SUNNYSIDE UP MOMENT - MAY 6, 2020

DAY FIFTY-ONE OF THE CORONAVIRUS QUARANTINE FOR US AT STACK 'EM HIGH PANCAKES AND SO FORTH

I was never in love with technology all that much before the world went into a tailspin.  I drug my feet getting a smart phone until the tracks behind me were deep with everyone else’s frustrations.  I don’t have a Paypal or Venmo account.  I absolutely refuse the idea of Kindle or other electronic reading devices.  I pledge my binding fidelity to real books.  The ones you hold on your lap, write in the margins and turn pages with your hands.  We even subscribe to the Virginian Pilot newspaper that is delivered daily to our door. 

During quarantine; however, I have engaged in what is turning out to be a fifty-one night stand with applied science.  I am just as likely to be in a Google Hangout as I am to be signing in to Zoom or group FaceTime.  Like many of you, I am thankful for these applications as they sustain our connections while we are physically distant from each other.  Our adventure in homeschooling has also been enriched by the wealth of information at our virtual fingertips.  I even visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam during an interminable bout of insomnia last week.

But, like many a torrid romance, my red-hot flame is burning out.  Undeniably, the many ways technology has worked for the greater good are too numerous to count and my thankfulness has no end.  But as I plod through these difficult days and my well seems a little dry, I yearn not for something virtual but for something real.  And what I must come to terms with is that what will come, will not resemble what was.  Yesterday this thought was too painful to bear and tears were the natural reaction to my breaking heart.  This morning, I received a text from my husband.  A nudge of hope on my pixelated screen.  It was a link to a TED talk with Anne Lamott and in it she said, “The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world. To summon grace, say, "Help," and then buckle up.  Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn't leave you where it found you.”  In a blink of my teary eyes, I found a little peace.

Before long, I will move on from my fling with technology.  You know, it will be time to settle down.  But I will remember this relationship fondly.  It will always remind me of that time when spring came in tiny increments.  The time that grace swept me off my feet.