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?