Thursday, August 20, 2020

Time Passages

In yesterday's Hodgepodge I asked readers what they were doing five years ago, and decided I'd make that more or less the subject of today's post. When not a lot is going on in your corner of the world you have to reach a little for blog content.

After I asked the question it occurred to me that we've been at this whole Corona mess for five long months (feels like years) so I started wondering what we were doing just prior, and decided to take a peek back at that too.

Five months ago...we were in the first few days of everybody stay home !!! Stay far and away from everybody else in the entire world including your own extended family !!! Now in our house we'd been discussing the virus for a solid two months prior as it hit South Korea hard in January. A friend reminded me yesterday how we'd had a conversation back then, so concerned about my daughter and her family, never imagining we'd be in the same boat just a short time later.


Five months ago hubs and I drove home after spending a long weekend with friends in Florida. Things were open when we headed down, but closed by the time we headed home. The shutdown happened almost overnight. We ate lunch at Chick-fil-a coming back and it was only their first or second day of strictly take out. Of course Chick-fil-a is awesome and handled the upheaval like it was no big deal.

I don't know if anyone imagined in March we'd still be slogging through this insanity five months later, yet here we are. Who's over it?

Five years ago...I wrote a post entitled Retirement Day 187. Currently we are in Retirement Day 2000 so I guess time really does fly when you're having fun. By the way, it's going swimmingly.


Except for the pandemic and the unrest across America and the general nastiness online and the no travel-no-houseguests-no making plans, but other than that it's going swimmingly.

Five years ago we took a fun trip up the East Coast to attend a friend's daughter's wedding.


We drove from New Jersey to Prince Edward Island Canada and thoroughly enjoyed eating our weight in lobster rolls, the staggering beauty of Maine and PEI, and in-person time spent with real life friends.


Also, five years ago I apparently still took pictures with a good camera and not just so-so pictures with a phone.

I would so love to jump in the car and take a road trip somewhere new and pretty and not give a thought to hotel cleanliness, gloving up to pump gas, masking up to get out of the car, or doing math to calculate how many gallons of hand sanitizer we'd need for the journey.

Five years ago we sold our house in New Jersey and spent six weeks living with my mama before heading south. I'm sure she was ready for us to take all our stuff and get on with things, but five years later would give anything to have us back in her house for six weeks.


Six days even.
I haven't seen my mom in person since January.

While we were living with my mom our old and beloved dog died. Five years later her name is still mentioned on a fairly regular basis with an ache in our hearts and smiles on our faces.


NJ winters could easily last into summer, but this photo wasn't actually taken in August. I like it though, and it is five years old. This beautiful pup was something else and when she was gone we said we'd never have another. Letting them go is too hard and we travel too much and have too much company and blah blah blah.


About that same time Daughter1 brought a puppy into her Washington State home and now that puppy is a five year old dock diver living his best life on a Carolina lake. Go figure. And his mama is raising our two favorite boys on the other side of the world, which is something else we didn't see coming five years back.


Five years ago we moved from New Jersey to South Carolina. Not to this house, but to a cozy apartment just across the parking lot from Daughter2's cozy apartment. Those were the days!


Well maybe not really 'the days' because it wasn't a huge amount of space, and we were so anxious and excited to get this house built, but also yes it kind of really was 'the days'. Apartment living meant we didn't have to think about home maintenance and repairs, dock maintenance and repairs, boat maintenance and repairs, catching beavers before they destroy the landscaping, and a host of other assorted bits and bobs that go hand in hand with home ownership.


Then again, there were no early morning lake sunrises where the sky turns pink before your very eyes, no magical light dancing on the water, no boating to dinner, no big porches for napping and reading and enduring this weird season that in 2015 we didn't know was coming, and for that I'm grateful.

Five months may have dragged, but five years have flown.
Time is funny like that.

"The best thing about the future is it comes one day at a time." 
attributed to various speakers...true for us all

11 comments:

  1. Such a great post! I love all the beautiful photos and hearing about your memories. What you said at the end - Five months may have dragged, but five years have flown is SO true! Cheers to a great weekend :)

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  2. A very lovely post,Joyce! I remember most of your mentions here. Five years has flown by a lot faster than the last five months!! But, here we are!

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  3. Amazing how much has happened in just 5 years. Gives meaning to the caveat "if the Lord wills" we will do this or that or the other. I'm hoping for the day we can look back and say remember that crazy mask wearing, distancing and horrible unrest in our country...glad that's behind us. Good to read your thoughts. Your mama is such a beauty!

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  4. Time is funny like that! What a fun look back at 5 years.. until you wrote it out I had't really thought about how many months we've been living like we have. Sometimes that too feels like it's going by quickly and other times it feels like it is really dragging along.

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  5. That photo of you and your daughter shows how much she looks like you. I am also SO OVER the pandemic. I have much to be grateful for though, so it could certainly be worse. What you said about the last 5 months dragging & the last 5 years flying is so true. Enjoyed your post.
    Jan
    Laughter and Consistency

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  6. I enjoyed remembering times past with you. As I read along, I recalled the posts you'd written, five years ago, concerning those things. Time has flown!
    Kathy (Reflections)

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  7. What a great look back over the last 5 years. Yes the last five months have been strange but I don't actually feel they have dragged it's more a case of how can we still be dealing with this pandemic?!

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  8. As always Joyce, I enjoyed this post. And the way you put this time period in words really hit me that it really has been that long and it just seems to get stranger as we go along. On the bright side, I went shopping this morning and was greeted by a friendly young man. All masked up and ready to face the world, I always appreciate the smiles I "hear" in the greetings.

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  9. Another good read here, Joyce. You should write a column in a local newspaper. But blogging is pretty much the same thing. I enjoy your writing so much.

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  10. Wonderful read, Joyce. That was a good idea to take the "what were you doing five years ago?" and really run with it. I so enjoyed reading it.

    Yes, I also am so over the "pandemic". I understand the virus is real, but so are many other things that we have not shut our country down for. And there are so many crazy inconsistencies in how it's being dealt with. I personally am done with it. I loved what Ellen wrote above: "I'm hoping for the day we can look back and say remember that crazy mask wearing, distancing and horrible unrest in our country...glad that's behind us". I'm hoping and praying for that day too!

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  11. I enjoyed reading this post and looking back over the years.
    Hotels rank pretty high on the safe list but it is still scary. Heck back in February we made a trip to Great Falls, MT and I wiped down the hotel room back then. We are going to try to visit with Amber and Dylan soon.

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