KEEPING BUSY

For all those people who have put off big jobs for ages, telling yourselves that “if you ever have time, you will get right to it”: how’s that working out for you?

Have you discovered it wasn’t the lack of time that was holding you back?  But, more like the lack of ambition?

And, for those of you that have buckled under the pressure to do something with your COVID crisis time, and now find yourselves knee deep in twenty odd years of keepsakes and your kids’ entire 12 years of scholastic artwork, are you truly glad to be where you are?

Have you binge watched everything you can think of?  Twice?

Are there any books in your possession worth reading again?

Do you need a hair cut?  How hard could that be ... really? 

Do you know how to sew?  Do you have a sewing machine?  Could you find it under the Christmas decoration boxes?  If you have said ‘yes’ to any of these questions, they need face masks out there on the front lines. 

Do you find yourself scrolling through Facebook over and over again, looking for conversation, even if it’s only trading memes?

Do you even know what day it is?

Personally, at this house, today is the day after I made the carrot cake with cream cheese icing and three days after I made the lace cookies.  Last week it was three dozen buns and a few days before that it was a batch of pies and a couple dozen butter tarts.  Today, out of self preservation, I have a roast beef in the oven so there’s no room to cook anything else.  I started out treating this period of isolation like a gift of ‘every day is casual day!’ and revelled in the slouchy comfort of sweat pants.  If I don’t manage to squelch this urge to bake soon sweat pants are going to be my only option.

We are trying to keep occupied though. 

We heat the shop during the winter with a wood burning stove so the resident lumberjack has been going up to the pasture to fell and pile trees for future use.  He tells me that his supply is three years ahead of his demand so far, but as long as he’s not in the house driving me crazy, I’m fine with that.  Besides, in this crazy world, who knows if we won’t need to be heating the house with wood down the road? 

Also, with all that fresh air and exercise, he comes home with a big appetite; all the better to use up all this calorie laden baking I’ve been inspired to do.  It’s a win/win situation.

This feeling of limbo is a strange one, isn’t it?  We prairie people are used to weathering storms.  We are a tough and resilient breed.  But our storms, though they can be very powerful, are also fairly quick.  We prepare, we hunker down, we ride it out, and then the sun comes back out.  This time around we are being told the sun is going to be a long time in the coming.

There’s no adrenalin rush from the wind of a tornado, there’s no measurable dimension of how deep the snow banks are, there’s no radar map to see where we could escape the storm if we wanted to get away.  There is just a plea to stay at home to stop the spread of an invisible and deadly enemy.

It leaves us feeling like we should be doing ‘something’, but ‘nothing’ is what we are required to do.

And so I find myself trying to curb my fetish to bake ... or to cut my own hair.

Heaven knows I’m going to have a hard enough integrating back into society at 300 pounds.  I don’t need a bad hair cut too.