Figurative Wildflowers
One of my favourite newsletters—Strong Sense of Place—had a line that I loved last week. She wrote the day after (hence the “yesterday” in the quote you’ll read soon) meeting up with a friend outside after a long pandemic stay-at-home. They were careful; keeping distant and masked, but created a space in which to enjoy each other and have a pastry to boot.
She writes, “For a bit, the world felt more normal and happy and sweet than it has in a while … A year from now, I won’t remember today. But I will definitely fondly remember yesterday.”
I loved this because I don’t think I’ll remember the hard days. I mean, yes, I will remember that they existed, but I won’t feel them as keenly as I will the little victories that broke up the monotony at home. Seeing my sister and brother outside after a year without them. The day we took a long walk and got gelatis to go. Seeing my parents and uncle outside every other week to drop off groceries. A picnic with my in-laws halfway between our two houses at an Interstate rest stop. Reading by the river on the eastern shore.
We’re not there yet; we’ve made the personal decision to not change anything—even post-vaccine—until community transmission goes down. But I can keep going whenever I pause and think about how tiny, happy moments dot the landscape like wildflowers in a field.
3 comments
“You belong among the wildflowers… You belong somewhere you feel free.” Tom Petty was the soundtrack to this post for me. Thank you for writing it!
Hello, dear ‘other’ Mel-who-is-Melissa-not-Melanie!
I’m so glad that newsletter resonated with you. I’ve been having many ‘bad attitude’ days since we passed the 1-year anniversary of the start of our lockdown. As you know from my other Friday emails, we’ve been masking and isolating this whole time — and there’s no end in sight, here in Prague. The vaccine rollout has been… let’s just say it feels like a Keystone Kops movie 😉 But there have been really nice times, too, and I’m trying to focus on those. I don’t always succeed, obvs. But we’ve had so many cold-weather picnics, which I LOVE. And taking a mid-day break to snuggle up and watch a movie just because we want to and we can’t leave the house anyway. I kinda want to keep that habit even post-vaccine 😉 Anyhoodle… it’s really nice to connect with you. I don’t usually comment, but I follow your posts, and they’re great. Take good care out there!
As part of our mindfulness and growth mindset work, we roll a pair of dice every night with talking prompts about our day. One of our prompts are “What do I want to remember about today.”
I’m not disputing anything you’ve said, but I want to believe that there is something that happened in every day that we might want to remember. We may not remember it, but hopefully something happened that you’d want to bring forward.