up what I was missing or had so easily discarded in the last twenty-four months. In spite of everything going on in this world, the little guy managed to show me how to find fun, laughter, shiny beauty—with some leftovers for later.
It seems to me, I owe friends and neighbours a lot of cookies, books, magazines, bottles of wine and cards. So many people have been so very kind and generous towards me in the last two years. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opened the door and found a little gift bag, with treats inside, along with either a card or a note of encouragement from a friend. I really, really want to put some twinkly, sparkle back in my life. I think I’ve got just the recipe for that. Actually, I’ve got more than one recipe, as it turns out.
Shine on, friends!
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