Building The Love Shack

I woke up this morning from an unpleasant dream. It started with me being at the hospital with one of my colleagues where we were called to a meeting about Covid 19. After the meeting I left her and walked back to my car with my hands full of more reading material, with more rules for the staff at Long Term Care to follow.

When I arrived at my car I discovered that my purse was missing. I walked back to the meeting room and found my purse was gone. I checked with the staff and no one had found or turned in my purse.

Without my purse I had no phone to call anyone. Of course like everyone else, I depend on that phone and no longer learn phone numbers. I had no cash or bank cards to use became everything was in my wallet and I had no car keys because they too were in the purse.

With no choice, I had to a walk home in the cold and damp weather. I tried at first to carry the books full of reading material I had acquired at the meeting, but after a while the books got heavy and eventually I passed a store and stopped to throw the books in the garage can. I continued to walk until I reached home where I sat on the porch waiting in the cold for Husband to return home, because of course the house keys where also missing with the lost purse.

As I sat on the porch, I was wishing I had a cigarettes, but of course, I didn’t have those not because they were in my purse but because they were the best choice I had made this year was to quit smoking, which didn’t feel like such a good choice at the time.

I think that dream pretty much sums up not only the last year but how this Christmas feels this year. Cold, lonely, and with more rules and missing something.

Like everyone else in Ontario I’m sitting and waiting for this days announcement from the government. Waiting for them to tell us what else we can not do and for how long. And of course telling us what else we must do.

I am a Nurse. There is no need to explain the logic. I am well educated in the logic. I just wish someone in the government would also remember that they are also dealing with human being, with real lives, and real feeling. Today, like in my dream, I plan to be just a human, not a Nurse. Today, I left the Nurse at work.

This past year feels like we have all been living in the TV show by Rod Sterling’s, The Twilight Zone. We keep trying to go through the motions of what is our normal. Like for Christmas, we decorated the the front of the house and the inside too. We put up the tree and bought the Christmas gifts and some of the usual food. I made some of the gifts but I did not bake as there is no one to give it too.

We can not bring in baked good to share with our co-workers and there will be no family and friends to share after dinner desert with after the Christmas Dinner. So the baking got scarped this year. There will also be no opening gifts together as we have had to drop them off at front doors this year, like everyone else.

There is a lack of excitement in my heart. It’s very hard to pull excitement from the air when each day the news and even our favorite TV shows now all focus on political issue and the Covid, making no escape from the reality. Thank god for the Hallmark Channel and Netflix, they seem to be the only escape from the disease and the anger.

It’s also hard to pull of excitement when I sit daily and watch the Covid numbers climb in the Long Term Homes around us, including the one my daughter-in-law is work at and the others my friends work in.

I have found myself in the past month, not answers the phone and emails have been left unchecked for days. Phone calls have been slow to be returned and as was pointed out to me recently, that I have also been short with texting, only answering in a few short words. And there are calls that have not yet been returned.

It’s not that I don’t want to talk to the persons on the other end of the out reach, I just simply don’t want to talk about the Covid, the politics or the even the frustrations. I know we all need to talk and vent, it’s the healthiest thing for all to let it out, but living in the worlds we are living in, the minute we reach the parking lot of our jobs till the time we get back in our cars to go home, it’s all Covid and politics. We just need something different. Christmas should be that something different.

Christmas, yes they say it’s just one year and we will have lots more, I say to that HUMBUG! Christmas is special and every one is special. And back to that Nurse, we all know that one year can be a long one or a last one.

So I decided with only a few days till Christmas to do some of that baking. I have decided that the three of us, Husband, our son and myself will spend the day with the fur babies watching Christmas movies’ and eating all the baking I am about to head to do and I will make those phone calls.

Now for the next five minutes, I must allow myself to be sad. To say I will miss our friends and family. That I miss baking for my co-worker who have become my friends and our family. And I say it’s ok to feel sad. But I also say Covid is HUMBUG!

Truly deep in my heart, I know this year has not been completely awful. It has been a year of growing personally. It has been a year of over coming and in many ways, triumph. I look forward to next week to sit down and write a look back at 2020. As always there will be the bad things and sad things. But as always there has been new additions to our lives and celebrations to our lives. And with that in mind, I now head to the kitchen to make my famous cheesecake which I will freeze some of to be able to give to my co-workers and friends when this darkening passes.

Recently thanks to Netflix and too much home time, I have had a chance to watch the series “The Crown”, yes all four seasons, and I have adopted something this year, “Happy Christmas” from the British.

Covid is HUMBUG! Christmas should still be a time to find and celebrate the happiness in our lives.

With that I want to wish you a Happy Christmas and may you Make Merry with those sitting close to you and those who are closet to your heart.

Christmas can not be a HUMBUB, we can not allow ourselves to forget the real meaning of Christmas, it’s those that we are missing and those we are lucky enough to share our lives with.

On that note Happy Christmas, now off to the kitchen with me, I have cheesecakes that should have already been baked.