My Pandemic Birthday

My face is cold but only my face.  The rest of me stays snug under cottage-fleece blankets, listening to Ken, already awake, getting his breakfast, and hoping he’ll make a fire, which he does, and my birthday is off to a cozy start.

The water is flat and the sun bright, but I’m not all rushing down to the dock just yet.  We got the kayak out of the boathouse yesterday and it was such a mess.  Somehow - even propped up and on its side – it got filled with brackish sludge that now floods the once-dry, slimy wooden floor in not-in-decades water levels.  We got it out and parked beside the dock, but it will take a good cleaning before a pleasant paddle could be had.  This I’m thinking wrapped in my housecoat sipping tea caught in the tension between by my mad desire for that first of season paddle and my shivery shelf enjoying the fire. 

But the mad desire wins, and I head down with towel-rags to undo the mucky damage.  There.  Not quite pristine but good enough.  And just like that with a silent push, I’m off, suspended now in that space between the ridiculous and sublime, like the morning mist that still caresses the surface of the water, mystically, as if some magic was lifting, leftover from last night.

And oh, this is pouring in and filling up and healing.  Silent gliding on glass flat water, sun happy happy above in a sky silly with blue.  And the heron and the young family of geese don’t mind me.  And in spite of myself I find I am weeping in their welcome.  I am welcomed onto the water with them.  And I didn’t know how badly I need this.  Sounds foolish, I know. 

It’s a water snake, I think, making its way across the partially submerged swimming raft tied to the side of the dock.  A long one, maybe a meter, all brown and shiny and snakishly beautiful, flipping off now into the water on the other side, making good speed along the shoreline.

Lunch down by the water with Ken, unfolds itself to some time in my space on the desk.  The wind has come up just a little.  Enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay. 

The jenny wrens have abandoned the birdhouse and are building a nest under the eves almost above my head.  In this they are welcome, being such good company and cheerful heralds of each new morning, as they have done for many seasons already.  I find comfort in their quick visits close on the rail of the deck, twigs and other building materials in beak, before they flit up to keep on with the project.  It’s nice to be trusted.

And this is how God gifts me this birthday.  I think He started, actually, yesterday.  Yesterday I slept.  Pretty much the entire day.  Still can’t believe it myself.  Up at 5:11 a.m. with a plumbing emergency.  A yikes-get-the-towels-turn-off-the-pump-which-pipe-is-it-this-time kind of emergency.  The kind that has plagued this opening so far.  Even so, we’re both in good spirits, and when it’s all mopped up and there’s warm oatmeal in our bellies, the fire would make a good place to read for a bit.  Or sleep.  Which I did on and off until lunch.  And after lunch I had a nap.  Mostly until supper.  And after supper and a time down at the dock and a game of Scrabble, I still went to bed before sundown.  And slept all night.  How is that possible?  Except maybe I needed it.  Except maybe it was a pre-birthday gift that I was badly in need of and didn’t know.

We waited until they said it was okay, this coming up to the cottage thing.  I tell myself that every time I ask, “why didn’t we do this sooner?”  Oh yeah.  There’s a pandemic thing going on.  Except up here, I can’t tell. 

Today, for my birthday, I’ve been given an extraordinary gift of not knowing.  I don’t know who’s protesting what, either peacefully or violently, what Ontario’s latest Covid numbers are, or our Region’s or Canada’s or the world’s, or how many people died in the last 24 hours by disease or hatred or anything else.  This gift is priceless right now.

Believe me.  The great imbalance of blessing on my life right at this moment is not lost on me.  Not for a moment.  Gratitude and humility and wonder all around.  And I treasure this moment and save it up against anything that’s coming that won’t be like this, when I’ll need to remember that one perfect pandemic birthday when I turned 63.

And friends, dear, dear friends and beloveds, oh I wish I could give you some of this!  We all need so badly to be in ‘not-pandemic’ mode for long enough to breathe deep and long enough; to sleep enough; to just be a human being, instead of a human, being in the midst of such a long duress. 

And I’ll keep preaching that, and practicing what I preach about that.  About it not being about place or circumstance but about frame of mind.  About knowing that the deep peace of Christ that ‘passes understanding’ isn’t explained by the rationale given the stressors.  It’s about having a mind ‘stayed on Thee’ and finding a sweet spot of peace even as everything rages or just simply tediously persists among us.

Sending love and courage and joy and peace and the gift of not-knowing, if you can swing it.

Monday.

The week is just beginning!!