THE GREAT AWAKENING

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – in a former life I just know I was a bear.

I mean, their whole lifestyle appeals to me: the wandering around in scenic, natural settings, the not being judged for growling at people who annoy me, and eating everything in sight all summer so I can sleep all winter and wake up skinny.  What’s not to love about that?

What’s got me thinking about this now, though, is the feeling of déjà vu as we are being released from the restrictions we’ve lived with for the past year.  I am positive that I’ve felt this before. 

It feels like the long, drab isolation of winter is easing off.

It feels like the promise of sunshine is once again warming our world.

It feels like the dawn of a new day as we stumble out of confinement, gripping our coffee mugs and squinting while our eyes adjust to the light.

Yep, I am certain that this is how it feels to come out of hibernation.  I have been here before!

It’s interesting to hear people talk about what they are going to do with this new found freedom.  There are those who can’t wait to get on a plane and go somewhere far away.  There are grandparents who just want to go one province over to see their grandkids before they’ve all grown up.  There are those who have been waiting for elective surgery and are praying their delay in treatment is almost at an end. 

Parents are rejoicing that the threat of home schooling will not be hanging over their heads.  Doctors and nurses are can hardly believe they made it through  ... and I won’t say unscathed.

Restaurants that have struggled to hang on are dreaming of just having a regular day with regular staff serving their regular menu to a regular crowd at their regular tables and – hallelujah! – making a regular income.

Employees and employers are assessing what going back to work means after all these months of working remotely from home.  The future of the work world may end up being a hybrid of home and office that works better for everyone.

There are gardeners and bakers out there who would have never learned they had such talents had Covid not forced them to try.

There are the people who kept the food delivery system rolling, and the transportation system moving, and the public safety system in place at grave danger to themselves and the families they went home to every night.  It has been a learning experience for us all to realize what an essential service it is to pick and package fresh produce or drive a bus or stock grocery store shelves.  Be sure to smile and thank them ... won’t it be wonderful to see smiles when we can finally take off our masks?

And, let’s not forget the hundreds of thousands of people who are no longer with us.  This past year has been restrictive and unpleasant but we’re still here to talk about it.  We are the lucky ones.

Yes, as I sit in the warm sunshine just outside my den and wait for my eyes to adjust to the light I reflect all that has gone on during this winter of our discontent and ponder what I will do with these fresh new summer days ahead.

 I will have a ceremonial obliteration of a bottle of hand sanitizer.  I will decommission the last facemask I had to use and press it between two pages of a big book like they used to do with souvenirs because that’s all I want it to be.  I plan to stop and chat with people not from my own household in the middle of grocery aisles less than six feet apart and going the wrong direction ... just because I can.

But one thing I think I will leave off my summer ‘to do’ list.  I will not be showing off my beach body.  For some reason Covid hibernation didn’t work like regular hibernation does.

What happened to the ‘waking up skinny’ part?

 

FAMILIARITY

The proverbial ‘they’ say that familiarity breeds contempt. 

While this may be true, spending time and getting to know others can also be hilarious.  I’m talking animals here, humans are too complicated to be trusted.

I’ve mentioned Turbo before.  He’s a beautiful dog: smart, loving, gentle, tolerant, but he’s not without his quirks.  For one thing, he doesn’t trust doors.  The wide open kind are okay, and the fully shut ones are safe too, but the half ajar ones are to be avoided.  Even if his food dish and water are on the other side he’ll hang back and give us his sad eyes treatment but won’t try to get past it on his own.  He was two years old when we met him – it’s always makes me wonder, somewhere in his puppyhood did he lose a battle with a door?

Another idiosyncrasy is due to genetics.  He’s part Husky and apparently they are very concerned with keeping their pack together. If either one of his humans has failed to return by sundown he lies at the garden doors and watches for them to return.  If they are away overnight he’s a very anxious dog.  I guess this makes sense for a breed expected to pull heavy sleighs around – you would want the whole team there to help with the work.

He’s not much of a hunter though.  Oh, he thinks he is.  Any time the farmer goes out to bring the gopher population down Turbo’s out there like a dirty shirt, running from one hole to another, digging wildly, snorting dirt up his nose, catching nothing and scaring away anything that the farmer might have had a shot at.  Once when we were out for a walk he actually got one.  I don’t know who was the most surprised – me, the gopher, or the dog – but the triumphant march home was like a victory parade at the end of WWll.

Because of Turbo’s feeble hunting skills and the fact that mice like to move in for the winters I decided last fall that we would expand our pet population by one cat.  We acquired Thundercat in late summer – a black, nondescript half-grown kitten - hoping that he would take his job seriously.  The cat set about claiming the house as his own and tormenting the dog with way too much purring and cuddling.  Or  sneak attacks while he was sleeping.  Many times have those sad puppy dog eyes asked me why we needed a cat.  Much as I hate to hurt his feelings I have repeatedly explained about unwanted varmints and his lack of prey drive.

By this spring the newly renamed cat (Turbo’s choice, can’t be used in polite company) had earned his ‘you get to stay’ papers and rated a trip to the vet for the shots to keep him healthy and the surgery to keep him home.  He is never not hunting and there are mouse carcasses delivered daily: I like that in a cat.

In fact, I’ve kind of grown to like him.  So much so that when he disappeared for a day I was quite concerned that a coyote might have made lunch out of him.  It wasn’t just the $100.00 vet bill, I actually liked him.  I looked, I called, I asked Turbo – nada. 

Almost a complete day after his last sighting I went to get in my car to go to town.  I opened the driver’s door and looked across to the passenger’s seat at one very disgruntled cat.  He stood up, glared at me, and uttered a meow that unmistakably translated into “Where the #$@& have you been?” and stomped (yes, stomped!) out of the car. 

Talk about mixed emotions! Joy because the lost was found.  Terror about what 20 hours of an angry cat locked in a car might mean.  Cautiously I stuck my head back in and sniffed.

 Nothing. 

I now love that cat.