Savoring the Wait

Papa and Sarah Grace at the local carousel in a past summer

I've always thought April to be the loveliest of months, but this year I've realized she's really a tease and a flirt. She comes in full of promise, of sunny skies and warmer days, of daffodils and tulips pushing their pointy heads up through the wet ground. Then she switches back to days that are cold and windy and wet, a bit bleak if the truth were told.

But it's the promise - not the reality I'm usually in search of. Promise of better days ahead, when we're at the county fair, slathered up in sun lotion, eating corndogs and wiping sweat off our faces, or paddling around in the lake, bobbing up and down inside plastic rings that keep us afloat. Afternoons curled up on the deck with a good book and a sweating glass of iced something. The smell of burgers on the grill, the sight of parks full of screaming kids climbing over equipment or running through the splash pads. Sidewalks filled with tables full of people having lunch or dinner together.

I don't need all of that now, I just need the promise of it. I found myself realizing the last few days of April that I had just wished away the month, mostly missed out on the promise, because I was so anxious to get to the reality.

Now that we're in Phase I of moving back to life after Covid, I'm seeing that it's a very gradual thing. I can get a book from the library, but I can't go inside. I can go inside some places, but I have to wear a mask and wait in line. I can fly on a plane but I better have a good mask to wear while I breath that recirculating air. And I still can't hug my people, or go inside church, or the movie theater, etc. etc. etc.

So I'm taking a breath, and for now I'm not only hanging harder onto the promises, I'm also trying to capture that awareness that so much of what I once took for granted is a gift.

It's a gift to go to school talent shows and hear children sing off key, attend graduations, school field days, take prom and last day of the school year photos, to sit in car line to pick the kids up from school and ask how their day was and hear them say 'fine'. Which means don't ask about my day, just please give me a snack and let me go home.

It's a gift to hug people who don't live inside my house.

It's a gift to have people inside my house to hug. (Not everyone does.)

It's a gift to sit in a restaurant and eat chips and salsa, hearing all around me the sound of voices talking over each other.

It's a gift to go to the movie theater, eat buttered popcorn in the dark in a seat that, God forbid, someone else touched an hour ago.

It's a gift to go through the grocery store, taking my time, without a mask, and bringing home groceries that I don't scrub down before putting them away.

It's a gift to pass people on the sidewalk in our neighborhood and figuring out which of us is moving off to let the other go by.

It's a gift to turn on the news and hear about something besides a pandemic.

It's a gift to plan vacations with family on beaches that are open.

It's a gift to walk into church, hug people along the way to finding a seat.

It's a gift to go inside the library and touch books, check one out and bring it home.

Within a few weeks we'll begin to add back some of these things and soon after that they will again become commonplace. But for right now, it's a gift to realize they are actually a gift. It's a gift to have them to look forward to, the tease, the flirt, in a way that the actually having will never be.

I want to spend May with a realization of where the magic lies - in the anticipation the night before Christmas holds, not Christmas morning. The daffodil barely poking through the wet, cold soil rather than the fully bloomed flower strutting its stuff. Soon enough it'll all be commonplace again, right now in Phase I is an opportunity to savor the wait.