Ever since the California lockdown began, maybe even since the first hints that we had a pandemic on our hands, we haven’t had much sunlight in our neck of the woods. It’s been day after day of rain and gray-flannel skies, but this morning—and it appears for the next several days—we’ll be bathing in sunshine.
What a difference it makes. Gray skies are occasionally moody and can even evoke a certain coziness, when you’re inside with a fire going and some nice music filling the room, but when it just doesn’t let up and goes on for days at a time, now and then dumping barrels of rain on you and making your dog stink and turning your trips in search of toilet paper into drenched safaris, well, it’s depressing is what it is.
As I look out my window this morning, even though it’s still pretty cold out, I get a much stronger feeling that we’ll resume some kind of life in a little bit. It might be a different kind of life than we all had before. In some ways, hell, it might even be better, maybe a little bit smaller and quieter. We’ll look at each other with a different attitude, a fellowship, a warm understanding. We’ve all been through the same thing. Some of us lost a great deal, and some of us only stood to lose a lot. But we were all in danger, and we helped one another, and we’ll have something called normal again, even if it’s a new one.
The sun made me say all that. If you get some, soak it up.
It’s amazing what sun can do!
Yeah, between the rain of March, the pain in my knee, and the quarantine orders, March was pretty much a wasted month. This week seems like we might finally get to a Northern California Spring.
Every day is a new day. I often attended church with my grandfather (Baptist) and there was a lot of talk about being “saved” because the world could end and you have to be ready because you never know when the rapture is going to happen. You could be out with your brother plowing the field and one of you might be taken up the other left. Or at the sink washing the dishes with your mother and she just vanishes before your eyes. At some point, I was worried about it and I asked my grandmother (Methodist) if she thought the world was going to end in my lifetime. She said, “Every morning that you wake up and put your feet on the floor the world as you knew it yesterday has ended.”
The sun can do that to me, too, but also rain because … well, we need rain 😉