I found a surprise in my inbox, this week, and I've appreciated it.  A blogger I used to follow sent out a "Quarantine Planner" with kind and quirky suggestions for organizing and inhabiting time at home.  Here are a few of my favorite pages.

Spring emerged boldly, this weekend, with warm sunny days and lots of color.  I started planting our garden with zucchini in the bed by our front door.

Other savored signs of Spring included "opening the pool." It was 48 degrees that morning but kiddo would not be swayed from the maiden voyage of his wheelbarrow boat. 

The weekend included the usual cleaning, tidying, and puttering (that I secretly enjoy) reestablishing our cosy order and lived-in clean.  I made a few colorful and practical changes to my "office," since kiddo and I will be inhabiting more time there.  Framed pictures went up, a drape over the gaping closet of random containers, and a new keyboard tray and mousepad.  My wrists and back are already thanking me. 

I am especially grateful for this guy for his pragmatic support, easy company, and all-around silliness.  We make a good home, together, all the more apparent by the extra time we're home, right now. 

Tonight, I am grateful and content.  This weekend felt...normal.  Like the former normal.  Kiddo went to his dad's. I cleaned and organized the house.  We purchased more seeds at the hardware store.  There was time together and time apart.  I napped, twice!, today.  While grocery shopping, I picked up some stuck-at-home toys for kiddo.  He was grateful and we played together in the late afternoon. 

Recent days have been bumpy.  Each day with its own series of ups and downs and back up again (mostly). Because the "new normal" doesn't arrange itself overnight. We create it one small course correction at a time, which bring us closer to stability, familiarity, and a sense of normal.  

Things that are working in my house: making art, physical activity outdoors, planting seeds (literally) for a big new garden, revising the schedule of working-at-home and school-at-home, practicing patience and mercy (aka grace) with ourselves and each other.  What's working in your home? What fails are you either learning from or just moving on from?  It all counts.  

In November 2016, my bestie G was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer.  We were relieved, in a way, to have a diagnosis for the disturbing symptoms that had been disrupting her mind, relationships, and daily life for months.  But... cancer.

In an effort to cheer myself, and cast some hope into the future, I purchased some decorative papers to make a journal for her.  But the days were so full of worry, fatigue, and challenge after challenge... my energy and inspiration pulled away.  The book didn't get made.

Two years later, G is cancer-free!  She is restored to her full and healthy self.  Her family, work, and other relationships, all share in the gifts of her renewal.  We are all relieved.  We are reconnected.  The tenuous thread of life, its preciousness, G's preciousness, made obvious by disease, remains close in our hearts and minds, even as we resume the usual and mundane of our day-to-day.

Finally, I am making her book.  A token of love and celebration. For her birthday.

I've enjoyed coloring since I was a child.  As an adult, it's taken on a different feel and purpose.  When I scroll through my old blog, there are intermittent posts of completed coloring pages, filled in at night at the kitchen table, waiting for Baby N to wake up for a feeding or some comfort, until I could finally go to bed.  Now, N is a tween who needs different things from me, and I find myself again at the kitchen table coloring.   ​

 I color to soothe my nerves and clear my head after a day at the office and the commuter traffic.  I color because I enjoy the final product.  But there's something else easing its way into my little hobby.  I color to restore some of my own vibrancy.  I'm re-membering my creativity.

Granted, filling in a pre-printed page with markers isn't a unique expression of self or anything. But it does offer some foundational elements for developing creativity.  I mean both concrete things like choosing colors, establishing patterns, practicing technique with a tool, and intangibles like getting into the “zone,” perceiving something familiar from a different perspective, and engaging imagination and ideation parts of the brain.  I’ve missed these parts of myself during these seasons of personal drought.

​Coloring again feels to me like planting and tending my creativity.  Coaxing it out of dormancy.  Bringing it up into my life.  

​June Moon Visionary Art free online coloring book

​Dover Publications offers a diverse array of coloring books

My mother is visiting from North Carolina, so I thought we'd do a hike that's been on my list for a year.  Ebey's Landing on Whidbey Island.  It was gorgeous!  Totally worth it, to me.  For mom... a little too strenuous and brisk.  I'm sympathetic.  I find that much of my life, these days, is a little too strenuous and brisk.  My days are exhausting and I experience physical and emotional pain regularly.  But on this hike - I felt free.  Little N and I took the lead on a narrow, muddy trail along the bluff and down to the ocean.  The views were bright and expansive.  The air was fresh and blustery.  The sun and sea gleamed.  Sigh.  

The landlord raised my rent this summer and I needed help financially. So L moved back in with me and Little N. He's paying me rent to share a room with his son. It's an unconventional arrangement, though I hear it's not as uncommon as one might expect, and it's given my bank account a little breathing room. Much appreciated!

The new living arrangement also initiated some rearranging of the physical space. I've moved into the smaller bedroom and turned it into a bright cozy nest. My little sanctuary of self-care. 

Back in November, I posted that Samhain to Imbolc would be a season of sitting still with the life that I live.  Oh, but I am a wriggly little worm.  Much of this dark season has been resisting the life that I live. So mundane. So uninspired. I've been looking ahead to a season of action on resolutions.  

I started smoking the summer of 2013, when L and I decided to divorce.  It was an amicable decision and yet it initiated a very stressful phase of transition, communication, and action.  

Our divorce was finally final on 12/2/14.  In recognition of what prompted my smoking habit, I decided that I would quit when we divorced.  It has been 6 days since my last cigarette.  

I'm chewing gum, including nicotine gum.  I've told a few folks and have received good support from friends and coworkers.  I'm imagining my lungs healthy again.