Surreal Spring

Spring is usually a time we really enjoy. Evenings get longer, snow yields to flowers and budding trees. Birds chirp a little more joyously. People resume life more outdoors: exercising, cleaning up winter’s leavings, walking and gathering outside.

For obvious reasons, this spring is surreal.

Sure, the days are stretching longer, the sun is getting warmer and – at least as of now – we are still allowed outside (not a sentence I’d ever thought I’d murmur, let alone write). But, gather we do not. Its hard to think of something to really celebrate right now. We try from our shelter-at-home seclusion, but its odd.

We don’t do much. We do have routine which includes jockeying for grocery delivery time slots, a delivery of which is somewhat abruptly followed by a subsequent grocery order to try to backfill and supplement with all of the things we ordered in the last delivery which did not come. Sometimes we get half of our order, sometimes less and occasionally we get nearly everything. It also includes a survey of what household supplies we have (I.e. dishsoap, handsoap, detergent and the much celebrated currency of our day – TP) and what we may need in a few weeks so we can hit up amazon for a delivery before we run low or out. The above takes a couple of hours for a couple of days per week.

We exercise daily and are fortunate enough to still have and are able to get fresh food. We read. We practice Portuguese and take our twice-weekly lessons via Skype. We do a little bit of work to keep some income flowing.

We’ve seen most of the 2020 Oscar nominated and winning movies we want to see. Sorry Academy, but we just don’t get Parasite. I liked it, but was alone in this household but even for me: best picture? Was this some prescient nod to “it could always be worse” we’re supposed to harken back to while quarantined? We watch just about every live performance from various musicians’ and comedians’ living rooms and we cap it all off with a little Schitt’s Creek which makes us forget the horrible news we see of rising case and death counts and falling equity values over the course of the rest of each day, if only for 20 minutes at a time.

I continue to write posts because I personally want to be able to look back and compare this surreal spring to next, which with any luck will be more like the last. So, cheers to Spring may you do your part to help lay waste to this nasty virus.