A few months ago, I received a hand-crafted Valentine from my daughter. On the cover, “Happy Valentine’s Day” was written in gold glitter.
Inside, the message said, “Don’t shake your card too hard or all your sparkles will fall off.”
It’s so much like my daughter, to give me a card with instructions. It makes me smile to think of it even now, all these weeks later.
Last week at this time, there was snow in the forecast. Today, we’re expecting a high of 86 degrees. It’s April in Kansas, after all.
I’m not a fan of waiting until the last minute. I would have preferred to have finished this post last week, not one day before it gets published. But real life takes precedent, and lately, that has included (among many other things) night-time driving practice with Molly and talking to my sister on the phone and helping Randy install a little concrete slab for our city issued recycling and yard waste carts.
I’m the last person to adopt any kind of new technology. Ask anyone at my house and they’ll tell you the same thing, emphatically and without hesitation.
I held on to my push-button Tracfone much longer necessary, endlessly annoying my loved ones with the length of time it took me to tap out replies to texts. (By the time they got my answer, they’d forgotten what they asked me in the first place.)
The week our clocks sprang forward last month, I saw an Instagram post that went something like this: “Why are we complaining about losing an hour when we just lost an entire year?”
I laughed at the irony, but the caption also prompted some thoughts about 2020, the pandemic and our own individual responses to it all.
It’s been a year, hasn’t it? A year of unexpected—sometimes even shocking—headlines, heartbreak, disappointment, layoffs, closures, cancellations and empty store shelves.
There’s no end to the conversation about all this, especially now as we’ve moved past the 12-month mark of when it all began (or when it all ended, as the case may be). I understand where people are coming from when they talk about how weary they are and how it’s often hard to see where God is in everything that has happened since last March.
Spring break was pretty low key for us this year. We made a quick weekend trip to see our college girl, and then mostly stayed around the house the rest of the time.
Molly was deep into a book series, but she took a break one day to make soft pretzels with me. I don’t know about you, but I love soft pretzels. Maybe even more than cilantro and avocados. (And that’s saying something.)