Thursday, July 30, 2020

The Song of Summer

I have a quiet morning to just sit for once. Today I'm working 3 to 11 after a three-day stretch of 8 to 4. It was good to sleep in. I'm taking the moment to enjoy my morning coffee on the front porch and breathe in the peace of a soft summer morning, the cloudless sky, the massive gloriously green trees that line our street only slightly moving in the breeze, and the chirping of so many birds. This is my favourite time of year. 

I figured it was also a good time to try and get some thoughts out into words and sentences, as it's been so long since my last post - and Covid time really does seem to have sped up in the last little while. I said to my coworker the other day, why can't July and August feel as long as March did?

But time continues its march, often at a quicker pace than I'd like. I want these summer days to last. Too often conversations are about school starting up (if? when?), and for now I choose to ignore those questions (although I probably should buy school supplies now while I can still find them at Walmart). Who wants to think about school when there's still 5 weeks of summer left to enjoy?

I'm working less often in the Covid call centre these days and more in my old job in the pathology department as surgeries ramp back up, the workload increases, and the plague of staffing shortages we were dealing with pre-covid only intensifies. It means more day shifts, more weeks of 4 or 5 days straight, more guaranteed hours, but more questions of how or if my job status will change going forward. As a casual whose job is to fill in the gaps, I feel the strain of being needed in too many places - and I remind myself I am only one person, and I can only do what I can do; let someone else figure out the rest. 

So it comes down to taking it one day at a time. But there's a balance there too, because I find one day at a time in a pandemic sometimes leaves me feeling like we will be in a pandemic forever, so occasionally when covid fatigue (yet another new buzzword for 2020) sets in, I remind myself to look further ahead than just six months or a year. The realist in me knows this isn't going away tomorrow or next month or really until there's a vaccine. But I try to find hope in a few years down the road, where Lord willing there is a fantastically effective vaccine that allows us to be out of this pandemic lifestyle. (I won't say return to normal as I think its unrealistic to expect life to ever feel the way it did before, as is the nature of change, but maybe we can go back to some of our old ways...)

And on peaceful mornings like this, I soak in the comfort of the nature around me. Let the cicadas sing their song of summer. Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat...