by Noella Noelophile®
(Royalty-free image by Image by smartmdblond from Pixabay.)
“Days are getting shorter.”
In my memory, I can still hear my dad saying that. Even as I find myself saying it now.
How quickly the year is passing–even the strange year that has been 2020.
If anyone had told me, last summer, what radical changes this year would bring, I would have wondered what was in their coffee. No one could ever have foreseen cancellation of large-scale events like the Long Beach Grand Prix, the Orange County Fair or the 2021 Rose Parade®.
Nor that classes, by and large, would become online events. Nor that going to the store, having a haircut or eating in a restaurant could be a life-threatening situation.
As we continue to social distance, and hope a vaccine for COVID-19 is near, two things remains constant.
Hope–and creativity.
(Royalty-free Image by Vesna Harni from Pixabay)
Ever since March, people have found creative ways to go on with their lives. Meetings and conferences have adapted to Zoom and similar platforms. Milestone birthdays, graduations and sometimes even weddings have happened virtually.
And all of these are happening against the background of dire headlines, unprecedented uncertainly and in some cases, complete devastation.
Which makes me wish I could talk to my grandmother. She was a young married woman in 1906, and would have been in her early thirties in 1918. She’d have experienced the Spanish flu pandemic. I don’t recall her ever talking about it, but it would certainly have been in the headlines in her time.
What I do remember about my grandmom, is her creativity and talent. She was always sewing, baking or cooking. I can still see her, in my mind’s eye, sitting at the old metal Singer sewing machine. Working the foot treadle, she’d create a dress for a granddaughter, that granddaughter’s doll, or clothes for a new baby in the church community.
And I still have two patchwork quilts she made, one with a blue background and one with pink.
(Royalty-free Image by NickyPe from Pixabay)
Baking was also an area in which she excelled. Of course, her cookies were what the grandchildren remembered best. But my mother talked about bread-baking days when all the local schoolchildren would come by for a piece of hot bread with butter and sugar. As a teenager, I remember going with her to deliver her homemade Christmas bread to members of her congregation. She’d baked the bread in Christmas wreaths, and decorated it with white maraschino cherries and slivered almonds. The end product could have rivaled any Christmastime bakery-window display!
Sewing and baking would have been a necessity in her day. But they were also creative outlets–which probably provided some hope and comfort. Grandmother’s lifetime included, not just the Spanish flu pandemic but both World Wars and the Great Depression. There was also a personal tragedy: her younger daughter died of diphtheria, at the age of three. Vaccines for this now all-but-extinct disease were still decades away.
Creating something can give a sense of hope. There’s a feeling of, “I can make something good happen. I am not helpless.” I’m seeing people draw on their creativity and resourcefulness with a background theme of a popular hashtag: “We will get through this.”
As we go forward towards autumn and Christmas season 2020, I’m keeping my grandmother’s creativity in mind.
After all, she dealt with the “unprecedented” too–and came out on the other side.